THE dining-room was green, as green could be. Under the orange-colored
candle-light, the walls, rugs, ceiling, draperies, ferns, glowed
verdant, mysterious, intense, like night woods arching round a camp
fire. Into this fervid, pastoral verdure the round white table,
sparkling with silver, limpid with wine-lights, seemed to roll forth
resplendent and incongruous as a huge, tinseled snowball.
Outside, like fire engines running on velvet wheels, the automobiles
went humming along the pavement. Inside, the soft, narrow, ribbony voice
of a violin came whimpering through the rose-scented air.
It was the midst of dinner-party time. In the oak-paneled hallway a
shadowy, tall clock swallowed gutturally on the verge of striking nine.
The moment was distinctly nervous. The _entree_ course was late, and the
Hostess, gesticulating tragically to her husband, had slipped one
chalky white shoulder just a fraction of an inch too far out of its
jeweled strap. The Host, conversing every second with exaggerated
blandness about the squirrels in Central Park, was striving frantically
all the while with a desperately surreptitious, itchy gesture to signal
to his mate. Worse than this, a prominent Sociologist was audibly
discussing the American penal system with a worried-looking lady whose
brother was even then under indictment for some banking fraud. Some one,
trying to kick the Sociologist's ankle bone, had snagged his own foot
gashingly through the Woodland Girl's skirt ruffle, and the Woodland
Girl, blush-blown yet with country breezes, clear-eyed as a trout pool,
sweet-breathed as balsam, was staring panic-stricken around the table,
trying to locate the particular man's face that could possibly connect
boot-wise with such a horridly profane accident. The sudden, grotesque
alertness of her expression attracted the laggard interest of the young
Journalist at her left.
"What brought you to New York?" the Journalist asked abruptly. "You're
the last victim in from the country, so you must give an account of
yourself. Come 'fess up! What brought you to New York?"
The Journalist's smile was at least as conscientious as the smile of
daylight down a city airshaft, and the Woodland Girl quickened to the
brightening with almost melodramatic delight, for all previous
conversational overtures from this neighbor had been about actors that
she had never heard of, or operas that she could not even pronounce, and
before the man's scrutinizing, puzzled amazement she had felt convicted
not alone of mere rural ignorance, but of freckles on her nose.
"What brought me to New York?" she repeated with vehement new courage.
"Do you really want to know? It's quite a speech. What brought me to New
York? Why, I wanted to see the 'heart of the city.' I'm twenty years
old, and I've never in all my life been away from home before. Always
and always I've lived in a log bungalow, in a wild garden, in a pine
forest, on a green island, in a blue lake. My father is an invalid, you
know, one of those people who are a little bit short of lungs but
inordinately long of brains. And I know Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and
Hindoo History and Sunrises and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose, and
such things. But I wanted to know People. I wanted to know Romance. I
wanted to see for myself all this 'heart of the city' that you hear so
much about--the great, blood-red, eager, gasping heart of the city. So I
came down here last week to visit my uncle and aunt."
[Illustration: "The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist"]
Her mouth tightened suddenly, and she lowered her voice with ominous
intensity. "But there _isn't_ any heart to, your city--no!--there is no
heart at all at the center of things--just a silly, pretty, very much
decorated heart-shaped box filled with candy. If you shake it hard
enough, it may rattle, but it won't throb. And I hate--hate--hate your
old city. It's utterly, hopelessly, irremediably jejune, and I'm going
home to-morrow!" As she leaned toward the Journalist, the gold locket on
her prim, high-necked gown swung precipitously forth like a wall picture
in a furious little earthquake.
The Journalist started to laugh, then changed his mind and narrowed his
eyes speculatively toward something across the room. "No heart?" he
queried. "No Romance?"
The Woodland Girl followed his exploring gaze. Between the plushy green
_portieres_ a dull, cool, rose-colored vista opened forth refreshingly,
with a fragment of bookcase, the edge of a stained glass window, the
polished gleam of a grand piano, and then--lithe, sinuous, willowy, in
the shaded lamplight--the lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist.
In the amazing mellow glow that smote upon his face, the Woodland Girl
noted with a crumple at her heart the tragic droop of the boy's dark
head, the sluggish, velvet passion of his eyes, the tortured mouth,
the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant
instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding
water poured on ice--seething with anguish, shuddering with ecstasy,
flame at your heart, frost at your spine.
The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays,
of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but
that's Genius, isn't it, not Romance? He's such a little lad. He can
hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond
a--stomach ache--or the loss of a Henty book."
"A stomach ache! A Henty book!" cried the Journalist, with a bitter,
convulsive sort of mirth. "Well, I'm ready to admit that the boy is
scarcely eighteen. But he happens to have lost a wife and a son within
the past two months! While some of us country-born fellows of
twenty-eight or thirty were asking our patient girls at home to wait
even another year, while we came over to New York and tried our
fortunes, this little youngster of scarcely eighteen is already a
husband, a father, and a widower.
"He's a Russian Jew--you can see that--and one of our big music people
picked him up over there a few months ago and brought him jabberingly to
America. But the invitation didn't seem to include the wife and
baby--genius and family life aren't exactly guaranteed to develop very
successfully together--and right there on the dock at the very last
sailing moment the little chap had to choose between a small, wailing
family and a great big, clapping New York--just temporarily, you
understand, a mere matter of immediate expediency; and families are
supposed to keep indefinitely, you know, and keep sweet, too, while
everybody knows that New York can go sour in a single night, even in the
coldest weather. And just as the youngster was trying to decide,
wavering first one way and then the other, and calling on high every
moment to the God of all the Russias, the old steamer whistle began to
blow, and they rustled him on board, and his wife and the kid pegged
back alone to the province where the girl's father lived, and they got
snarled up on the way with a band of Cossack soldiers, and the little
chap hasn't got any one now even as far off as Russia to hamper his
musical career.... So he's playing jig-tunes to people like us that are
trying to forget our own troubles, such as how much we owe our tailors
or our milliners. But sometimes they say he screams in the night, and
twice he has fainted in the midst of a concert.
"No heart in the city? No Romance? Why, my dear child, this whole
city fairly teems with Romance. The automobiles throb with it. The
great, roaring elevated trains go hustling full of it. There's
Romance--Romance--Romance from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn
again. The sweetness of the day-blooming sunshine, the madness of the
night-blooming electric lights, the crowds, the colors, the music, the
perfume--why, the city is _Romance-mad_! If you stop anywhere for even
half an instant to get your breath, Romance will run right over you.
It's whizzing past you in the air. It's whizzing past you in the street.
It's whizzing past you in the sensuous, ornate theaters, in the jaded
department stores, in the calm, gray churches. Romance?--Love?
"The only trouble about New York Romance lies just in the fact that it
is so whizzingly premature. You've simply got to grab Love the minute
before you've made up your mind--because the minute after you've made
up your mind, it won't be there. Grab it--or lose it. Grab it--or
lose it. That's the whole Heart-Motto of New York. Sinner or
Saint--RUSH--RUSH--RUSH--like Hell!"
"Grab it--or lose it. Grab it, or--l-o-s-e it." Like the impish raillery
of a tortured devil, the violin's passionate, wheedling tremolo seemed
to catch up the phrase, and mouth it and mock it, and tear it and tease
it, and kiss it and curse it--and SMASH it at last into a great,
screeching crescendo that rent your eardrums like the crash of steel
rails.
With strangely parched lips, the Woodland Girl stretched out her small
brown hand to the fragile, flower-stemmed glass, and tasted for the
first time in her life the sweety-sad, molten-gold magic of champagne.
"Why, what is it?" she asked, with the wonder still wet on her lips.
"Why, what is it?"
The Journalist raised his own glass with staler fingers, and stared for
a second through narrowing eyes into the shimmering vintage. "What is
it?" he repeated softly. "This particular brand? The Italians call it
'_Lacrymae Christi_.' So even in our furies and our follies, in our cafes
and carousals, in our love and all our laughter--we drink--you
see--the--'Tears of Christ.'" He reached out suddenly and covered the
Girl's half-drained glass with a quivering hand. "Excuse me," he
stammered. "Maybe--our thirst is partly of the soul; but '_Lacrymae
Christi_' was never meant for little girls like you. _Go back to your
woods!_"
Scuttle as it might, the precipitate, naked passion in his voice did not
quite have time to cover itself with word-clothes. A little gasping
breath escaped. And though the Girl's young life was as shiningly empty
as an unfinished house, her brain-cells were packed like an attic with
all the inherent experiences of her mother's mother's mother, and she
flinched instinctively with a great lurch of her heart.
"Oh, let's talk about something--dressy," she begged. "Let's talk about
Central Park. Let's talk about the shops. Let's talk about the subway."
Her startled face broke desperately into a smile. "Oh, don't you think
the subway is perfectly dreadful," she insisted. "There's so much
underbrush in it!" Even as she spoke, her shoulders hunched up the
merest trifle, and her head pushed forward, after the manner of people
who walk much in the deep woods. The perplexity in her eyes spread
instantly to her hands. Among the confusing array of knives and forks
and spoons at her plate, her fingers began to snarl nervously like a
city man's feet through a tangle of blackberry vines.
With a good-natured shrug of his shoulders, the Journalist turned to his
more sophisticated neighbor, and left her quite piteously alone once
more. An enamored-looking man and woman at her right were talking
transmigration of souls, but whenever she tried to annex herself to
their conversation they trailed their voices away from her in a sacred,
aloof sort of whisper. Across the table the people were discussing city
politics in a most clandestine sort of an undertone. Altogether it was
almost half an hour before the Journalist remembered to smile at her
again. The very first flicker of his lips started her red mouth mumbling
inarticulately.
"Were you going to say something?" he asked.
She shook her head drearily. "No," she stammered. "I've tried and tried,
but I can't think of anything at all to say. I guess I don't know any
secrets."
The Journalist's keen eyes traveled shrewdly for a second round the
cautious, worldly-wise table, and then came narrowing back rather
quizzically to the Woodland Girl's flushing, pink and white face.
"Oh, I don't know," he smiled. "You look to me like a little girl who
might have a good many secrets."
She shook her head. "No," she insisted, "in all the whole wide world I
don't know one single thing that has to be whispered."
"No scandals?" teased the Journalist.
"No!"
"No love affairs?"
"No!"
The Journalist laughed. "Why, what do you think about all day long up in
your woods?" he quizzed.
"Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunsets and Mountains
and Moose," she repeated glibly.
"Now you're teasing me," said the Journalist.
She nodded her head delightedly. "I'm trying to!" she smiled.
The Journalist turned part way round in his chair, and proffered her a
perfectly huge olive as though it had been a crown jewel. When he spoke
again, his voice was almost as low as the voice of the man who was
talking transmigration of souls. But his smile was a great deal kinder.
"Don't you find any Romance at all in your woods?" he asked a bit
drawlingly.
"No," said the Girl; "that's the trouble. Of course, when I was small it
didn't make any difference; indeed, I think that I rather preferred it
lonesome then. But this last year, somehow, and this last autumn
especially--oh, I know you'll think I'm silly--but two or three times
in the woods--I've hoped and hoped and hoped--at the turn of a trail, or
the edge of a brook, or the scent of a camp fire--that I might run right
into a real, live Hunter or Fisherman. And--one night I really prayed
about it--and the next morning I got up early and put on my very best
little hunting suit--all coats and leggings and things just like yours,
you know--and I stayed out all day long--tramping--tramping--tramping,
and I never saw _any one_. But I did get a fox. Yes!--and then--"
"And then what?" whispered the Journalist very helpfully.
The Girl began to smile, but her lips were quite as red as a blush.
"Well--and--then," she continued softly, "it occurred to me all of a
sudden that the probable reason why the Man-Who-Was-Meant-for-Me didn't
come was because he--_didn't know I was there_!" She began to laugh,
toying all the while a little bit nervously with her ice-cream fork. "So
I thought that perhaps--if I came down to New York this winter--and then
went home again, that maybe--not probably you know, but just
possibly--some time in the spring or summer--I might look up suddenly
through the trees and he _would_ be there! But I've been ten days in New
York and I haven't seen one single man whom I'd exactly like to meet in
the woods--in my little hunting suit."
"Wouldn't you be willing to meet me?" pried the Journalist
injudiciously.
The Girl looked up and faltered. "Why, of course," she hurried, "I
should be very glad to see you--but I had always sort of hoped that the
man whom I met in the woods wouldn't be bald."
The Journalist choked noisily over his salted almonds. His heightened
color made him look very angry.
"Oh, I trust I wasn't rude," begged the Woodland Girl. Then as the
Journalist's galloping laughter slowed down into the gentlest sort of a
single-foot smile, her eyes grew abruptly big and dark with horror.
"Why, I never thought of it," she stammered, "but I suppose that what I
have just said about the man in the woods and my coming to New York
is--'husband hunting.'"
The Journalist considered the matter very carefully. "N--o," he answered
at last, "I don't think I should call it 'husband hunting' nor yet,
exactly, 'the search for the Holy Grail'; but, really now, I think on
the whole I should call it more of a sacrament than a sport."
"O--h," whispered the Girl with a little sigh of relief.
It must have been fully fifteen minutes before the Journalist spoke to
her again. Then, in the midst of his salad course, he put down his fork
and asked quite inquisitively: "Aren't there any men at all up in your
own special Maine woods?"
"Oh, yes," the Girl acknowledged with a little crinkle of her nose,
"there's Peter."
"Who's Peter?" he insisted.
"Why, Peter," she explained, "is the Philadelphia boy who tutors with
my father in the summers."
Her youthfulness was almost as frank as fever, and, though taking
advantage of this frankness seemed quite as reprehensible as taking
advantage of any other kind of babbling delirium, the Journalist felt
somehow obliged to pursue his investigations.
"Nice boy?" he suggested tactfully.
The Girl's nose crinkled just a little bit tighter.
The Journalist frowned. "I'll wager you two dozen squirrels out of
Central Park," he said, "that Peter is head over heels in love with
you!"
The Girl's mouth twisted a trifle, but her eyes were absolutely solemn.
"I suppose that he is," she answered gravely, "but he's never taken the
trouble to tell me so, and he's been with us three summers. I suppose
lots of men are made like that. You read about it in books. They want to
sew just as long--long--long a seam as they possibly can without tying
any knot in the thread. Peter, I know, wants to make perfectly
Philadelphia-sure that he won't meet any girl in the winters whom he
likes better."
"I think that sort of thing is mighty mean," interposed the Journalist
sympathetically.
"Mean?" cried the Girl. "Mean?" Her tousley yellow hair seemed fairly
electrified with astonishment, and her big blue eyes brimmed suddenly
with uproarious delight. "Oh, of course," she added contritely, "it may
be mean for the person who sews the seam, but it's heaps of fun for the
cloth, because after awhile, you know, Pompous Peter will discover that
there isn't any winter girl whom he likes better, and in the general
excitement of the discovery he'll remember only the long, long
seam--three happy summers--and forget altogether that he never tied any
knot. And then! And then!" her cheeks began to dimple. "And then--just
as he begins triumphantly to gather me in--all my yards and yards and
yards of beautiful freedom fretted into one short, puckery, worried
ruffle--then--Hooray--swish--slip--slide--_out comes the thread_--and
Mr. Peter falls right over bump-backward with surprise. Won't it be
fun?"
"Fun?" snapped the Journalist. "What a horrid, heartless little cynic
you are!"
The Girl's eyebrows fairly tiptoed to reach his meaning. "Cynic?" she
questioned. "You surely don't mean that I am a cynic? Why, I think men
are perfectly splendid in every possible way that--doesn't matter to a
woman. They can build bridges and wage wars, and spell the hardest,
homeliest words. But Peter makes life so puzzling," she added wryly.
"Everybody wants me to marry Peter; everybody says 'slow but sure,'
'slow but sure.' But it's a lie!" she cried out hotly. "Slow is _not_
sure. It is not! It is not! The man who isn't excited enough to _run_ to
his goal is hardly interested enough to walk. And yet"--her forehead
crinkled all up with worry--"and yet--you tell me that 'quick' isn't
sure, either. _What is sure?_"
"Nothing!" said the Journalist.
She tossed her head. "All the same," she retorted, "I'd rather have a
man propose to me three years before, rather than three years after, I'd
made up my mind whether to accept him or not."
"Don't--marry--Peter," laughed the Journalist.
"Why not?" she asked--so very bluntly that the Journalist twisted a bit
uneasily.
"Oh--I--don't--know," he answered cautiously. Then suddenly his face
brightened. "Any trout fishing up in your brooks about the first of
May?" he asked covertly.
Again the knowledge of her mother's mother's mother blazed red-hot in
the Girl's cheeks. "Y--e--s," she faltered reluctantly, "the
trout-fishing is very generous in May."
"Will Peter be there?" persisted the Journalist.
Her eyes began to shine again with amusement. "Oh, no," she said. "Peter
never comes until July." With mock dignity she straightened herself up
till her shoulder almost reached the Journalist's. "I was very foolish,"
she attested, "even to mention Peter, or mankind--at all. Of course, I'm
commencing to realize that my ideas about men are exceedingly
countrified--'disgustingly countrified,' my aunt tells me. Why, just
this last week at my aunt's sewing club I learned that the only two real
qualifications for marriage are that a man should earn not less than a
hundred dollars a week, and be a perfectly kind hooker."
"A perfectly kind hooker?" queried the Journalist.
"Why, yes," she said. "Don't you know--now--that all our dresses fasten
in the back?" Her little tinkling, giggling laugh rang out with
startling incongruity through the formal room, and her uncle glanced at
her and frowned with the slightest perceptible flicker of irritation.
She leaned her face a wee bit closer to the Journalist. "Now, uncle, for
instance," she confided, "is not a particularly kind hooker. He's
accurate, you understand, but not exactly kind."
The Journalist started to smile, but instantly her tip-most finger ends
brushed across his sleeve. "Oh, please, don't smile any more," she
pleaded, "because every time you smile you look so pleasant that some
lady sticks out a remark like a hand and grabs you into her own
conversation." But the warning came too late. In another moment the
Journalist was most horridly involved with the people on his left in a
prosy discussion regarding Japanese servants.
For another interminable length of time the Woodland Girl sat in
absolute isolation. Some of the funerals at home were vastly more
social, she thought--people at least inquired after the health of the
survivors. But now, even after she had shredded all her lettuce into a
hundred pieces and bitten each piece twice, she was still quite alone.
Even after she had surreptitiously nibbled up all the cracker crumbs
around her own plate and the Journalist's plate, she was still quite
alone. Finally, in complete despair, she folded her little, brown,
ringless hands and sat and stared frankly about her.
Across the sparkly, rose-reeking table a man as polished as poison ivy
was talking devotedly to a white-faced Beauty in a most exciting gown
that looked for all the world like the Garden of Eden struck by
lightning--black and billowing as a thunder cloud, zigzagged with
silver, ravished with rose-petals, rain-dropped with pearls. Out of the
gorgeous, mysterious confusion of it the Beauty's bare shoulders leaped
away like Eve herself fleeing before the storm. But beyond the
extravagant sweep of gown and shoulder the primitive likeness ended
abruptly in one of those utterly well-bred, worldly-wise, perfected
young faces, with that subtle, indescribable sex-consciousness of
expression which makes the type that men go mad over, and the type that
older women tersely designate as looking just a little bit "too kissed."
But the Woodland Girl did not know the crumpled-rose-leaf stamp of face
which characterizes the coquette. Utterly fascinated, tremulous with
excitement, heartsick with envy, she reached out very softly and knocked
with her finger on the Journalist's plate to beg readmission to his
mind.
"Oh, who is that beautiful creature?" she whispered.
"Adele Reitzen," said the Journalist, "your uncle's ward."
"My own uncle's ward?" The Woodland Girl gave a little gasp. "But why
does she worry so in her eyes every now and then?" she asked abruptly.
Even as she asked, Adele Reitzen began to cough. The trouble started
with a trivial clearing of her throat, caught up a disjointed swallow or
two, and ended with a rack that seemed to rip like a brutal knife right
across her silver-spangled lungs. Somebody patted her on the back.
Somebody offered her a glass of water. But in the midst of the choking
paroxysm she asked to be excused for a moment and slipped away to the
dressing-room. The very devoted man seemed rather piteously worried by
the incident, and the Hostess looked straight into his eyes and shook
her head ominously.
"I hope you are planning a southern wedding trip next week," she said.
"I don't like that cough of Adele's. I've sat at three dinner parties
with her this week, and each individual night she has had an attack like
this and been obliged to leave the table."
In the moment's lull, the butler presented a yellow telegram on a shiny,
Sheffield tray, and the Hostess slipped her pink fingers rustlingly
through the envelope and brightened instantly. "Oh, here's a surprise
for you, Chloe," she called to the Woodland Girl. "Peter is coming over
to-night to see you." Like a puckering electric tingle the simple
announcement seemed to run through the room, and a little wise,
mischievous smile spread from face to face among the guests. In another
instant everybody turned and peeped at the Woodland Girl, and the
Woodland Girl felt her good cool, red blood turn suddenly to bubbling,
boiling water, and steam in horrid, clammy wetness across her forehead
and along the prickling palms of her hands, and the Journalist laughed
right out loud, and the whole green, definite room swam dizzily like
the flaunting scarlet messiness of a tropical jungle.
Every nook and corner of the house, indeed, was luxuriously heated, but
when Adele Reitzen came sauntering back to her seat, pungent around her,
telltale as an alien perfume, lurked the chill, fresh aroma of the
wintry, blustering street. Only the country girl's smothering lungs
noted the astonishing fact. Like a little caged animal scenting the
blessed outdoors, her nostrils began to crinkle, and she straightened up
with such abrupt alertness that she loomed to Adele Reitzen's startled
senses like the only visible person at the table, and for just the
fraction of a heart-beat the two girls fathomed down deep and
understandingly into each other's eyes, before Adele Reitzen fluttered
her white lids with a little piteous gesture of appeal.
Breathlessly the Woodland Girl turned to the Journalist, and touched his
arm. "New York _is_ interesting, isn't it!" she stammered. "I've decided
just this minute to stay another week."
"Oh, ho," said the Journalist. "So you love it better than you did an
hour ago?"
"No!" cried the Woodland Girl. "I love it worse. I love it worse every
moment like a--ghost story, but I'm going to stick it out a week longer
and see how it ends. And I've learned one clue to New York's plot this
very night. I've learned that most every face is a 'haunted house.' The
mouths slam back and forth all the time like pleasant doors, and the
jolliest kind of speeches come prancing out, and all that--but in the
eyes ghosts are peering out the windows every minute."
"Cheerful thought," said the Journalist, taking off his glasses. "Who's
the ghost in my eyes?"
The Woodland Girl stared at him wonderingly. "The ghost in your eyes?"
she blundered. "Why--I guess--it's 'the patient girl at home' whom you
asked to wait 'even another year.'"
Like two fever spots the red flared angrily on the Journalist's cheek
bones.
Not even the Journalist spoke to her again.
Finally, lonesome as a naughty child, she followed the dozen dinner
guests back into the huge drawing-room, and wandered aimlessly around
through the incomprehensible mysteries of Chinese idols and teakwood
tabourets and soft, mushy Asiatic rugs. Then at last, behind a dark,
jutting bookcase, in a corner most blissfully safe and secret like a
cave, she stumbled suddenly upon a great, mottled leopard skin with its
big, humpy head, and its sad glass eyes yearning out to her
reproachfully. As though it had been a tiny, lost kitten, she gave a wee
gasp of joy, and dropped down on the floor and tried to cuddle the huge,
felt-lined, fur bulk into her lap. Just as the clumsy face flopped
across her knees, she heard the quick swish of silk, and looked up to
see Adele Reitzen bending over her.
The older girl's eyes were tortured with worry, and her white fingers
teased perpetually at the jeweled watch on her breast. "Chloe Curtis,"
she whispered abruptly, "will you do something for me? Would you be
afraid? You are visiting here in the house, so no one would question
your disappearance. Will you go up to the dressing-room--quick--and get
my black evening coat--the one with the gold embroidery and the big
hood--and go out to the street corner where the cars stop--and tell the
man who is waiting there--that I couldn't--simply couldn't--get out
again? Would you be afraid?"
The Woodland Girl jumped to her feet. At that particular instant the
lump in her throat seemed the only really insurmountable obstacle in the
whole wide world. "Would I be afraid?" she scoffed. "Afraid of what? Of
New York? Of the electric lights? Of the automobiles? Of the cross
policemen? Afraid of nothing!" Her voice lowered suddenly. "Is
it--Love?" she whispered.
The older girl's face was piteous to see. "Y--e--s," she stammered. "It
is Love."
The Woodland Girl's eyes grew big with wonder. "But the other man?" she
gasped. "You are going to be married next week!"
Adele Reitzen's eyes blurred. "Yes," she repeated, "I am going to be
married next week." A little shiver went flickering across her
shoulders.
The Woodland Girl's heart began to plunge and race. "What's the matter
with the man out on the street corner?" she asked nervously.
Adele Reitzen caught her breath. "He's a civil engineer," she said. "His
name is Brian Baird. He's just back from Central America. I met him on
the steamer once. He was traveling second cabin. My--family--won't--let
--me--have--him."
The Woodland Girl threw back her head and laughed, and smothered her
laugh contritely with her hand. "Your family won't let you have him?"
she mumbled. "What a funny idea! What has your family got to do about
it?" Her breath began to quicken, and she reached out suddenly and
clutched Adele Reitzen's shoulder. "Do you know where my uncle's musty
old law library is?" she hurried. "It's downstairs, you know, close to
the store room--nobody ever uses it. You go down there just as fast as
you possibly can, and wait there, and I'll be back in five minutes with
the--Love Man."
Before Adele Reitzen's feebler courage could protest, the Woodland Girl
was scurrying up the short flight to the dressing-room and pawing like a
prankish terrier through the neatly folded evening coats that snuggled
across the bed. Tingling with excitement, she arrayed herself finally in
the luxuriantly muffling black and gold splendor, and started cautiously
down the long, creaky front stairs.
Like the inimitable, familiar thrill of little wild, phosphorescent eyes
looming suddenly out of the black night-woods at home, the adventure
challenged her impetuous curiosity. Bored puzzlingly by the big city's
utter inability to reproduce the identical, simple lake-and-forest
emotionalism that was the breath of life to her, she quickened now
precipitately to the possible luring mystery in human eyes. Through the
dark mahogany stripes of the balustrade, the drawing-room candles flared
and sputtered like little finger-pinches of fluid flame, and the
violin's shuddering voice chased after her, taunting, "Hurry! Hurry! Or
it won't be there!" Beyond the lights and music, and the friendly
creaking stairs, the strange black night opened forth like the scariest
sort of a bottomless pit; but as yet, in all the girl's twenty coltish
years nothing except headache and heart-beat had ever made her feel
perfectly throbbing-positive that she was alive. She could spare the
headache, but she could not spare the heart-beat. Paddling with
muscle-strained shoulder and heaving breast across a November-tortured
lake, or huddling under forbidden pine trees in a rackety August
thunder storm, or floundering on broken snowshoes into the antlered
presence of an astounded moose--Fun and Fear were synonymous to her.
Once on the street, like water to thirst, the cold night air freshened
and vivified her. Over her head the electric lights twinkled giddily
like real stars. On either side of her the huge, hulking houses reared
up like pleasant imitation mountains. Her trailing cloak slipped now and
then from her clutching fingers, but she trudged along toward the corner
with just one simple, supreme sense of pleasurable excitement--somewhere
out of the unfathomed shadows a real, live Adventure was going to rise
up and scare her.
But the man, when he came, did not scare her one hundredth part as much
as she scared him, though he jumped at her from the snuggling fur robe
of a stranded automobile, and snatched at her arm with an almost
bruising intensity.
"Oh, Adele," he cried huskily, "I thought you had failed me again."
The Woodland Girl threw back her somber hood and stood there all blonde
and tousle-haired and astonishing under the electric light. "I'm not
your Adele," she explained breathlessly. "I'm just Chloe Curtis. Adele
sent me out to tell you that she absolutely couldn't--couldn't come.
You yourself would have seen that it was horridly impossible. But you
are to go back to the house now with me--to my uncle's old unused
library and see Adele yourself for as much as fifteen minutes. No
one--oh, I'm sure that no one--could persuade a woman to be brave--on a
street corner; but I think that perhaps if you had a chance to see Adele
all alone, she would be very--extraordinarily brave."
Anger, resentment, confusion, dismay flared like successive explosions
in the man's face, and faded again, leaving his flesh utter ash gray.
"It was plucky of you to come," he muttered grimly, "but I haven't quite
reached the point yet--thank you--where I go sneaking round people's
unused rooms to meet any one!"
"Is it so very different from sneaking round street corners?" said the
Woodland Girl.
The man's head lifted proudly. "I don't go 'sneaking' round street
corners," he answered simply. "All Outdoors _belongs_ to me! But I won't
go secretly to any house that doesn't welcome me."
The Woodland Girl began to stamp her foot. "But the house does welcome
you," she insisted. "It's my visity-house, and you are to come there as
my friend."
In her ardor she turned and faced him squarely under the light, and
winced to see how well worth facing he was--for the husband of a
coward. There was no sleek New York about him, certainly, but rather the
merge of all cities and many countries, a little breath of unusualness,
a touch of mystery, a trifling suggestion, perhaps, of more dusty roads
than smug pavements, twenty-eight or thirty years, surely, of
adventurous youth. Impulsively she put out her hand to him. "Oh, please
come," she faltered. "I--think you are so nice."
With a little laugh that had no amusement in it, nor pleasure, nor
expectation, nor any emotion that the Woodland Girl had ever
experienced, he stood and stared at her with some sudden impulse. "Does
Adele really want me to come?" he asked trenchantly.
"Why yes," insisted the Woodland Girl. "It's life or death for you and
Adele."
Ten minutes later, standing on guard at the edge of the library door,
the Woodland Girl heard, for the first time in her life, the strange,
low, vibrant, mysterious mate-tone of a human voice. If she had burrowed
her head in a dozen pillows, she could not have failed to sense the
amazing wonder of the sound, though the clearer-worded detail of hurried
plans and eager argument and radiant acquiescence passed by her
unobserved. "But I must be perfectly sure that you love me," persisted
the man's voice.
"You and--you only," echoed the woman's passion.
Then suddenly, like a practical joke sprung by a half-witted Fate, the
store room door opened with casual, exploring pleasantness, and the
Journalist and Adele Reitzen's promised husband and big Peter himself
stepped out into the hallway.
Before the surprised greeting in two men's faces the Woodland Girl
retreated step by step, until at last with a quick turn she whirled back
into the dingy, gas-lit library--her chalky face, her staring eyes
proclaiming only too plainly the calamity which she had no time to stuff
into words.
Close behind her followed the three smiling, unsuspicious intruders.
Even then the incident might have passed without gross awkwardness if
the Woodland Girl's uncle and aunt had not suddenly joined the company.
From the angry, outraged flush on the two older faces it was perfectly
evident that these two, at least, had been waylaid by kitchen gossip.
Brian Baird laughed. Like a manly lover goaded and hectored and cajoled
too long into unworthy secrecy, his pulses fairly jumped to meet the
frank, forced issue. But with a quick, desperate appeal Adele Reitzen
silenced the triumphant speech on his lips. "Let me manage it!" she
whispered, so vehemently that the man yielded to her, and stepped back
against the fireplace, and spread his arms with studied, indolent ease
along the mantel, like a rustic cross tortured out of a supple willow
withe. One of his hands played teasingly with a stale spray of Christmas
greens. Nothing but the straining, white-knuckled grip of his other hand
modified the absolute, wilful insolence of his pose.
As for Adele, her face was ghastly.
With crude, uncontrolled venom the Woodland Girl's aunt plunged into the
emergency. "Adele," she cried shrilly, "I think you owe your _fiance_ an
explanation! You promised us faithfully last year that you would never,
never see Mr. Baird again--and now to-night our chauffeur saw you steal
out to the street corner to meet him--like a common shop-girl. And you
dare to bring him back--to my house! What have you to say for yourself?"
For the fraction of a moment Adele Reitzen's superb beauty straightened
up to its full majestic height, and all the love-pride that was in her
white, white flesh flamed gloriously in her face. Then her sleek,
prosperous, arrogant city lover stepped suddenly forward where the
yellow light struck bleakly across his shrewd, small eyes and his thin,
relentless mouth.
"I should be very glad, indeed, to hear what you have to say," he
announced, and his voice was like a nicked knife blade.
Flush by flush by flush the red glory fled from Adele Reitzen's face.
Her throat began to flutter. Her knees crumpled under her. Fear went
over her like a gray fog.
With one despairing hand she reached back to the Woodland Girl. "Oh,
tell them it was you," she whispered hotly. "Oh, tell them it was you."
Her scared face brightened viciously. "It _was_ you--you know! Tell
them--oh, tell them anything--only save me!"
The Woodland Girl's eyes were big with horror. She started to speak, she
started to protest, but before the jumbled words could leave her lips
Adele Reitzen turned to the others and blurted out hysterically:
"Surely I can't be expected to keep even a love-secret under
these--distressing circumstances. _It was Chloe who went out to the
street corner to-night--like a common shop-girl--to meet Brian Baird.
She wore my cloak on purpose to disguise her._"
Like the blaring scream of a discordant trumpet, the treacherous,
flatted truth crashed into the Woodland Girl's startled senses, and the
man in the shape of a sagging willow cross started up and cried out, "My
God!"
For a second the Woodland Girl stood staring into his dreadful, chaotic
face, then she squared her shoulders and turned to meet the wrathful,
contemptuous surprise in her uncle's and aunt's features.
"So it was you," sneered the uncle, "embroiling our decent household in
a common, vulgar intrigue?"
"So it was you," flamed her aunt, "you who have been posing all these
days as an Innocent?"
Frantic with perplexity, muddled with fear, torn by conflicting
chivalries, the Woodland Girl stared back and forth from Adele Reitzen's
agonized plea to the grim, inscrutable gleam in Brian Baird's eyes. As
though every living, moving verb had been ripped out of that night's
story, and all the inflexible nouns were printing themselves slam-bang
one on top of another--Roses, Wine, Music, Silver, Diamonds, Fir-Balsam
telescoped each other in her senses.
"Your father sent you down here," persisted her aunt brutally, "on the
private plea to me that he was planning to be married again--but I can
readily see that perhaps no one would exactly want you."
The Woodland Girl's heart began to pound.
"We--are--waiting," prodded her uncle's icy voice.
Suddenly the Girl's memory quickened. Once, long ago, her father had
said to her: "Little Daughter, if you are ever in fear and danger by sea
or land--or city, which is neither sea nor land--turn always to that
man, and to that man only, whom you would trust in the deep woods. Put
your imagination to work, not your reason. You have no reason!"
Desperately she turned to Peter. His face, robbed utterly of its
affection, was all a-shock with outraged social proprieties, merging the
merest bit unpleasantly into the racy appreciation of a unique
adventure. Panic-stricken, she turned to the Journalist. Already across
the Journalist's wine-flushed face the pleasant, friendly smile was
souring into worldly skepticism and mocking disillusionment.
She shut her eyes. "O Big Woods, help me!" she prayed. "O Cross Storm,
warn me! O Rough Trail, guide me!"
Behind her tightly scrunched lids her worried brain darkened like a
jumbled midnight forest. Jaded, bedraggled, aching with storm and
terror, she saw herself stumbling into the sudden dazzling splurge of a
stranger's camp fire. Was it a man like Peter? Was it the Journalist?
She began to shiver. Then her heart gave a queer, queer jump, and she
opened her eyes stark wide and searched deep into Brian Baird's livid
face. One of his hands still strained at the wooden mantel. The other
still bruised the pungent balsam tip between its restive fingers. His
young hair was too gray about his temples. His shoulders were too tired
with life's pack burdens. His eyes had probably grown more bitter that
night than any woman's lips could ever sweeten again. And yet--
Down from the far-away music room floated the quavering, passionate
violin wail of the boy who had dared to temporize with Fate. Up from the
close-nudging street crashed the confusing slap of hoofs and the mad
whir of wheels racing not so much for the Joy of the Destination as for
the Thrill of the Journey. She gave a little gasping sob, and Brian
Baird stooped forward incredulously, as though from the yellow glare of
his camp fire he had only just that instant sensed the faltering
footfall of a wayfarer in acute distress, and could scarcely distinguish
even yet through the darkness the detailed features of the apparition.
For a second, startled eyes defied startled eyes, and then suddenly, out
of his own meager ration of faith or fortune or immediate goodness, the
man straightened up, and _smiled_--the simple, honest, unquestioning
camp-fire smile--the smile of food and blanket, the smile of welcome,
the smile of shelter, the signal of the gladly-shared crust--and the
Woodland Girl gave a low, wild cry of joy, and ran across the room to
him, and wheeled back against him, close, tight, with her tousled hair
grazing his haggard cheek and her brown hands clutching hard at the
sweep of his arms along the mantel.
"Adele Reitzen is right," she cried out triumphantly. "This is
my--man!"