There was a touch of idealism hidden away somewhere in Martin's
character. A more than usually keen-eyed boy had once called him "the
poet" at school. In order that this dubious nickname should be
strangled at birth, there had been an epoch-making fight. Both lads
came out of it in a more or less unrecognizable condition, but Martin
reestablished his reputation and presently entered Yale free from the
suspicion of being anything but a first-rate sportsman and an
indisputable man.
There Martin had played football with all the desired bullishness. He
had hammered ragtime on the piano like the best ordinary man in the
University. With his father he rode to hounds hell for leather, and he
wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded
as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a
sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on
Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck and Barrie, and only when alone on
vacation that he bathed in the beauty of French cathedrals, sat
thrilled and stirred by the waves of melody of the great composers,
drew up curiously touched and awed at the sight of the places in the
famous cities of Europe that echoed with the footsteps of history.
If the ideality of that boy had been seized upon and developed by a
sympathetic hand, if his lively imagination and passion for the
beautiful had been put through a proper educational course, he might
have used the latent creative power with which nature had endowed him
and taken a high place among artists, writers or composers. As it was,
his machinelike, matter-of-fact training and his own self-conscious
anxiety not to be different from the average good sportsman had made
him conform admirably to type. He was a fine specimen of the eager,
naive, quick-witted, clean-minded young American, free from "side,"
devoid of mannerisms, determined to make the utmost of life and its
possibilities.
It is true that when death seized upon the man who was brother and pal
as well as father to Martin, all the stucco beneath which he had so
carefully hidden his spiritual and imaginative side cracked and broke.
Under the indescribable shock of what seemed to him to be wanton and
meaningless cruelty, the boy gave way to a grief that was angry and
agonized by turns. He had left a fit, high-spirited father to drive to
a golf shop to buy a new mashie, returned to take him out to Sleepy
Hollow for a couple of rounds--and found him stretched out on the floor
of the library, dead. Was it any wonder that he tortured himself with
unanswerable questions, sat for hours in the dark trying with the most
pitiful futility to fathom the riddle of life, or that he wandered
aimlessly about the place, which was stamped with his father's fine and
kindly personality,--like a stick suddenly swept out of the current of
the main stream into a tideless backwater, untouched by the sun? And
when finally, still deaf to the call of spring, his father's message of
courage, "We count it death to falter, not to die," rang out and
straightened him up and set him on the rails of action once again, it
was not quite the same Martin Gray who uttered the silent cry for
companionship that found an answer in Joan's lonely and rebellious
heart. Sorrow had strengthened him. Out of the silent manliness of
grief he went out again on the great main road with a wistful desire to
love and be loved, to find some one with whom to link an arm in an
empty world all crowded with strangers--and there stood Joan.
It was natural that he should believe, under those circumstances, that
he and she did not meet by mere accident, that they had been brought
together by design--all the more natural when he listened to her story
of mental and physical imprisonment and came to see, during their daily
stolen meetings, that he was as necessary to her as she was to him.
Every time he left her and watched her run back to that old house of
old people, it was borne in upon him more definitely that he was
appointed in the cosmic scheme to rescue Joan from her peculiar cage
and help her to try her wings. All about that young fresh, eager
creature whose eyes were always turned so ardently toward the city, his
imagination and superstition built a bower of love.
He had never met a girl in any way like her--one who wanted so much and
would give so little in return for it, who had an eel-like way of
dodging hard-and-fast facts and who had made up her mind with all the
zest and thoughtlessness of youth to mold life, when finally she could
prove how much alive she was, into no other shape than the one which
most appealed to her. She surprised and delighted him with her quick
mental turns and twists, and although she sometimes made him catch his
breath at her astoundingly frank expression of individualism, he told
himself that she was still in the chrysalis stage and could only get a
true and normal hang of things after rubbing shoulders with what she
called life with a capital L.
Two weeks slipped away more quickly than these two young things had
ever known them to go, and the daily meetings, utterly guileless and
free from flirtation, were the best part of the day; but there was a
new note in Joan's laugh as she swung out of the wood and went toward
Martin one afternoon.