thought the place glorious. He went up in the autumn when everything was
crimson and purple and gold. Yet more, in a sense, than I could feel it,
for he did love her as men love women. It shows you how far gone she was
that she turned him down. Many women, in her case, would have jumped at
Withrow for the sake of getting away. But she was so steeped in her type
that she couldn’t. She wouldn’t have married him before; and she wasn’t
going to marry him for the sake of living in New York. She would have
been ashamed to. A few of us who knew blamed her. I didn’t, really,
though I had always suspected that she cared for him personally.
Kathleen Somers’s love, when it came, would be a very complicated
thing. She had seen sex in too many countries, watched its brazen play
on too many stages, within theatres and without, to have any mawkish
illusions. But passion would have to bring a large retinue to be
accepted where she was sovereign. Little as I knew her, I knew that. Yet
I always thought she might have taken him, in that flaming October, if
he hadn’t so flagrantly, tactlessly liked the place. He drank the autumn
like wine; he was tipsy with it; and his loving her didn’t tend to sober
him. The consequence was that she drew away--as if he had been getting
drunk on some foul African brew that was good only to befuddle woolly
heads with; as if, in other words, he had not been getting drunk like a
gentleman.... Anyhow, Arnold came back with a bad headache. She had
found a gentle brutality to fit his case. He would have been wise, I
believe, to bring her away, even if he had had to chloroform her to do
it. But Withrow couldn’t have been wise in that way. Except for his
incurable weakness for Nature, he was the most delicate soul alive.
He didn’t talk much to me about it, beyond telling me that she had
refused him. I made out the rest from his incoherences. He had not slept
in the barn, for they could hardly have let a cat sleep in the barn on
such cold nights; but Melora Meigs had apparently treated him even worse
than she had treated me. Kathleen Somers had named some of the unnamed
mountains after the minor prophets; as grimly as if she had been one of
the people they cursed. I thought that a good sign, but Withrow said he
wished she hadn’t: she ground the names out so between her teeth. Some
of her state of mind came out through her talk--not much. It was from
one or two casually seen letters that I became aware of her desire to
go a little--just a little--mad.
In the spring Kathleen Somers had a relapse. It was no wonder. In spite
of the Franklin stoves, her frail body must have been chilled to the
bone for many months. Relief settled on several faces, when we heard--I
am afraid it may have settled on mine. She had been more dead than
alive, I judged, for a year; and yet she had not been able to cure her
sanity. That was chronic. Death would have been the kindest friend that
could arrive to her across those detested hills. We--the “we” is a
little vague, but several of us scurried about--sent up a trained nurse,
delaying somewhat for the sake of getting the woman who had been there
before; for she had the advantage of having experienced Melora Meigs
without resultant bloodshed. She was a nice woman, and sent faithful
bulletins; but the bulletins were bad. Miss Somers seemed to have so
little resistance: there was no interest there, she said, no willingness
to fight. “The will was slack.” Ah, she little knew Kathleen Somers’s
will! None of us knew, for that matter.
The spring came late that year, and in those northern hills there were
weeks of melting snow and raw, deep slush--the ugliest season we have to
face south of the Arctic circle. The nurse did not want any of her
friends to come; she wrote privately, to those of us who champed at the
bit, that Miss Somers was fading away, but not peacefully; she was
better unvisited, unseen. Miss Somers did not wish any one to come, and
the nurse thought it wiser not to force her. Several women were held
back by that, and turned with relief to Lenten opera. The opera,
however, said little to Withrow at the best of times, and he was crazed
by the notion of not seeing her before she achieved extinction. I
thought him unwise, for many reasons: for one, I did not think that
Arnold Withrow would bring her peace. She usually knew what she
wanted--wasn’t that, indeed, the whole trouble with her?--and she had
said explicitly to the nurse that she didn’t want Arnold Withrow. But by
the end of May, Withrow was neither to hold nor to bind: he went. I
contented myself with begging him at least not to poison her last hours
by admiring the landscape. I had expected my earnest request to shock
him; but, to my surprise, he nodded understandingly. “I shall curse the
whole thing out like a trooper, if she gives me the chance.” And he got
into his day-coach--the Pullmans wouldn’t go on until much later--a
mistaken and passionate knight.
Withrow could not see her the first evening, and he talked long and
deeply with the nurse. She had no hope to give him: she was mystified.
It was her opinion that Kathleen Somers’s lack of will was killing her,
speedily and surely. “Is there anything for her to die of?” he asked.
“There’s nothing, you might say, for her to _live_ of,” was her reply.
The nurse disapproved of his coming, but promised to break the news of
his presence to her patient in the morning.
Spring had by this time touched the hills. It was that divine first
moment when the whole of earth seems to take a leap in the night; when
things are literally new every morning. Arnold walked abroad late,
filling his lungs and nostrils and subduing his pulses. He was always
faunishly wild in the spring; and for years he hadn’t had a chance to
seek the season in her haunts. But he turned in before midnight, because
he dreaded the next day supremely. He didn’t want to meet that face to
face until he had to. Melora Meigs lowered like a thunderstorm, but she
was held in check by the nurse. I suppose Melora couldn’t give notice:
there would be nothing but the poor-farm for her if she did. But she
whined and grumbled and behaved in general like an electrical
disturbance. Luckily, she couldn’t curdle the milk.
Withrow waked into a world of beauty. He walked for an hour before
breakfast, through woods all blurred with buds, down vistas brushed with
faint color. But he would have given the spring and all springs to come
for Kathleen Somers, and the bitter kernel of it was that he knew it. He
was sharp-faced and sad (I know how he looked) when he came back, with a
bunch of hepaticas, to breakfast.
The nurse was visibly trembling. You see, Kathleen Somers’s heart had
never been absolutely right. It was a terrible responsibility to let her
patient face Withrow. Still, neither she nor any other woman could have
held Withrow off. Besides, as she had truly said, there was nothing
explicitly for Kathleen Somers to die of. It was that low vitality, that
whispering pulse, that listlessness; then, a draught, a shock, a bit of
over-exertion, and something real and organic could speedily be upon
her. No wonder the woman was troubled. In point of fact, though she had
taken up Miss Somers’s breakfast, she hadn’t dared tell her the news.
And finally, after breakfast, she broke down. “I can’t do it, Mr.
Withrow,” she wailed. “Either you go away or I do.”
Withrow knew at first only one thing: that he wouldn’t be the one to go.
Then he realized that the woman had been under a long strain, what with
the spring thaws, and a delicate patient who wouldn’t mend--and Melora
to fight with, on behalf of all human decency, every day.
“You go, then,” he said finally. “I’ll take care of her.”
The nurse stared at him. Then she thought, presumably, of Kathleen
Somers’s ineffable delicacy, and burst out laughing. Hysteria might, in
all the circumstances, be forgiven her.
Then they came back to the imminent question.
“I’ll tell her when I do up her room,” she faltered.
“All right. I’ll give you all the time in the world. But she must be
told I’m here--unless you wish me to tell her myself.” Withrow went out
to smoke. But he did not wish to succumb again to the intoxication
Kathleen Somers so disdained, and eventually he went into the barn, to
shut himself away from temptation. It was easier to prepare his
vilifying phrases there.
To his consternation, he heard through the gloom the sound of sobbing.
The nurse, he saw, after much peering, sat on a dusty chopping-block,
crying unhealthily. He went up to her and seized her arm. “Have you told
her?”
“I can’t.”
“My good woman, you’d better leave this afternoon.”
“Not”--the tone itself was firm, through the shaky sobs--“until there is
some one to take my place.”
“I’ll telegraph for some one. You shan’t see her again. But I will see
her at once.”
Then the woman’s training asserted itself. She pulled herself together,
with a little shake of self-disgust. “You’ll do nothing of the sort.
I’ll attend to her until I go. It has been a long strain, and, contrary
to custom, I’ve had no time off. I’ll telegraph to the Registry myself.
And if I can’t manage until then, I’ll resign my profession.” She spoke
with sturdy shame.
“That’s better.” Withrow approved her. “I’m awfully obliged. But
honestly, she has got to know. I can’t stand it, skulking round, much
longer. And no matter what happens to the whole boiling, I’m not going
to leave without seeing her.”
“I’ll tell her.” The nurse rose and walked to the barn-door like a
heroine. “But you must stay here until I come for you.”
“I promise. Only you must come. I give you half an hour.”
“I don’t need half an hour, thank you.” She had recovered her
professional crispness. In the wide door she stopped. “It’s a pity,” she
said irrelevantly, “that she can’t see how lovely this is.” Then she
started for the house.
“I believe you,” muttered Withrow under his breath.
In five minutes the nurse came back, breathless, half-running. Arnold
got up from the chopping-block, startled. He believed for an instant (as
he has since told me) that it was “all over.” With her hand on her
beating heart the woman panted out her words:
“She has come down-stairs in a wrapper. She hasn’t been down for weeks.
And she has found your hepaticas.”
“Oh, hell!” Withrow was honestly disgusted. He had never meant to insult
Kathleen Somers with hepaticas. “Is it safe to leave her alone with
them?” He hardly knew what he was saying. But it shows to what a pass
Kathleen Somers had come that he could be frightened at the notion of
her being left alone with a bunch of hepaticas.
“She’s all right, I think. She seemed to like them.”
“Oh, Lord!” Withrow’s brain was spinning. “Here--I’ll go. If she can
stand those beastly flowers, she can stand me.”
“No, she can’t.” The nurse had recovered her breath now. “I’ll go back
and tell her, very quietly. If she could get down-stairs, she can stand
it, I think. But I’ll be very careful. You come in ten minutes. If she
isn’t fit, I’ll have got her back to bed by that time.”
She disappeared, and Withrow, his back to the view, counted out the
minutes. When the large hand of his watch had quite accomplished its
journey, he turned and walked out through the yard to the side door of
the house. Melora Meigs was clattering dish-pans somewhere beyond, and
the noise she made covered his entrance to the living-room. He drew a
deep breath: they were not there. He listened at the stairs: no sound up
there--no sound, at least, to rise above Melora’s dish-pans, now a
little less audible. But this time he was not going to wait--for
anything. He already had one foot on the stairs when he heard voices and
stopped. For just one second he paused, then walked cat-like in the
direction of the sounds. The front door was open. On the step stood
Kathleen Somers, her back to him, facing the horizon. A light shawl hung
on her shoulders, and the nurse’s arm was very firmly round her waist.
They did not hear him, breathing heavily there in the hall behind them.
He saw Kathleen Somers raise her arm slowly--with difficulty, it seemed.
She pointed at the noble shoulder of a mountain.
“That is Habakkuk,” said her sweet voice. “I named them all, you know.
But I think Habakkuk is my favorite; though of course he’s not so
stunning as Isaiah. Then they run down to Obadiah and Malachi. Joel is
just peeping over Habakkuk’s left shoulder. That long bleak range is
Jeremiah.” She laughed, very faintly. “You know, Miss Willis, they are
really very beautiful. Isn’t it strange I couldn’t see it? For I
honestly couldn’t. I’ve been lying there, thinking. And I found I could
remember all their outlines, under snow ... and this morning it seemed
to me I must see how Habakkuk looked in the spring.” She sat down
suddenly on the top step; and Miss Willis sat down too, her arm still
about her patient.
“It’s very strange”--Withrow, strain though he did, could hardly make
out the words, they fell so softly--“that I just couldn’t see it before.
It’s only these last days.... And now I feel as if I wanted to see every
leaf on every tree. It wasn’t so last year. They say something to me
now. I don’t think I should want to talk with them forever, but you’ve
no idea--you’ve no idea--how strange and welcome it is for my eyes to
find them beautiful.” She seemed almost to murmur to herself. Then she
braced herself slightly against the nurse’s shoulder, and went on, in
her light, sweet, ironic voice. “They probably never told you--but I
didn’t care for Nature, exactly. I don’t think I care for it now, as
some people do, but I can see that this is beautiful. Of course you
don’t know what it means to me. It has simply changed the world.” She
waved her hand again. “They never got by, before. I always knew that
line was line, and color was color, wherever or whoever. But my eyes
went back on me. My father would have despised me. He wouldn’t have
preferred Habakkuk, but he would have done Habakkuk justice from the
beginning. Yes, it makes a great deal of difference to me to see it
once, fair and clear. Why”--she drew herself up as well as she could, so
firmly held--“it is a very lovely place. I should tire of it some time,
but I shall not tire of it soon. For a little while, I shall be up to
it. And I know that no one thinks it will be long.”
Just then, Withrow’s absurd fate caught him. Breathless, more
passionately interested than he had ever been in his life, he sneezed.
He had just time, while the two women were turning, to wonder if he had
ruined it all--if she would faint, or shriek, or relapse into apathy.
She did none of these things. She faced him and flushed, standing
unsteadily. “How long have you been cheating me?” she asked coldly. But
she held out her hand before she went up-stairs with the nurse’s arm
still round her.
Later he caught at Miss Willis excitedly. “Is she better? Is she worse?
Is she well? Or is she going to die?”
“She’s shaken. She must rest. But she’s got the hepaticas in water
beside her bed. And she told me to pull the shade up so that she could
look out. She has a touch of temperature--but she often has that. The
exertion and the shock would be enough to give it to her. I found her
leaning against the door-jamb. I hadn’t a chance to tell her you were
here. I can tell you later whether you’d better go or stay.”
“I am going to stay. It’s you who are going.”
“You needn’t telegraph just yet,” the nurse replied dryly. She looked
another woman from the nervous, sobbing creature on the chopping-block.
The end was that Miss Willis stayed and Arnold Withrow went. Late that
afternoon he left Kathleen Somers staring passionately at the sunset. It
was not his moment, and he had the grace to know it. But he had not had
to tell her that the view was beastly; and, much as he loved her, I
think that was a relief to him.
None of us will ever know the whole of Kathleen Somers’s miracle, of
course. I believe she told as much of it as she could when she said that
she had lain thinking of the outlines of the mountains until she felt
that she must go out and face them: stand once more outside, free of
walls, and stare about at the whole chain of the earth-lords. Perhaps
the spring, which had broken up the ice-bound streams, had melted other
things besides. Unwittingly--by unconscious cerebration--by the long
inevitable storing of disdained impressions--she had arrived at vision.
That which had been, for her, alternate gibberish and silence, had
become an intelligible tongue. The blank features had stirred and
shifted into a countenance; she saw a face, where she had seen only odds
and ends of modelling grotesquely flung abroad. With no stupid pantheism
to befuddle her, she yet felt the earth a living thing. Wood and stone,
which had not even been an idol for her, now shaped themselves to hold a
sacrament. Put it as you please; for I can find no way to express it to
my satisfaction. Kathleen Somers had, for the first time, envisaged the
cosmic, had seen something less passionate, but more vital, than
history. Most of us are more fortunate than she: we take it for granted
that no loom can rival the petal of a flower. But to some creatures the
primitive is a cipher, hard to learn; and blood is spent in the
struggle. You have perhaps seen (and not simply in the old legend)
passion come to a statue. Rare, oh, rare is the necessity for such a
miracle. But Kathleen Somers was in need of one; and I believe it came
to her.
The will was slack, the nurse had said; yet it sufficed to take her
from her bed, down the stairs, in pursuit of the voice--straight out
into the newly articulate world. She moved, frail and undismayed, to the
source of revelation. She did not cower back and demand that the oracle
be served up to her by a messenger. A will like that is not slack.
Now I will shuffle back into my own skin and tell you the rest of it
very briefly and from the rank outsider’s point of view. Even had I
possessed the whole of Arnold Withrow’s confidence, I could not deal
with the delicate gradations of a lover’s mood. He passed the word about
that Kathleen Somers was not going to die--though I believe he did it
with his heart in his mouth, not really assured she wouldn’t. It took
some of us a long time to shift our ground and be thankful. Withrow,
with a wisdom beyond his habit, did not go near her until autumn.
Reports were that she was gaining all the time, and that she lived
out-of-doors staring at Habakkuk and his brethren, gathering wild
flowers and pressing them between her palms. She seemed determined to
face another winter there alone with Melora, Miss Willis wrote. Withrow
set his jaw when that news came. It was hard on him to stay away, but
she had made it very clear that she wanted her convalescent summer to
herself. When she had to let Miss Willis go--and Miss Willis had already
taken a huge slice of Kathleen’s capital--he might come and see her
through the transition. So Withrow sweltered in New York all summer, and
waited for permission.
Then Melora Meigs was gracious for once. With no preliminary illness,
with just a little gasp as the sun rose over the long range of Jeremiah,
she died. Withrow, hearing this, was off like a sprinter who hears the
signal. He found laughter and wit abiding happily in Kathleen’s
recovered body. Together they watched the autumn deepen over the
prophets. Habakkuk, all insults forgiven, was their familiar.
So they brought Kathleen Somers back from the hills to live. It was
impossible for her to remain on her mountain side without a Melora
Meigs; and Melora, unlike most tortures, was unreplaceable. Kathleen’s
world welcomed her as warmly as if her exile had been one long suspense:
a gentle hypocrisy we all forgave each other. Some one went abroad and
left an apartment for her use. All sorts of delicate little events
occurred, half accidentally, in her interest. Soon some of us began to
gather, as of old. Marvel of marvels, Withrow had not spoken in that
crimson week of autumn. Without jealousy, he had apparently left her to
Habakkuk. It was a brief winter--for Kathleen Somers’s body, a kind of
spring. You could see her grow, from week to week: plump out and bloom
more vividly. Then, in April, without a word, she left us--disappeared
one morning, with no explicit word to servants.
Withrow once more--poor Withrow--shot forth, not like a runner, but like
a hound on a fresh scent. He needed no time-tables. He leaped from the
telephone to the train.
He found her there, he told me afterwards, sitting on the step, the door
unlocked behind her but shut.
Indeed, she never entered the house again; for Withrow bore her away
from the threshold. I do not think she minded, for she had made her
point: she had seen Habakkuk once more, and Habakkuk had not gone back
on her. That was all she needed to know. They meant to go up in the
autumn after their marriage, but the cottage burned to the ground before
they got back from Europe. I do not know that they have ever gone, or
whether they ever will go, now. There are still a few exotic places that
Kathleen Withrow has not seen, and Habakkuk can wait. After all, the
years are very brief in Habakkuk’s sight. Even if she never needs him
again, I do not think he will mind.
III
MISS MARRIOTT AND THE FAUN
“Love?” repeated Hoyting queryingly.
I don’t know how the word had been mentioned between us. Love doesn’t
bulk big in Hoyting’s vocabulary, or in mine when I’m talking to him.
But occasionally one comes in sight of this great natural wonder and can
scarcely refrain from alluding to it. This must have been one of the
occasions.
“What about it?” I was curious to hear what Hoyting had to say. I could
have sworn that he himself had never known the “sacred terror.” His
lurching bulk and his brown face have been shaped and tempered to other
adventures and other solutions. What a time (I’ve often thought, without
blasphemy) St. Peter will have with Hoyting’s pack when he dumps it at
the pearly gates for appraisal! No one I have ever known has wandered so
far afield--disinterestedly. I don’t think Hoyting has ever plucked an
orchid or brought home--but he has no home--the skin of a beast. What
has ever mattered to him save the encounter, in minor seas and
insignificant ports, with things that, to the end, did not concern him?
No Aziyadés and Chrysanthèmes, I feel sure, for Hoyting.
“Love?” he repeated again, relaxing his huge body slowly and flinging
one leg over the other. “I’ve seen as much of love as the next man, in
more places than most. I’ve never been mixed up with it myself--not with
the real thing. But most things are mixed up with it. You’ll believe
that I don’t read poetry. If you people could ever get the beat of life,
you’d get it with prose. Imagine fitting human beings--black or
white--into a stanzaic form! I realized that young. I’ve seen people
make love all over the shop. I’m not denying it’s effective. But the one
thing I’ve never seen it do is really change a person. That’s why I
don’t believe in all the things they tell me the poets say about it.
Time and again I’ve seen the trick tried; and time and again I’ve seen
the woman or the man slump back into the shape God made ’em in. Puffing
out like the frog in the fable--and bursting, sometimes--but never
turning into the ox, you know. Humph!” Hoyting snorted mildly, emitting
blue smoke from his nostrils like a djinn.
I didn’t care to take up the challenge. I have always suspected Hoyting
of suspecting me of perpetrating fiction--if you called it “literature,”
it would make no difference to Hoyting. He must have read a few books in
his time, for now and then he quotes. But if you placed Hoyting on the
classic uninhabited island, with the traditional spoils of shipwreck
clustered about him; if you went the wild length of floating in a
properly labelled Mudie box on the seventh wave: well, my guess is that
when the rescuing party came, they would find Hoyting--or perhaps his
skeleton--sitting on the sand, hunched into the most comfortable
position the scene afforded, and the box lying unopened in the middle
distance. I don’t know any other human creature of whom I could, with
conviction, predicate that. Hoyting prefers humanity to anything; but he
would prefer the barest vegetation to books.
As I said, I never supposed Hoyting an authority on the “sacred
terror”--for one thing, I don’t believe any woman has ever gone the
length of falling in love with him--but I should always be exceedingly
interested to know what he thought of anything so variously human. So I
egged him on, as the years have taught me how: with vermouth close to
his hand, the cigarettes just by, and my own face turned non-committally
to the fresh sea-wind. The lights of the little café were going out one
by one as the prudent proprietor discovered that they were no longer
needed, and François himself withdrew on tiptoe to some region at the
back, like an inspired accomplice. Hoyting sleeps when he feels like it,
and no vigil discourages him.