MONDAY, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it had rained. Day in, day
out, day in, day out, day in, it had rained and rained and rained and
rained and rained, till by Friday night the great blue mountains loomed
like a chunk of ruined velvet, and the fog along the valley lay thick
and gross as mildewed porridge.
It was a horrid storm. Slop and shiver and rotting leaves were rampant.
Even in Alrik's snug little house the chairs were wetter than moss.
Clothes in the closets hung lank and clammy as undried bathing-suits.
Worst of all, across every mirror lay a breathy, sad gray mist, as
though ghosts had been back to whimper there over their lost faces.
It had never been so before in the first week of October.
There were seven of us who used to tryst there together every year in
the gorgeous Scotch-plaid Autumn, when the reds and greens and blues
and browns and yellows lapped and overlapped like a festive little kilt
for the Young Winter, and every crisp, sweet day that dawned was like
the taste of cider and the smell of grapes.
That is the kind of October well worth living, and seven people make a
wonderfully proper number to play together in the country, particularly
if six of you are men and women, and one of you is a dog.
Yet, after all, it was October, and October alone, that lured us. We
certainly differed astonishingly in most of our other tastes.
Three of us belonged to the peaceful Maine woods--Alrik and Alrik's Wife
and his Growly-Dog-Gruff. Four of us came from the rackety cities--the
Partridge Hunter, the Blue Serge Man, the Pretty Lady, and Myself--a
newspaper woman.
Incidentally, I may add that the Blue Serge Man and the Pretty Lady were
husband and wife, but did not care much about it, having been married,
very evidently, in some gorgeously ornate silver-plated emotion that
they had mistaken at the time for the "sterling" article. The shine and
beauty of the marriage had long since worn away, leaving things quite a
little bit edgy here and there. Alrik's young spouse was, wonder of
wonders, a transplanted New York chorus girl. No other biographical
data are necessary except that Growly-Dog-Gruff was a brawling, black,
fat-faced mongrel whose complete sense of humor had been slammed in the
door at a very early age. For some inexplainable reason, he seemed to
hold all the rest of the crowd responsible for the catastrophe, but was
wildly devoted to me. He showed this devotion by never biting me as hard
as he bit the others.
Yet even with Growly-Dog-Gruff included among our assets, we had always
considered ourselves an extremely superior crowd.
There were seven of us, I said, who _used_ to tryst there together every
autumn. But now, since the year before, three of us had _gone_, Alrik's
Wife, Alrik's Dog, and the Blue Serge Man. So the four of us who
remained huddled very close around the fire on that stormy, dreary,
ghastly first night of our reunion, and talked-talked-talked and
laughed-laughed-laughed just as fast as we possibly could for fear that
a moment's silence would plunge us all down, whether or no, into the
sorrow-chasm that lurked so consciously on every side. Yet we certainly
looked and acted like a very jovial quartet.
The Pretty Lady, to be sure, was a black wisp of crape in her prim,
four-footed chair; but Alrik's huge bulk tipped jauntily back against
the wainscoting in a gaudy-colored Mackinaw suit, with merely a broad
band of black across his left sleeve--as one who, neither affirming nor
denying the formalities of grief, would laconically warn the public at
large to "Keep Off My Sorrow." I liked Alrik, and I had liked Alrik's
Wife. But I had loved Alrik's Dog. I do not care especially for temper
in women, but a surly dog, or a surly man, is as irresistibly funny to
me as Chinese music, there is so little plot to any of them.
[Illustration: The four of us who remained huddled very close around the
fire]
But now on the hearth-rug at my feet the Partridge Hunter lay in amiable
corduroy comfort, with the little puff of his pipe and his lips
throbbing out in pleasant, dozy regularity. He had traveled in Japan
since last we met, and one's blood flowed pink and gold and purple,
one's flesh turned silk, one's eyes onyx, before the wonder of his
narrative.
No one was to be outdone in adventurous recital. Alrik had spent the
summer guiding a party of amateur sports along the Allagash, and his
garbled account of it would have stocked a comic paper for a month. The
Pretty Lady had christened a warship, and her eager, brooky voice went
rippling and churtling through such major details as blue chiffon velvet
and the goldiest kind of champagne. Even Alrik's raw-boned Old Mother,
clinking dirty supper dishes out in the kitchen, had a crackle-voiced
tale of excitement to contribute about a floundering spring bear that
she had soused with soap-suds from her woodshed window.
But all the time the storm grew worse and worse. The poor, tiny old
house tore and writhed under the strain. Now and again a shutter blew
shrilly loose, or a chimney brick thudded down, or a great sheet of rain
sucked itself up like a whirlpool and then came drenching and hurtling
itself in a perfect frenzy against the frail, clattering window-panes.
It was a good night for four friends to be housed together in a red, red
room, where the low ceiling brooded over you like a face and the warped
floor curled around you like the cuddle of a hand. A living-room should
always be red, I think, like the walls of a heart, and cluttered, as
Alrik's was, with every possible object, mean or fine, funny or
pathetic, that typifies the owner's personal experience.
Yet there are people, I suppose, people stuffed with arts, not hearts,
who would have monotoned Alrik's bright walls a dull brain-gray, ripped
down the furs, the fishing-tackle, the stuffed owls, the gaudy
theatrical posters, the shelf of glasses, the spooky hair wreaths, the
really terrible crayon portrait of some much-beloved ancient grandame;
and, supplementing it all with a single, homesick Japanese print,
yearning across the vacuum at a chalky white bust of a perfect stranger
like Psyche or Ruskin, would have called the whole effect more
"successful." Just as though the crudest possible room that represents
the affections is not infinitely more worth while than the most esoteric
apartment that represents the intellect.
There were certainly no vacuums in Alrik's room. Everything in it was
crowded and scrunched together like a hard, friendly hand-shake. It was
the most fiercely, primitively sincere room that I have ever seen, and
king or peasant therefore would have felt equally at home in it. Surely
no mere man could have crossed the humpy threshold without a blissful,
instinctive desire to keep on his hat and take off his boots. Alrik knew
how to make a room "homeful." Alrik knew everything in the world except
grammar.
Red warmth, yellow cheer, and all-colored jollity were there with us.
Faster and faster we talked, and louder and louder we laughed, until at
last, when the conversation lost its breath utterly, Alrik jumped up
with a grin and started our old friend the phonograph. His first choice
of music was a grotesque _duo_ by two back-yard cats. It was one of
those irresistibly silly minstrel things that would have exploded any
decent bishop in the midst of his sermon. Certainly no one of us had
ever yet been able to withstand it. _But now no bristling, injuriated
dog jumped from his sleep and charged like a whole regiment on the
perfectly innocent garden._ And the duo somehow seemed strangely flat.
"Here is something we used to like," suggested Alrik desperately, and
started a splendid barytone rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine
Eyes." _But no high-pitched, mocking tenor voice took up the solemn
velvet song and flirted it like a cheap chiffon scarf._ And the Pretty
Lady rose very suddenly and went out to the kitchen indefinitely "for a
glass of water." It was funny about the Blue Serge Man. I had not liked
him overmuch, but I missed _not-liking-him_ with a crick in my heart
that was almost sorrow.
"Oh, for heaven's sake try some other music!" cried the Partridge Hunter
venomously, and Alrik clutched out wildly for the first thing he could
reach. It was "Give My Regards to Broadway." We had practically worn out
the record the year before, but its mutilated remains whirred along,
dropping an occasional note or word, with the same cheerful spunk and
unconcern that characterized the song itself:
"Give my regards to Broadway,
Remember me to Herald Square,
Tell all the--whirry--whirry, whirrrrry--whirrrrrrr
That I will soon be there."
The Partridge Hunter began instantly to beat muffled time with his soft
felt slippers. Alrik plunged as usual into a fearfully clever and
clattery imitation of an ox shying at a street-car. _But what of it? No
wakened, sparkling-eyed girl came stealing forth from her corner to
cuddle her blazing cheek against the cool, brass-colored jowl of the
phonograph horn._ An All-Goneness is an amazing thing. It was strange
about Alrik's Wife. Her presence had been as negative as a dead gray
dove. But her _absence_ was like scarlet strung with bells!
The evening began to drag out like a tortured rubber band getting ready
to snap.
It was surely eleven o'clock before the Pretty Lady returned from the
kitchen with our hot lemonades. The tall glasses jingled together
pleasantly on the tray. The height was there, the breadth, the precious,
steaming fragrance. _But the Blue Serge Man had always mixed our
nightcaps for us._
With grandiloquent pleasantry, the Partridge Hunter jumped to his feet,
raised his glass, toasted "Happy Days," choked on the first swallow,
bungled his grasp, and dropped the whole glass in shattering, messy
fragments to the floor.
"Lord," he muttered under his breath, "one could stand missing a fellow
in a church or a graveyard or a mournful sunset glow--but to miss him
in a foolish, folksy--hot lemonade!--Lord!" And he shook his shoulders
almost angrily and threw himself down again on the hearth-rug.
The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing
pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored
pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.
But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the
Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in
particular:
"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've just _got_ to know
how it all happened!"
No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with
word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost
resonance, but with mechanism only just that instant released, Alrik and
the Pretty Lady burst into sound.
The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross,
like the breath of a person who runs for a train--and misses it.
"It was--in--Florida," she gasped, "the--last--of March. The sailboat
was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he _would_ go out in
it--_alone_--storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of
emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the
shortcomings of her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They
found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always
find his pocket, but never his watch--his purse, but never his money--his
song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and
deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid--wicked--wilful--accident,"
she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery--astonished--
moment--just--as--as--plainly--as--though--I--had--been--there.
Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even--Death--without
making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: '_This_ is
too salt! _This_ is too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While
all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious,
memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome,
whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except--_me_--except M-E!'"
The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of
course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go--nothing could
make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very _mad_. He had
just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at
Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June--"
She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into
the silence.
"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all
the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She
wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your
wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing
tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And
when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any
of them thick things, I couldn't fool her--she just up an' said it was
nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And
Gruff--Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed
him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."
The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last,
his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand,
and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round
his words.
"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying
here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three--Man,
Girl, and Dog--are cuddling off together somewhere in the big,
spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a
star--talking--perhaps--about--_us_?"
The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one
to be alone on such a night.
But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a
resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.
"She _ain't_ with him!" he cried. "She _ain't_, she AIN'T, she A-I-N-'T!
I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"
And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly,
all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.
"I'll wager she _is_ with him," she whispered under her breath. "She
always did tag him wherever he went!"
Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the
Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to
me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation
shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with
much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged
round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.
Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.
The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a
lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of
loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar.
Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On
the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. _It was
the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where
Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well._ With a
hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had
not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it--oh, 'way, 'way back out
of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find
it.
Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could
a _man_ be all gone, but his silly cap _last_?
My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely
clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really
sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my
things. _A trinket jingled--a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the
setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair._ I slammed the drawer with a
bang, and opened another. _Metal and leather slid heavily along the
bottom._ It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the
name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not
like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked
the looking-glass.
Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on
the bed in all my clothes and began to _wake up_--wider and wider and
wider.
My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory,
photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the
Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing
sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue
gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether
too vivid to be pleasant.
Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol,
chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle
flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black
night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter
idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble
gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched
with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned in the wind.
"Of course, of course, there are no ghosts," I reasoned, just as one
reasons that there is no mistake in the dictionary, no flaw in the
multiplication table. But sometimes one's fantastically jaded nerves think
they have found the blunder in language, the fault in science. Ghosts
or no ghosts--if you _thought_ you saw one, wouldn't it be just as bad?
My eyes strained out into the darkness. Suppose--I--should--_think_--that
I heard the bark of a dog? Suppose--suppose--that from that black shed
door where the automobile used to live, I should _think_--even T-H-I-N-K
that I saw the Blue Serge Man come stumbling with a lantern? The black
shed door burst open with a bang-bang-bang, and I screamed, jumped,
snatched a blanket, and fled for the lamp-lighted hall.
A little dazzled by the sudden glow, I shrank back in alarm from a
figure on the top stair. It was the Pretty Lady. Wrapped clumsily like
myself in a big blanket, she sat huddled there with the kerosene lamp
close beside her, mending the Blue Serge Man's cap. On the step below
her, smothered in a soggy lavender comforter, crouched Alrik's Old
Mother, her dim eyes brightened uncannily with superstitious excitement.
I was evidently a welcome addition to the party, and the old woman
cuddled me in like a meal-sack beside her.
"Naw one could sleep a night like this," she croaked.
"_Sleep?_" gasped the Pretty Lady. Scorn infinite was in her tone.
But comfortably and serenely from the end of the hall came the heavy,
regular breathing of the Partridge Hunter, and from beyond that, Alrik's
blissful, oblivious snore. Yet Alrik was the only one among us who
claimed an agonizing, personal sorrow.
I began to laugh a bit hysterically. "Men are funny people," I
volunteered.
Alrik's Old Mother caught my hand with a chuckle, then sobered suddenly,
and shook her wadded head.
"Men _ain't_ exactly--people," she confided. "Men _ain't_ exactly
people--at all!"
The conviction evidently burned dull, steady, comforting as a
night-light, in the old crone's eighty years' experience, but the Pretty
Lady's face grabbed the new idea desperately, as though she were trying
to rekindle happiness with a wet match. Yet every time her fretted lips
straightened out in some semblance of Peace, her whole head would
suddenly explode in one gigantic sneeze. There was no other sound, I
remember, for hours and hours, except the steady, monotonous, slobbery
swash of a bursting roof-gutter somewhere close in the eaves.
Certainly Dawn itself was not more chilled and gray than we when we
crept back at last to our beds, thick-eyed with drowsy exhaustion,
limp-bodied, muffle-minded.
But when we woke again, the late, hot noonday sun was like a scorching
fire in our faces, and the drenched dooryard steamed like a dye-house in
the sudden burst of unseasonable heat.
After breakfast, the Pretty Lady, in her hundred-dollar ruffles, went
out to the barn with shabby Alrik to help him mend a musty old plow
harness. The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers.
So were Alrik's. The exclusiveness of their task seemed therefore to
thrust the Partridge Hunter and me off by ourselves into a sort of
amateur sorrow class, and we started forth as cheerfully as we could to
investigate the autumn woods.
Passing the barn door, we heard the strident sound of Alrik's
complaining. Braced with his heavy shoulders against a corner of the
stall, he stood hurling down his new-born theology upon the glossy blond
head of the Pretty Lady who sat perched adroitly on a nail keg with two
shiny-tipped fingers prying up the corners of her mouth into a smile.
One side of the smile was distinctly wry. But Alrik's face was deadly
earnest. Sweat bubbled out on his forehead like tears that could not
possibly wait to reach his eyes.
"There ought to be a separate heaven for ladies and gentlemen," he was
arguing frantically. "'Tain't fair. 'Tain't right. I won't have it! I'll
see a priest. I'll find a parson. If it ain't proper to live with
people, it ain't proper to die with 'em. I tell you I won't have Amy
careerin' round with strange men. She always was foolish about men. And
I'm breakin' my heart for her, and Mother's gettin' old, and the house
is goin' to rack and ruin, but how--_how_ can a man go and get married
comfortable again when his mind's all torturin' round and round and
round about his first wife?"
The Partridge Hunter gave a sharp laugh under his breath, yet he did not
seem exactly amused. "Laugh for _two_!" I suggested, as we dodged out of
sight round the corner and plunged off into the actual Outdoors.
The heat was really intense, the October sun dazzlingly bright. Warmth
steamed from the earth, and burnished from the sky. A plushy brown
rabbit lolling across the roadway dragged on one's sweating senses like
overshoes in June. Under our ruthless, heavy-booted feet the wet green
meadow winced like some tender young salad. At the edge of the forest
the big pines darkened sumptuously. Then, suddenly, between a scarlet
sumach and a slim white birch, the cavernous wood-path opened forth
mysteriously, narrow and tall and domed like the arch of a cathedral.
Not a bird twitted, not a leaf rustled, and, far as the eye could reach,
the wet brown pine-needles lay thick and soft and padded like tan-bark,
as though all Nature waited hushed and expectant for some exquisitely
infinitesimal tragedy, like the travail of a squirrel.
With brain and body all a-whisper and a-tiptoe, the Partridge Hunter and
I stole deeper and deeper into the Color and the Silence and the
Witchery, dazed at every step by the material proof of autumn warring
against the spiritual insistence of spring. It was the sort of day to
make one very tender toward the living just because they were living,
and very tender toward the dead just because they were dead.
At the gurgling bowl of a half-hidden spring, we made our first
stopping-place. Out of his generous corduroy pockets the Partridge
Hunter tinkled two drinking-cups, dipped them deep in the icy water, and
handed me one with a little shuddering exclamation of cold. For an
instant his eyes searched mine, then he lifted his cup very high and
stared off into _Nothingness_.
"To the--_All-Gone People_," he toasted.
I began to cry. He seemed very glad to have me cry. "Cry for two," he
suggested blithely, "cry for two," and threw himself down on the twiggy
ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand.
"Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave
it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last,
I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue
Serge Man himself is--quite _gone_. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's
forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course it _isn't_ so,"
he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man's
_things_ were the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and
that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the
S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality
accumulates in the few years' time allotted to him. The man himself, you
see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't
escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he
brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his
bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that
turns up a generation hence in a German prayer-book at a French
book-stall.
"And isn't Death a teasing teacher? Holds up a personality suddenly like
a map--makes you learn by heart every possible, conceivable pleasant
detail concerning that personality, and then, when you are fairly
bursting with your happy knowledge, tears up the map in your face and
says, 'There's no such country any more, so what you've learned won't do
you the slightest good.' And there you'd only just that moment found out
that your friend's hair was a beautiful auburn instead of 'a horrid
red'; that his blessed old voice was hearty, not 'noisy'; that his table
manners were quaint, not 'queer'; that his morals were broad, not
'bad.'"
The Partridge Hunter's mouth began to twist. "It's a horrid thing to
say," he stammered, "but there ought to be a sample shroud in every
home, so that when your husband is late to dinner, or your daughter
smokes a cigarette, or your son decides to marry the cook, you could get
out the shroud and try it on the offender, and make a few experiments
concerning--well, _values_. Why, I saw a man last week dragged by a
train--jerked in and out and over and under, with his head or his heels
or the hem of his coat just missing Death every second by the
hundred-millionth fraction of an inch. But when he was rescued at last
and went home to dinner--shaken as an aspen, sicker than pulp,
tongue-tied like a padlock--I suppose, very likely, his wife scolded him
for having forgotten the oysters."
The Partridge Hunter's face flushed suddenly.
"I didn't care much for Alrik's Wife," he attested abruptly. "I always
thought she was a trivial, foolish little crittur. But if I had known
that I was never going to see her again--while the sun blazed or the
stars blinked--I should like to have gone back from the buckboard that
last morning and stroked her brown hair just once away from her eyes.
Does that seem silly to you?"
"Why, no," I said. "It doesn't seem silly at all. If I had guessed that
the Blue Serge Man was going off on such a long, long, never-stop
journey, I might even have kissed him good-by. But I certainly can't
imagine anything that would have provoked or astonished him more! People
can't go round petting one another just on the possible chance of never
meeting again. And goodness gracious! nobody wants to. It's only that
when a person actually _dies_, a sort of subtle, holy sense in you wakes
up and wishes that just once for all eternity it might have gotten a
signal through to that subtle, holy sense in the other person. And of
course when a youngster dies, you feel somehow that he or she must have
been different all along from other people, and you simply wish that you
might have guessed that fact sooner--before it was too late."
The Partridge Hunter began to smile. "If you knew," he teased, "that I
was going to be massacred by an automobile or crumpled by an elevator
before next October--would you wish that you had petted me just a little
to-day?"
"Yes," I acknowledged.
The Partridge Hunter pretended he was deaf. "Say that once again," he
begged.
"Y-e-s," I repeated.
The Partridge Hunter put back his head and roared. "That's just about
like kissing through the telephone," he said. "It isn't particularly
satisfying, and yet it makes a desperately cunning sound."
Then I put back my head and laughed, too, because it is so thoroughly
comfortable and pleasant to be friends for only one single week in all
the year. Independence is at best such a scant fabric, and every new
friendship you incur takes just one more tuck in that fabric, till
before you know it your freedom is quite too short to go out in. The
Partridge Hunter felt exactly the same way about it, and after each
little October playtime we ripped out the thread with never a scar to
show.
Even now while we laughed, we thought we might as well laugh at
everything we could think of, and get just that much finished and out of
the way.
"Perhaps," said the Partridge Hunter, "perhaps the Blue Serge Man was
_glad_ to see Amy, and perhaps he was rattled, no one can tell. But
I'll wager anything he was awfully mad to see Gruff. There were lots of
meteors last June, I remember. I understand now. It was the Blue Serge
Man raking down the stars to pelt at Gruff."
"Gruff was a very--nice dog," I insisted.
"He was a very growly dog," acceded the Partridge Hunter.
"If you growl all the time, it's almost the same as a purr," I argued.
The Partridge Hunter smiled a little, but not very generously. Something
was on his mind. "Poor little Amy," he said. "Any man-and-woman game is
playing with fire, but it's foolish to think that there are only two
kinds, just Hearth-Fire and Hell-Fire. Why, there's 'Student-lamp' and
'Cook-stove' and 'Footlights.' Amy and the Blue Serge Man were playing
with 'Footlights,' I guess. She needed an audience. And he was New York
to her, great, blessed, shiny, rackety New York. I believe she loved
Alrik. He must have been a pretty picturesque figure on that first and
only time when he blazed his trail down Broadway. But _happy_ with
him--H-E-R-E? Away from New York? Five years? In just green and brown
woods where the posies grow on the ground instead of on hats, and even
the Christmas trees are trimmed with nothing except real snow and live
squirrels? G-L-O-R-Y! Of course her chest caved in. There wasn't kinky
air enough in the whole state of Maine to keep her kind of lungs active.
Of course she starved to death. She needed her meat flavored with harp
and violin; her drink aerated with electric lights. We might have done
something for her if we'd liked her just a little bit better. But I
didn't even know her till I heard that she was dead."
He jumped up suddenly and helped me to my feet. Something in my face
must have stricken him. "Would you like my warm hand to walk home with?"
he finished quite abruptly.
Even as he offered it, one of those chill, quick autumn changes came
over the October woods. The sun grayed down behind huge, windy clouds.
The leaves began to shiver and shudder and chatter, and all the gorgeous
reds and greens dulled out of the world, leaving nothing as far as the
eye could reach but dingy squirrel-colors, tawny grays and dusty
yellows, with the far-off, panting sound of a frightened brook dodging
zigzag through some meadow in a last, desperate effort to escape winter.
As a draft from a tomb the cold, clammy, valley twilight was upon us.
Like two bashful children scuttling through a pantomime, we hurried out
of the glowery, darkening woods, and then at the edge of the meadow
broke into a wild, mirthful race for Alrik's bright hearth-fire, which
glowed and beckoned from his windows like a little tame, domesticated
sunset. The Partridge Hunter cleared the porch steps at a single bound,
but I fell flat on the bruising doormat.
Nothing really mattered, however, except the hearth-fire itself.
Alrik and the Pretty Lady were already there before us, kneeling down
with giggly, scorching faces before a huge corn-popper foaming white
with little muffled, ecstatic notes of heat and harvest.
The Pretty Lady turned a crimson cheek to us, and Alrik's tanned skin
glowed like a freshly shellacked Indian. Even the Old Mother's asthmatic
breath purred from the jogging rocker like a specially contented
pussy-cat.
Nothing in all the room, I remember, looked pallid or fretted except the
great, ghastly white face of the clock. I despise a clock that looks
worried. It wasn't late, anyway. It was scarcely quarter-past four.
Indeed, it was only half-past four when the company came. We were making
such a racket among ourselves that our very first warning was the
sudden, blunt, rubbery _m-o-o_ of an automobile directly outside. Mud
was the first thing I thought of.
Then the door flew open peremptorily, and there on the threshold stood
the Blue Serge Man--not dank and wet with slime and seaweed, but fat and
ruddy and warm in a huge gray 'possum coat. Only the fearful, stilted
immovability of him gave the lie to his reality.
_It was a miracle!_ I had always wondered a great deal about miracles. I
had always longed, craved, prayed to experience a miracle. I had always
supposed that a miracle was the supreme sensation of existence, the
ultimate rapture of the soul. But it seems I was mistaken. A miracle
doesn't do anything to your soul for days and days and days. Your heart,
of course, may jump, and your blood foam, but first of all it simply
makes you very, very sick in the pit of your stomach. It made a man like
Alrik clutch at his belt and jump up and down and "holler" like a
lunatic. It smote the Partridge Hunter somewhere between a cramp and a
sob. It ripped the Old Mother close at her waist-line, and raveled her
out on the floor like a fluff of gray yarn.
But the Pretty Lady just stood up with her hands full of pop-corn, and
stared and stared and stared and STARED. From her shining blond head to
her jet-black slippers she was like an exploded pulse.
The Blue Serge Man stepped forward into the room and faltered. In that
instant's faltering, Alrik jumped for him like a great, glad, loving
dog, and ripped the coat right off his shoulders.
The Blue Serge Man's lips were all a-grin, but a scar across his
forehead gave a certain tense, stricken dignity to his eyes. Very
casually, very indolently, he began to tug at his gloves, staring all
the while with malevolent joy on the fearful crayon portrait of the
ancient grandame.
"That's the very last face I thought of when I was drowning," he
drawled, "and there wasn't room enough in all heaven for the two of us.
Bully old face, I'm glad I'm here. I've been in Cuba," he continued
quite abruptly, "and I meant to play dead forever and ever. But there
was an autumn leaf--a red autumn leaf in a lady's hat--and it made me
homesick." His voice broke suddenly, and he turned to his wife with
quick, desperate, pleading intensity. "I'm not--much--good," he gasped.
"But I've--_come back_!"
I saw the flaky white pop-corn go trickling through the Pretty Lady's
fingers, but she just stood there and shook and writhed like a tightly
wrung newspaper smoldering with fire. Then her face flamed suddenly with
a light I had never, never seen since my world was made.
"I don't care whether you're any good or not," she cried. "You're alive!
You're alive! You're alive! You're _alive_! You're--ALIVE!"
I thought she would never stop saying it, on and on and on and on.
"You're alive, you're alive, you're alive." Like a defective phonograph
disk her shattered sense caught on that one supreme phrase, "You're
alive! You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!"
Then the blood that had blazed in her face spread suddenly to her
nerveless hands, and she began to pluck at the crape ruffles on her
gown. Stitch by stitch I heard the rip-rip-rip like the buzz of a
fishing-reel. But louder than all came that maddening, monotonous cry,
"You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!" I thought her brain was
broken.
Then the Blue Serge Man sprang toward her, and I shut my eyes. But I
caught the blessed, clumsy sound of a lover's boot tripping on a
ruffle--the crushing out of a breath--the smother of a half-lipped word.
I don't know what became of Alrik. I don't know what became of Alrik's
Old Mother. But the Partridge Hunter, with his arm across his eyes, came
groping for me through the red, red room.
"Let's get out of this," he whispered. "Let's get out of this."
So once again, amateurs both in sorrow and in gladness, the Partridge
Hunter and I fled fast before the Incomprehensible. Out we ran through
Amy's frost-blighted rose-garden, _where no gay, shrill young voice
challenged our desecration_, out through the senile old apple orchard,
_where no suspicious dog came bristling forth to question our innocent
intrusion_, up through the green-ribbon roadway, up through the
stumbling wood-path, to the safe, sound, tangible, moss-covered
pasture-bars, where the warm, brown-fur bossies, sweet-breathed and
steaming, came lolling gently down through the gauzy dusk to barter
their pleasant milk for a snug night's lodging and a troughful of yellow
mush.
A dozen mysterious wood-folk crackled close within reach, as though all
the little day-animals were laying aside their starched clothes for the
night; and the whole earth teemed with the exquisite, sleepy,
nestling-down sound of fur and feathers and tired leaves. Out in the
forest depths somewhere a belated partridge drummed out his excuses.
Across on the nearest stone wall a tawny marauder went hunching his way
along. It might have been a fox, it might have been Amy's thrown-away
coon-cat. Short and sharp from the house behind us came the fast,
furious crash of Alrik's frenzied young energies, chopping wood enough
to warm a dozen houses for a dozen winters for a dozen new brides. But
high above even the racket of his ax rang the sweet, wild, triumphant
resonance of some French Canadian _chanson_. His heart and his lungs
seemed fairly to have exploded in relief.
And over the little house, and the dark woods, and the mellow pasture,
and the brown-fur bossies, broke a little, wee, tiny prick-point of a
star, as though some Celestial Being were peeping down whimsically to
see just what the Partridge Hunter and I thought of it all.