NO man could have asked the question more simply. The whole gaunt,
gigantic Rocky Mountain landscape seemed indeed most peculiarly
conducive to simple emotions.
Yet Donas Guthrie's original remark had been purely whimsical and
distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe
against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not prepared the
way for any particularly vital statement.
"Up--to--the--time--he's--thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep,
distinctly masculine voice, "up--to--the--time--he's--thirty, no man has
done the things that he's really wanted to do--but only the things that
happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his
father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and
bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having
reached the grown-up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty, a
man's a fool, I tell you, who doesn't sit down deliberately, and roll
up his sleeves, and square his jaw, and list out, one by one, the things
that _he_ wants in the presumable measure of lifetime that's left
him--and go ahead and get them!"
"Why, surely," said the young woman, without the slightest trace of
surprise. Something in her matter-of-fact acquiescence made Donas
Guthrie smile a trifle shrewdly.
"Oh! So you've got your own list all made out?" he quizzed. Around the
rather tired-looking corners of Esther Davidson's mouth the tiniest
possible flicker of amusement began to show.
"No, not all made out," she answered frankly. "You see, I wasn't
thirty--until yesterday."
Stooping with cheerful unconcern to blow a little fluff of tobacco ash
from his own khaki-colored knees to hers, Guthrie eyed her delightedly
from under his heavy brows.
"Oh, this is working out very neatly and pleasantly," he mused, all
agrin. "Ever since you joined our camping party at Laramie, jumping off
the train as white-faced and out of breath as though you'd been running
to catch up with us all the way from Boston--indeed, ever since you
first wrote me at Morristown, asking full particulars about the whole
expedition and begging us to go to the Sierra Nevadas instead and
blotted 'Sierra' twice and crossed it out once--and then in final
petulance spelled it with three 'r's,' I've been utterly consumed with
curiosity to know just how old you are."
"Thirty years--and one morning," said the young woman--absent-mindedly.
"W-h-e-w!" gasped Guthrie. "But that's a ripe old age! Surely, you've no
time to lose!"
Rummaging through his pockets with mock intensity he thrust into her
hands, at last, a small pad of paper and a pencil.
"Now quick!" he insisted. "Make out your list before it's too late to
profit by it!"
The woman was evidently perfectly willing to comply with every playful
aspect of his mood, but it was equally evident that she did not intend
to be hurried about it. Quite perversely she began to dally with the
pencil.
"But, you see, I don't know exactly just what kind of a list you mean,"
she protested.
"Oh, shucks!" laughed the man. "Here, give me the paper! Now--head it
like this: 'I, Esther Davidson, spinster, _aet._ thirty years and a few
minutes over, do hereby promise and attest that no matter how unwilling
to die I may be when my time comes, I shall, at least, not feel that
life has defrauded me if I have succeeded in achieving and possessing
the following brief list of experiences and substances.' There!" he
finished triumphantly. "Now do you see how easy and business-like it
all is? Just the plainest possible rating of the things you'd like to
have before you're willing to die."
Cautiously Esther Davidson took the paper from his hand and scanned it
with slow-smiling eyes.
"The--things--I'd--like to have--before I'm--willing--to--die," she
mused indolently. Then suddenly into her placid face blazed an
astonishing flame of passion that vanished again as quickly as it came.
"My God!" she said. "The things I've _got_ to have before I'm willing to
die!"
Stretching the little paper taut across her knees, she began to scribble
hasty, impulsive words and phrases, crossing and recrossing, making and
erasing, now frowning fiercely down on the unoffending page, now staring
off narrow-eyed and smilingly speculative into the blue-green spruce
tops.
It was almost ten minutes before she spoke again. Then: "How do you
spell amethyst?" she asked meditatively.
The man gave a groan of palpable disgust. "Oh, I say," he reproached
her. "You're not playing fair! This was to be a really _bona fide_
statement you know."
Without looking up the young woman lifted her hand and gesticulated
across the left side of her mannish, khaki-colored flannel shirt.
"Cross my heart!" she affirmed solemnly. "This is a perfectly
'honest-injun' list!"
Then she tore up everything she had written and began all over again,
astonishingly slowly, astonishingly neatly, on a fresh sheet of paper.
"Of course, at first," she explained painstakingly, "you think there are
just about ten thousand things that you've simply got to have, but when
you really stop to sort them out, and pick and choose a bit, and narrow
them all down to actual essentials; narrow them all down to just the
'Passions of the Soul,' as it were, why, then, there really aren't so
many after all! Only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,"
she counted on her fingers. "At first, for instance," she persisted
frankly, "it seemed to me that I could never, never die happy until I
had possessed a very large--oh, I mean an inordinately large amethyst
brooch that simply wallowed in pearls, but honestly now as a real
treasure-trove, I can see that I'd infinitely rather be able to remember
that once upon a time I'd--stroked a lion's face; just one, long, slow,
soft-furred, yellow stroke from the browny-pink tip of his nose to the
extremest shaggy end of his mane--and he hadn't bitten me!"
"My Heavens!" gasped the man. "Are you crazy? What kind of a list have
you been making out anyway?"
A little acridly she thrust both her list and her hands into the side
pockets of her riding skirt.
"What kind of a list did you think I would make out?" she asked sharply.
"Something all about machinery? And getting a contract for city paving
stones? Or publicly protesting the new football rules? Goodness! Does it
have to be a 'wise' list? Does it have to be a worthy list? Something
that would really look commendable in a church magazine? This was all
your idea, you know! You asked me, didn't you, to write out, just for
fun, the things I'd got to have before I'd be willing to die?"
"Oh, come now," laughed the man. "Please don't get stuffy about it. You
surprised me so about stroking the lion's face that I simply had to
chaff you a little. Truly, I care a great deal about seeing that list.
When you got off the train that day it rattled me a confounded lot to
see that your camping togs were cut out of exactly the same piece of
cloth that mine were. Professor Ellis and his wife and Doctor Andrews
jollied me a good bit about it in fact, but--hang it all--it's beginning
to dawn on me rather cozily, though I admit still embarrassingly, that
maybe your mind and mine are cut out of the same piece of cloth, too.
Please let me see what you've written!"
With a grimace that was half reluctance, half defiance, the young woman
pulled the paper from her pocket, smoothed it out on her knees for an
instant and handed it to him.
"Oh, very well, then," she said. "Help yourself to the only authentic
list of my 'Heart's Desires.'" Then suddenly her whole face brightened
with amusement and she shook a sun-browned finger threateningly at him.
"Now remember," she warned him, "I don't have to justify this list, no
matter how trivial it sounds, no matter how foolish even; it is excuse
enough for it--it is dignity enough for it, that it happens to be so."
"Yes, surely," acknowledged the man.
Either consciously or unconsciously--then--he took off his battered
slouch hat and placed it softly on the seat beside him. The act gave the
very faintest possible suggestion of reverence to the joke. Then, rather
slowly and hesitatingly, after the manner of a man who is not specially
accustomed to reading aloud, he began:
[Illustration: "Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?"]
"Things That I, Esther Davidson, Am Really Obliged to Have Before I'm
Willing to Die: No. 1. A solid summer of horseback riding on a rusty
brown pony among really scary mountains. No. 2. A year's work at Oxford
in Social Economics. No. 3. One single, solitary sunset view of the Bay
of Naples. No. 4. A very, very large oil-painting portrait of a cloud--a
great white, warm, cotton-batting looking, summer Sunday afternoon sort
of a cloud--I mean; the kind that you used to see as a child when all
'chock full' of chicken and ice cream and serene thoughts about Heaven,
you lay stretched out flat on the cool green grass and stared right up
into the face of God, and never even guessed what made you blink so. No.
5. The ability to buy one life-saving surgical operation for some one
who probably wouldn't otherwise have afforded it. No. 6. A perfectly
good dinner. No. 7. A completely happy Christmas. No. 8. A pink sash.
That's all."
With really terrifying gravity, the man put down the finished page and
lifted his searching eyes to the woman's flushing, self-conscious face.
"Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?" he probed in much
perplexity.
"Oh, yes!" nodded the young woman briskly. "Oh, yes, indeed! It's an
obsession in my life. It's a groove in my brain. In the middle of the
night I wake and find myself sitting bolt upright in bed saying it. The
only time I ever took ether I prattled persistently concerning it. When
a Spring sunshine is so marvelous that it makes me feel faint, when the
Vox Humana stop in a church-organ snarls my heart-strings like an actual
hand, when the great galloping, tearing fire-engine horses come
clanging like mad around the street corner, it's the one definite
idea that explodes in my consciousness. It began way back when I was a
tiny six-year-old child at a Maine woods 'camp meeting.' Did you ever
see a really primitive 'camp meeting'? All fir-balsam trees and little
rustic benches and pink calicoes and Grand Army suits and high
cheek-bones and low insteps and--lots of noise? Rather inspiring too,
sometimes, or at least soul excitative. It might do a good deal to any
high-strung six-year-old kiddie. Anyway, I saw the old village drunkard
jump up and wave his arms and wail ingenuously: 'I want to be a
Christian!' And a palsied crone beside me moaned and sobbed 'I want to
be baptized!' And even my timid, gentle mother leaped impetuously to her
feet and announced quite publicly to every one 'I want to be washed in
the Blood of the Lamb!' And all about me I saw frenzied neighbors and
strangers dashing about making these uncontrollable, confidential
proclamations. And suddenly, to my meager, indefinite baby-brain, there
rushed such an exultancy of positive personal conviction that my poor
little face must have been literally transfigured with it, for my father
lifted me high to his tight-coated shoulders and cried out ecstatically:
'A little child shall lead them! Hear! Hear!' And with an emphasis on
the personal pronoun which I hate to remember even at this remote date,
I screamed forth at the top of my lungs: 'I want--a pink sash!'"
"And didn't you get it?" said Donas Guthrie.
The young woman crooked one eyebrow rather comically. "N-o," she said,
"I never got it!"
"But you could get it any time now," argued the man.
Helplessly she threw out the palms of her hands and the unexpected
gesture displayed an amazing slimness and whiteness of wrist.
"Stupid!" she laughed. "What would I do with a pink sash now?"
Ruthlessly her quick eyes traveled down the full length of her scant,
rough skirt to the stubbed toes of her battered brown riding boots.
"Dust on the highway and chalk in the classroom and 'grown-up-ness'
everywhere!" she persisted dully. "That's the real tragedy of growing
up--not that we outgrow our original desires, but that retaining those
desires, we outgrow the ability to find satisfaction in them. People
ought to think of that, you know, when they thwart a child's ten-cent
passion for a tin trumpet. Fifty years later, when that child is a bank
president, it may drive him almost crazy to have a toy-shop with a whole
window-full of tin trumpets come and cuddle right next door to his
bank--and nothing that the man can do with them!"
Like a little gray veil the tired look fell again over her face. The man
saw it and shuddered.
"Psychology is my subject at Varndon College, you know," she continued
listlessly, "and so I suppose I'm rather specially interested in
freakish mental things. Anyway--pink sashes or Noah's arks or enough
sugar in your cocoa--I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its
ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him
to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding
proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it."
Reminiscently, her narrowing eyes turned back their inner vision to the
far-away grotesque incident of the camp meeting. "It isn't as though a
child asked for a thing the very first time that he thought of it," she
protested a trifle pathetically. "An idea has been sown and has grown
and germinated in his mind a pretty long time before he gets up his
courage to speak to anybody about it. Oh, I tell you, sir, the time to
grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the
one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed
exactly to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow
old, or die young, together. But after that day--!
"Why, even with grown people," she added hastily. "Did you ever know a
marriage to turn out to be specially successful where the man had
courted a reluctant woman for years and years before she finally yielded
to him? It's perfectly astonishing how soon a wife like that is forced
to mourn: 'Why did he court me so long and so furiously if he really
cared as little as this? I'm just exactly the same person that I was in
the beginning!'--Yes, that's precisely the trouble. In the long time
that she has kept her man waiting, she has remained just exactly the
same small object that she was in the beginning, but the man's hunger
for her has materialized and spiritualized and idealized a thousandfold
beyond her paltry capacity to satisfy it."
"That's a funny way to look at it," mused Donas Guthrie.
"Is it?" said the young woman, a trifle petulantly. "It doesn't seem
funny to me!"
Then to Guthrie's infinite astonishment and embarrassment the tears
welled up suddenly into her eyes and she turned her head abruptly away
and began to beat a nervous tattoo with one hand on the flimsy piazza
railing.
In the moment's awkward silence that ensued, the little inn's clattery
kitchen wafted up its pleasant, odorous, noon-day suggestion of coffee
and bacon.
"W-h-e-w!" gloated Guthrie desperately, "but that smells good!"
"It doesn't smell good to me," said the young woman tartly.
With a definite thud the tilting leg of Guthrie's chair came whacking
down on the piazza floor.
"Why, you inconsistent little gourmand!" he exclaimed. "Then why did you
give 'one perfectly good dinner' a place on your list of necessities?"
"I don't know," whispered the young woman, a trifle tremulously. Then
abruptly she burst out laughing, and the face that she turned to Guthrie
again was all deliciously mussed up like a child's, with tears and
smiles and breeze-blown wisps of hair.
"That dinner item was just another silly thing," she explained half
bashfully, half defiantly. "It's only that although I practically never
eat much of anything on ordinary occasions, whenever I get into any kind
of danger, whenever the train runs off the track, or the steamer
threatens to sink, or my car gets stuck in the subway, I'm seized with
the most terrific gnawing hunger--as though--as though--" Furiously the
red flushed into her face again. "Well--eternity sounds so l-long," she
stammered, "and I have a perfect horror, somehow--of going to Heaven--on
an empty stomach."
In mutual appreciation of a suddenly relaxed tension, the man's laughter
and the woman's rang out together throughout the dooryard and startled
a grazing pony into a whimpering whinny of sympathy.
"I knew you'd think my list was funny," protested the young woman. "I
knew perfectly well that every single individual item on it would
astonish you."
Meditatively Donas Guthrie refilled his pipe and evidently illuminated
both the tobacco and the situation with the same match.
"It isn't the things that are on your list that astonish me," he
remarked puffingly. "It's the things that aren't on it that have given
me the bit of a jolt."
"Such as what?" frowned the young woman, sliding jerkily out to the edge
of her chair.
"Why, I'd always supposed that women were inherently domestic," growled
Guthrie. "I'd always somehow supposed that Love and Home would figure
pretty largely on any woman's 'List of Necessities.' But you! For
Heaven's sake, haven't you ever even thought of man in any specific
relation to your own life?"
"No, except in so far as he might retard my accomplishment of the things
on my list," she answered frankly. Out of the gray film of pipe-smoke,
her small face loomed utterly serene, utterly honest, utterly devoid of
coquetry or self-consciousness.
"Any man would be apt to 'retard' your desire to stroke a lion's face,"
said Guthrie grimly. "But then," with a flicker of humor, "but then I
see you've omitted that item from your revised list. Your only thought
about man then," he continued slowly, "is his probable tendency to
interfere with your getting the things out of life that you most want."
"Yes."
"Oh, this is quite a novel idea to me," said Guthrie, all a-smile again.
"You mean then--if I judge your premises correctly--you mean then that
if on the contrary you found a man who would really facilitate the
accomplishment of your 'heart's desires,' you'd be willing to think a
good deal about him?"
"Oh, yes!" said the young woman.
"You mean then," persisted Guthrie, "you mean then, just for the sake of
the argument, that if I, for instance, could guarantee for you every
single little item on this list, you'd be willing to marry even me?"
"Yes."
Altogether unexpectedly Guthrie burst out laughing.
Instantly a little alarmed look quickened in the young woman's sleepy
eyes. "Does it seem cold-blooded to you?" she asked anxiously.
"No, not exactly 'cold' blooded, but certainly a little cooler blooded
than any man would have dared to hope for," smiled Guthrie.
The frowning perplexity deepened in the young woman's face. "You surely
don't misunderstand me?" she pleaded. "You don't think I'm mercenary or
anything horrid like that? Suppose I do make a man's aptitude for
gratifying my eight particular whims the supreme test of his marital
attractiveness for me--it's not, you must understand, by the sign of his
material ability in the matter that I should recognize the Man Who Was
Made for Me--but by the sign of his spiritual willingness."
"O--h!" said Guthrie very leisurely. Then, with a trifle more vigor, he
picked up the small list again and scanned it carefully.
"It--wouldn't--be--such--a hard--list to--fulfil!" he resumed presently.
"'A summer in the mountains?' You're having that now. 'Oxford?' 'Glimpse
of Naples?' 'Cloud Picture?' 'Surgical Operation?' 'Pink Sash?' 'Good
Dinner?' 'Christmas?' Why there's really nothing here that I couldn't
provide for you, myself, if you'd only give me time."
With mischievous unconcern he smiled at the young woman. With equally
mischievous unconcern the young woman smiled back at him.
"What an extraordinary conversation we've had this morning," she said.
As though quite exhausted by the uniqueness of it, she slid a little
further down into her seat and turned her cheek against the firm support
of the chair-back.
"What an extraordinary understanding it has brought us to!" exclaimed
the man, scanning her closely.
"I don't see anything particularly--understandy about it," denied the
young woman wearily.
It was then that Donas Guthrie asked his simple question, boring his
khaki-colored elbows into his khaki-colored knees.
"Little Psychology Teacher," he said very gently, "Little Psychology
Teacher, Dr. Andrews says that you've got typhoid fever. He's feared it
now for some time, and you know it's against his orders--your being up
to-day. So as long as I've proved myself here and now, by your own test,
the Man-Whom-You-Were-Looking-For, I suggest that you and I be--married
this afternoon--before that itinerant shiny-shouldered preacher out in
the corral escapes us altogether--and then we'll send the rest of the
party on about their business, and you and Dr. Andrews and Hanlon's Mary
and I will camp right down here where we are--and scrap the old typhoid
fever to its finish. Will you, Little Psychology Teacher?"
Lifting her white hands to her throbbing temples the young woman turned
her astonished face jerkily toward him.
"What--did--you--say?" she gasped.
"I said: 'Will you marry me this afternoon?'" repeated Guthrie.
Bruskly she pushed that part of the phrase aside. "What did you really
say?" she insisted. "What did Dr. Andrews say?"
"Dr. Andrews says that you've got typhoid fever," repeated Guthrie.
Inertly she blinked her big brown eyes for an instant. Then suddenly her
hands went groping out to the arms of her chair. Her face was
horror-stricken. "Why didn't he tell me, himself?"
"Because I asked him to let me tell you," said Guthrie quietly.
"When did he tell you?" she persisted.
"Just before I came up on the piazza," said Guthrie.
"How did he tell you?" she demanded.
"How did he tell me?" mused Guthrie wretchedly. After all, underneath
his occasional whimsicality he was distinctly literal-minded. "How did
he tell me? Why I saw them all powwowing together in the corral, and
Andrews looked up sort of queer and said: 'Say, Guthrie, that little
Psychology friend of yours has got typhoid fever. What in thunder are we
going to do?"
The strained lines around Esther Davidson's mouth relaxed for a second.
"Well, what in thunder am I going to do?" she joked heroically. But the
effort at flippancy was evidently quite too much for her. In another
instant her head pitched forward against the piazza railing and her
voice, when she spoke again, was almost indistinguishable.
"And you knew all this an hour ago!" she accused him incoherently. "Knew
my predicament--knew my inevitable weakness and fear and
mortification--knew me a stranger among strangers. And yet you came up
here to jolly me inconsequently--about a million foolish things!"
"It was because at the end of the hour I hoped to be something to you
that would quite prevent your feeling a 'stranger among strangers,'"
said Guthrie very quietly. "I have asked you to marry me this afternoon,
you must remember."
The young woman's lip curled tremulously. "You astonish me!" she
scoffed. "I had always understood that men did not marry very easily.
Quick to love, slow to marry, is supposed to be your most striking
characteristic--and here are you asking marriage of me, and you haven't
even loved me yet!"
"You women do not seem to marry any too easily," smiled Guthrie gazing
nervously from his open watch to the furthest corner of the corral,
where the preacher's raw-boned pony, nose in air, was stubbornly
refusing to take his bit.
"Indeed we do marry--perfectly easily--when we once love," retorted the
woman contentiously! "It's the love part of it that we are reluctant
about!"
"But I haven't asked you to love me," protested the man with much
patience. "I merely asked you to marry me."
The woman's jaw dropped. "Out of sympathy for my emergency, out of
mistaken chivalry, you're asking me to marry you, and not even
pretending that you love me?" she asked in astonishment.
"I haven't had time to love you yet. I've only known you such a little
while," said the man quite simply. Almost sternly he rose and began to
pace up and down the narrow confines of the little piazza. "All I know
is," he asserted, "that the very first moment you stepped off the train
at Laramie, I knew you were the woman whom I was--going to
love--sometime."
Very softly he slid back into the rustic seat he had just vacated, and
taking the woman's small clenched hands in his began to smooth out her
fingers like poor crumpled ribbons.
"Now, Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I want you to listen very,
very carefully to everything I say. Do you like me all right?"
"Y--e--s."
"Better than you like Andrews or Ellis or even the old Judge?"
"Oh, yes!"
"Ever since we all started out together on the Trail you've just sort of
naturally fallen to my lot, haven't you? Whenever you needed your pony's
girth tightened, or whenever you wanted a drink of water, or whenever
the big canyons scared you, or whenever the camp fire smoked you, you've
just sort of naturally turned to me, haven't you? And it would be fair
enough, wouldn't it, to say that at least I've never made any situation
worse for you? So that if anything ugly or awkward were going to
happen--perhaps you really would rather have me around than any one
else?"
"Yes--surely."
"Maybe even, when we've been watching Ellis and his Missis riding ahead,
all hand in hand and smile in smile, you've wondered a bit, woman-like,
how it would seem, for instance, to be riding along hand in hand and
smile in smile with me?"
"P-o-s-s-i-b-l-y."
"Never had any special curiosity about how it would seem to go hand and
hand with--Andrews?"
"Foolish!"
"Hooray!" cried Guthrie. "That's all that I really needed to know! Oh,
don't feel bashful about it. It surely is an absolutely impersonal
compliment on your part. It isn't even you that I'm under obligations to
for the kindness, but Nature with a great big capital 'N.' Somehow I
always have had an idea that you women instinctively do divide all
mankind into three classes: first, Those Whom You Couldn't Possibly
Love; second, Those Whom You Could Possibly Love, and third, the One Man
of the World Whom You Actually Do Love. And unless this mysterious
Nature with a capital 'N' has already qualified a man for the second
class, God himself can't promote that man into the third class. So it
seems to me that every fellow could save himself an awful lot of
misunderstanding and wasted time if he'd do just what I've done--make a
distinctly preliminary proposal to his lady; not 'Do you love me?' which
might take her fifteen years to decide, but: 'Could you love me?' which
any woman can tell the first time she sees you. And if she can't
possibly love you, that settles everything neatly then and there, but if
she can possibly, why, with Nature once on his side, a man's a craven
who can't put up a mighty good scrap for his coveted prize. Doesn't this
all make sense to you?"
Cannily the young woman lifted her eyes to his and fathomed him mutely
for an instant. Then:
"Perfectly good 'sense' but no feeling," she answered dully.
"It's only 'sense' that I'm trying to make," acknowledged Guthrie. "Now
look here, you Little Teacher Person, I'm going to talk to you just as
bluntly as I would to another fellow. You are in a hole--the deuce of a
hole! You have got typhoid fever, and it may run ten days and it may run
ten weeks! And you are two thousand miles from home--among strangers!
And no matter how glad I personally may be that you did push on and join
us, sick or well, from every practical standpoint, of course, it surely
was heedless and ill-considered of you to start off in poor health on a
trip like this and run the risk of forcing perfectly unconcerned
strangers to pay for it all. Personally, you seem so much to belong to
me already that it gives me goose-flesh to think of your having to put
yourself under obligations to any purely conscientious person. Mrs.
Ellis, of course, will insist, out of common humanity, upon giving up
her trip and staying behind with you, but Mrs. Ellis, Little Teacher, is
on her honeymoon, and Ellis couldn't stay behind--it's his party--he'd
have to go on with his people--and you'd never be able to compensate
anybody for a broken honeymoon, and the Judge's youngster couldn't nurse
a sick kitten, and the two women teachers from New York have been
planning seven years for this trip, they told me, and we couldn't
decently take it away from them. But you and I, Little Psychology Lady,
are not strangers to each other. Hanlon's Mary here at the ranch house,
rough as she is, has at least the serving hands of a woman, and Andrews
belongs naturally to the tribe which is consecrated to inconveniences,
and both can be compensated accordingly. And I would have married you,
anyway, before another year was out! Yes, I would!"
Apparently ignoring everything that he had said, she turned her face
scowlingly toward the sound of hammering that issued suddenly through
the piazza door.
"Oh, Glory!" she complained. "Are they making my coffin already?"
With a little laugh, Guthrie relinquished her limp fingers, and jumping
up, took another swift turn along the piazza, stopping only to bang the
door shut again. When he faced her once more the twinkle was all gone
from his eyes.
"You're quite right, what you said about men," he resumed with desperate
seriousness. "We are a heap sight quicker in our susceptibilities than
in our mentalities! Therefore, no sane man ever does marry till his
brain has caught up with his emotions! But sometimes, you know,
something happens that hustles a man's brain along a bit, and this time
my brain seems fairly to have jumped to its destination and clean-beaten
even the emotions in the race. In cool, positive judgment I tell you I
want to marry you this afternoon."
"You've confessed yourself, haven't you, that you've no severer ideal
for marriage than that a man should be generous enough to give your
personality, no matter how capricious, a chance to breathe? Haven't I
qualified sufficiently as that amiable man? More than that, I'm free to
love you; I'm certainly keen to serve you; I'm reasonably well able to
provide for you, and you naturally have a right to know that I've led a
decent life. It's ten good years now since I was thirty and first found
nerve enough to break away from the stifling business life I hated and
get out into the open, where there's surely less money but infinitely
more air. And in ten years I've certainly found considerable chance to
fulfil a few of the items in my own little 'List of Necessities.' I've
seen Asia and I've seen Africa, and I've written the book I've always
wanted to write on North American mountain structures.
"But there's a lot more that I crave to do. Maybe I've got a bit of a
'capricious personality' myself! Maybe I also have been hunting for the
mate who would give my personality a chance to breathe. Certainly I've
never wanted any home yet, except when the right time came, the arms of
the right woman. And I guess you must be she, because you're the first
woman I've ever seen whom I'd trust to help me just as hard to play my
chosen games as I'd help her to play hers! I tell you--I want--very
much--to marry you this afternoon."
"Why do you dally with me so? Isn't it your own argument that there's
only just one day in the love-life of a man and woman when the question
and the answer mate exactly, and the books are balanced perfectly even
for the new start together? Demand and supply, debit and credit, hunger
and food? You, wild for help, and I wild to help you! What difference
does it make what you call it? Isn't this our day?"
"For a man who's usually as silent as you are, don't you think you're
talking a good deal, considering how sick you said I was?" asked the
young woman, not unmirthfully.
Guthrie's square jaws snapped together like a trap. "I was merely trying
to detain you," he mumbled, "until Hanlon had finished knocking the
windows out of your room. We're going to give you all the air you can
breathe, anyway."
A little sullenly he started for the stairs. Then just at the door he
turned unexpectedly and his face was all smiles again.
"Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I have made you a formal,
definite offer of marriage. And in just about ten minutes from now I am
coming back for my answer."
When he did return a trifle sooner than he had intended, he met her in
the narrow upper hallway, with hands outstretched, groping her way
unsteadily toward her room. As though her equilibrium was altogether
disturbed by his sudden advent, she reeled back against the wall.
"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I'm feeling pretty wobbly! Mr. Donas
Guthrie," she said, "I guess I'm pretty sick."
"It's a cruel long way down the hall," suggested Guthrie. "Wouldn't you
like me to carry you?"
"Yes--I--would," sighed the Little Psychology Teacher.
Even to Guthrie's apprehensive mind, her weight proved most
astonishingly light. The small head drooping limply back from the
slender neck seemed actually the only heavy thing about her, yet there
were apparently only two ideas in that head.
"I'm afraid of Hanlon's Mary, and I don't like Dr.
Andrews--very--specially--much," she kept repeating aimlessly. Then
halfway to her room her body stiffened suddenly.
"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she asked. "Do you think I'm probably going to
die?"
"N-a-w!" said Guthrie, his nose fairly crinkling with positiveness.
"But they don't give you much of anything to eat in typhoid, do they?"
she persisted hectically.
"I suppose not," acknowledged Guthrie.
With disconcerting unexpectedness she began to cry--a soft, low,
whimpery cry like a sleepy child's.
"If any day should come when--they think--that I am going to die," she
moaned, "who will there be to see that I do get--something awfully good
to eat?"
"I'll see to it," said Guthrie, "if you'll only put me in authority."
As though altogether indifferent to anything that he might say, her
tension relaxed again and without further parleying she let Guthrie
carry her across the threshold of her room and set her down cautiously
in the creaky rocking chair. The eyes that lifted to his were as vague
and turbid as brown velvet.
"There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to
hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm
and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?"
brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I
feel sort of confused--but it was something, I remember, that I was
going to argue with you about."
"It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie.
"Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment
she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her
temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down
into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of
his coat.
"Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd
better arrange pretty quickly--'cause I think--I'm--going--out."
This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews
stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a
piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium
plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse
which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and
three or four stale, tattered magazines--and typhoid fever.
It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable
companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from
day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.
The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry
colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward
the west--a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quantity of a
woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn
bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of God were to be
fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than
Death.
So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into
apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful
situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the
infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips.
"Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and
reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there
aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's
Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a
baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able
to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk
would do for a typhoid patient! And hang--"
But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the
expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting,
retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant.
So, with the brain of a doctor and the heart of a lover, the two men
worked and watched and waited through the tortuous autumn days and
nights, blind to the young dawn stealing out like a luminous mist from
the night-smothered mountains; deaf to the flutter of sun-dried leaves
in the radiant noon-time; dull to the fruit-scented fragrance of the
early twilight, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing, except
the flicker of a pulse or the rise of a temperature.
And then at last there came a harsh, wintry feeling day, when Andrews,
stepping out into the hall, called Guthrie softly to him and said, still
smiling:
"Guthrie, old man, I don't think we're going to win this game!"
"W-h-a-t?" gasped Guthrie.
With his mouth still curling amiably around his words, Andrews repeated
the phrase. "I said, I don't think we're going to win this game. No,
nothing new's happened. She's simply burning out. Can't you understand?
I mean she's probably--going to die!"
Out of the jumble of words that hurtled through Guthrie's mind only four
slipped his lips.
"But--she's--my--wife!" he protested.
"Other men's wives have died before this," said Andrews still smiling.
"Man," cried Guthrie, "if you smile again, I'll break your head!"
With his tears running down like rain into the broadening trough of his
smile, Andrews kept right on smiling. "You needn't be so cross about
it," he said. "You're not the only one who likes her! I wanted her
myself! You're nothing but a tramp on the face of the earth--and I could
have given her the snuggest home in Yonkers!"
With their arms across each other's shoulders they went back into the
sick room.
Rousing from her lethargy, the young woman opened her eyes upon them
with the first understanding that she had shown for some days.
Inquisitively she stared from Guthrie's somber eyes to Andrews'
distorted cheerfulness.
Taking instant advantage of her unwonted rationality, Andrews blurted
out the question that was uppermost in his professional responsibility.
"Don't you think, maybe, your people ought to know about your being
sick?" he said. "Now, if you could give us any addresses."
For a second it really seemed as though the question would merely
safely ignite her common sense.
"Why yes, of course," she acquiesced. "My brother."
Then suddenly, without any warning, her most dangerous imagination
caught fire.
"You mean," she faltered, "that--I--am--not--going to get well?"
Before either man was quick enough to contradict her, the shock had done
its work. Piteously she turned her face to the pillow.
"Never--never--to--go--to--Oxford?" she whispered in mournful
astonishment. "Never--even--to--see my--Bay of Naples?--Never to--have
a--a--perfectly happy Christmas?" A little petulantly then her brain
began to clog. "I think I--might at least have had--the pink sash!" she
complained. Then, equally suddenly her strength rallied for an instant
and the eyes that she lifted to Guthrie's were filled with a desperate
effort at raillery. "Bring on your--anchovies and caviar," she reminded
him, "and the stuffed green peppers--and remember I don't like my fillet
too well done--and--"
Five minutes later in the hallway Andrews caught Guthrie just as he was
chasing downstairs after Hanlon.
"What are you going to do?" he asked curiously.
"I am going to send Hanlon out to the telegraph station," said Guthrie.
"I'm going to wire to Denver for a pink sash!"
"What she was raving about?" quizzed Andrews. "Are you raving too?"
"It's the only blamed thing in the whole world that she's asked for that
I can get her," said Guthrie.
"It'll take five days," growled Andrews.
"I know it!"
"It won't do her any good."
"I can't help that!"
"She'll--be gone before it gets here."
"You can't help that!"
But she wasn't "gone," at all before it came. All her vitalities
charred, to be sure, like a fire-swept woodland, but still tenacious of
life, still fighting for reorganization, a little less feverish, a
little stronger-pulsed, she opened her eyes in a puzzled, sad sort of
little smile when Guthrie shook the great, broad, shimmering gauze-like
ribbon ticklingly down across her wasted hands, and then apparently
drowsed off to sleep again. But when both men came back to the room a
few moments later, almost half the pink sash was cuddled under her
cheek. And Hanlon's Mary came and peered through the doorway, with the
whining baby still in her arms, and reaching out and fretting a piece
of pink fringe between her hardy fingers, sniffed mightily.
"And you sent my man all the way to the wire," she asked, "and grubbed
him three whole days waitin' round, just for that?"
"Yes, sure," said Guthrie.
"G-a-w-d!" said Hanlon's Mary.
And, the next week the patient was even better, and the next week,
better still. Then, one morning after days and days of seemingly
interminable silence and stupor, she opened her eyes perfectly wide and
asked Guthrie abruptly:
"Whom did I marry? You or Dr. Andrews?"
And Guthrie in a sudden perversity of shock and embarrassment lied
grimly:
"Dr. Andrews!"
"I didn't either!--it was you!" came the immediate, not too strong, but
distinctly temperish response.
Something in the new vitality of the tone made Guthrie stop whatever he
was doing and eye her suspiciously.
"How long have you been conscious like this?" he queried in surprise.
The faintest perceptible flicker of mischief crossed her haggard face.
"Three--days," she acknowledged.
"Then why--?" began Guthrie.
"Because I--didn't know--just what to call you," she faltered.
After that no power on earth apparently could induce any further speech
from her for another three days. Solemn and big-eyed and totally
unfathomable, she lay watching Guthrie's every gesture, every movement.
From the door to the chair, from the chair to the window, from the
window back to the chair, she lay estimating him altogether
disconcertingly. Across the hand that steadied her drinking glass, she
studied the poise of his lean, firm wrist. Out from the shadow-mystery
of her heavy lashes, she questioned the ultimate value of each frown or
smile.
And then, suddenly--just as abruptly as the first time she had spoken:
"What day is it?" she asked.
"It's Christmas," said Guthrie softly.
"O-h!--O-h!--O-h!" she exclaimed, very slowly. Then with increasing
interest and wonder, "Is there snow on the ground?" she whispered.
"No," said Guthrie.
"Is it full moon to-night?" she questioned.
"No," said Guthrie.
"Is there any small, freckle-faced, alto-voiced choir boy in the house,
trotting around humming funny little tail-ends of anthems and carols,
while he's buckling up his skates?" she stammered.
"No," said Guthrie.
"Are there any old, white-haired loving people cuddled in the chimney
corner?" she persisted.
"No," said Guthrie.
"Isn't there--any Christmas tree?"
"No."
"Aren't there even any presents?"
"No."
"Oh!" she smiled. "Isn't it funny!"
"What's funny?" asked Guthrie perplexedly.
The eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of a strange, wistful
sort of astonishment. "Why, it's funny," she faltered, "it's funny--that
without--any of these things--that I thought were so necessary to
it--I've found my 'perfectly happy Christmas.'"
Then, almost bashfully, her wisp-like fingers went straying out toward
the soft silken folds of the precious pink sash which she kept always
close to her pillow.
"If--you--don't--mind," she said, "I think I'll cut my sash in two and
give half of it to Hanlon's Mary to make a dress for her baby."
The medicine spoon dropped rather clatteringly out of Guthrie's hand.
"But I sent all the way to Denver for it," he protested.
"Oh, yes, I know all about that," she acknowledged. "But--what--can--a
great big girl--like me--do with a--pink sash?"
"But you said you wanted it!" cried Guthrie. "Why, it took a man and a
pony and a telegraph station five entire days to get it, and they had to
flag the express train specially for it--and--and--"
A little wearily she closed her eyes and then opened them again
blinkingly.
"I'm pretty tired, now," she said, "so I don't want to talk about
it--but don't you--understand? I've revised my whole list of
necessities. Out of the wide--wide--world--I find that I don't really
want anything--except--just--you!"