MASON TAKES A VACATION
As Mason walked away from the lake that terrible day it seemed as if he
had ceased to drift. The spirit of that grim helmsman appeared to have
entered into him. Life was short and pleasures few. For fifteen years he
had planned important things to do, but had never done them--feeling all
the time the power to write latent within him, yet lacking stimulus.
From the very first this girl had roused him unaccountably. Her
sympathy, her imaginative faculty as well as her beauty, had come to
seem the qualities which he most needed.
Could he have gone to his own fireside at once, the determining letter
would have been written that night, but the routine of the office, the
chaff of his companions, took away his heroic mood, and when he entered
a car at twelve o'clock he slouched in his seat like a tired man, and
the muscles of his face fell slack and he looked like a hopeless man.
After Rose went home he seemed to Sanborn to be more impassible than
ever. As for Mason himself, it seemed as if some saving incentive had
gone out of his life--some redeeming grace. He had grown into the habit
of dropping in at Isabel's once a week, and Isabel had taken care that
Rose should be often there on the same evening; and so without giving
much thought to it he had come to accept these evenings as the
compensating pleasures of his sombre life.
It was such a delight to come up out of the vicious pitiless grind of
his newspaper day and sit there before the fire, with the face of a
radiant girl to smile upon him. Her voice, with its curiously
penetrating yet musical quality, stirred him to new thoughts, and often
he went home at ten or eleven and wrote with a feeling of exultant power
upon his book. After she went home he wrote no more; he smoked and
pondered. When he called upon Isabel and Sanborn he continued to smoke
and to ponder.
He had not abandoned his allegory in talking with Sanborn, and Sanborn
and Isabel together could not get at his real feeling for Rose.
Sanborn asked one day plumply:
"Mason, why don't you marry the coolly girl, and begin to live?"
"It would be taking a mean advantage of her. She's going to be famous
one of these days, and then I should be in the way."
"Nonsense!"
"Besides, she probably would not marry me; and if she would, I don't
think I could keep up the pose."
"What pose?"
"Of husband."
"Is that a pose?" Sanborn smiled.
"It would be for me," Mason said, rather shortly. He was thinking once
more of the letter he had promised to write to Rose, but which he had
never found himself capable of finishing.
He put it in his pocket when he went up in July to spend a week at the
Herrick cottage at Oconomowoc. Isabel and Sanborn were married just
before leaving the city.
Sanborn said he had the judge come in to give him legal power to compel
Isabel to do his cooking for him, and Isabel replied that her main
reason was to secure a legal claim on Sanborn's practice.
The wedding had been very quiet. Society reporters (who did not see it)
called it "an unique affair." But Mason, who did see it, said it was a
very simple process, so simple it seemed one ought to be able to go
through it oneself. To which Sanborn replied: "Quite right. Try it!"
They had a little cottage on the bank of the lake, and Sanborn came up
on Saturdays with the rest of the madly busy men who rest over Sunday
and over-work the rest of the week. Mason had been with them a week,
and, though he gave no sign, he was nearing a crisis in his life. He had
gone to the point of finishing his letter to Rose--it was lying at that
moment in his valise waiting to be posted--but it was a long way from
being over with. It was a tremendous moment for him. As he approached
the deciding moment the deed grew improbable, impossible. It was a very
beautiful life there on the lake, with nothing to do but smoke and
dream, but one evening he had the impulse to ask Isabel's advice, and
after dinner he courteously invited her to sail with him.
There was some joking by Sanborn about the impropriety of such a thing
on Isabel's part, and many offers to man the boat, which, Mason said,
sprang from jealousy. "I consider I am doing you people a kindness in
not letting you bore each other into black hatred." It ended in the two
friends drifting away over the lake, while Sanborn called after them
threats of war if they were not at the wharf at nine--sharp!
They talked commonplaces for a time, while the sky flushed and faded and
the lake gradually cleared of its fisher boats. Slowly the colors grew
tender and a subtle, impalpable mist rose from the water, through which
the boat drifted before an imperceptible breeze.
The two sailors lay at ease, Mason at the rudder. The sail stood up
light and airy and soundless as a butterfly's wing. It pointed at the
sparse stars as if with warning finger.
The hour and the place were favorable to confidences. As the dusk
deepened, a boat-load of young people put off into the lake, singing
some wailing sweet song. They were far enough away to be unobtrusively
impersonal. A plover was faintly calling from the sedgy shore on the
other side.
"One should be forever young," said Mason broodingly.
Isabel said: "Once I heard a cow low, and a robin laugh, while a cricket
chirped in the grass. Why should they have moved me so?"
Mason mused a moment. "The cow was maternity pleading for its suckling;
the robin's laugh suggested a thousand springtimes, and the cricket
prophesied the coming of frost and age. Love and loss are in the wail of
yonder song, the loneliness of age in yonder piping bird, and the
infinite and all-absorbing menstruum of death in the growing dusk."
"And the light of man's optimism in the piercing out of the stars."
"It may be so," he replied uncertainly.
They drifted on in silence. There was a faint ripple at the prow and
that was all. At last Mason roused himself to say his word.
"All these intangible essences and powers are no apparent reason why I
should do so foolish a thing--but they have influenced me. Today I wrote
to our coolly girl--I hope to say _my_ coolly girl."
Isabel caught her breath:
"Warren, did you? I'm very glad. If I could reach you I'd shake your
hand."
"I don't rejoice. This thing which boys and girls find easy I find each
year more difficult, quite equal to the revolution of the earth--perhaps
the girl will save me from myself."
"She'll save you _for_ yourself, and you'll be happy."
"It is impossible to say," he said sombrely. "I have warned her fairly.
Once I should not have warned the woman of my choice. Am I gaining in
humanity or losing? Please lower your head, I am going to tack."
The boat swung about like a sleeping gull, and the sail slowly filled,
and the ripple at the prow began again.
After a little Mason went on in a calm, even voice:
"The world to me is not well governed and I hesitate about marriage, for
it has the effect, in most cases, of perpetuating the human species,
which is not as yet a noble business. I am torn by two minds. I don't
appear to be torn by even one mind, but I am. I am convinced that Rose
has imagination, which is in my eyes the chief thing in a wife. It
enables her to idealize me"--there was a touch of his usual humor in
that--"and fills me with alleged desire to possess her, but it is sad
business for her, Isabel. When I think of her I am of the stature of a
thief, crouching for concealment."
The two in the boat were no longer young. They had never been lovers,
but they seemed to understand each other like man and wife.
"I am old in knowledge of the world--my life has ground away any charm I
might have once possessed. For her sake I hope she will refuse."
She perceived he was at the end of his confidence, and she began
speaking. "I promised you a story once," she began, "and I'm going to
tell it now, and then we'll return to Rose."
She spoke in a low voice, with a little catching of the breath peculiar
to her when deeply moved. It made her voice pulse out like the flow of
heavy wine. She faced him in the shadow, but he knew she was not looking
at him at all. Just how she began he didn't quite hear--perhaps she was
a little incoherent.
"O those days when I was seventeen!" she went on. "Everything was
magical. Every moonlit night thrilled me with its possibilities. I
remember how the boys used to serenade me, and then--I was a mediaeval
maiden at my barred window, and they were disguised knights seeking me
in strange lands by their songs.
"You know what I mean. I tingled with the immense joy of it! They sang
there in the moonlight, and I tip-toed to the window and peeped out and
listened and listened with pictures and pictures tumbling in and out of
my head.
"Of course it was only the inherited feminine rising up in me, as you
would say--but it was beautiful. It just glorified that village street,
making it the narrow way in a Spanish city."
There was silence again. Mason softly said: "Bend your head once more."
When the boat swung around and the faint moon and the lights of the town
shifted, Isabel went on.
"One of the boys who came on those midnight serenadings became my
hero--remember, I was only seventeen and he was twenty! We used to meet
on the street--and oh! how it shook me. My heart fluttered so I could
not speak, and at first I had to run past him. After a time I got
composed enough to speak to him"--
Her voice choked with remembered passion, but after a little pause she
went on:
"All this, I know as well as you, is absurd"--
"It is very beautiful," he said. "Go on!"
"He was tall and straight, I remember, with brown hair. He was a workman
of some kind. I know he used to show me his powerful hands and say he
had tried to get the grime from them. They were splendid, heroic hands
to me. I would have kissed them if I dared. It was all incredible folly,
but I thought I was loving beneath my station, for I was a little
grandee in the town. It pleased me to think I was stooping--defying the
laws of my house. He never tried to see me at home--he was good and
clean--I can see that now, for I remember just how his frank, clear eyes
looked at me. He didn't talk much, he seemed content to just look at
me."
"Well, that went on for weeks. He used to follow me to church, as the
boys do in country towns, but I used to go to different places just to
see if he would find out and be there to meet me at the door. He never
offered to speak to me or take my arm, but he stood to see me go by. Do
you know, if I go into a country church today, that scent of wilted
flowers and linen and mingled perfumes almost makes me weep?"
"I understand."
Her voice was lower when she resumed.
"Well, then the dreadful, the incredible happened. He did not meet me
any more, and just when I was wild with rage and humiliation came the
news of his illness--and then I suffered. O God! how I suffered! I
couldn't inquire about him--I couldn't see him. I had kept my secret so
well that no one dreamed of my loving him so. The girls thought that he
followed me and that I despised him, and when they jested about him I
had to reply while my heart was being torn out of me. I spent hours in
my room writhing, walking up and down, cursing in a girl's way myself
and God--I was insane with it all."
She drew a long breath but it did not relieve her. Her voice was as
tense as before when she spoke again. The helmsman leaned to listen, for
he could hardly hear.
"Then one day he died--O that awful day! I sat in my room with the
curtains down. I couldn't endure the sunlight. I pretended to be sick. I
was numb with agony and yet I could do nothing. I couldn't even send a
rose to lay on his coffin. I couldn't even speak his name. I could only
lie there like a prisoner gagged and on the rack--to suffer--suffer!"
The shadow of the sail covered the woman like a mantle. It was as if the
man listening had turned away his face from her sacred passion. She was
more composed when she spoke again:
"Well, it wore itself out after a time. I got hungry and ate once more,
though I did not suppose I ever should. I came down to the family a week
later, a puzzle to them. They never thought to connect my illness with
the death of an obscure machinist, and then in the same way I crept
gradually back into society--back into the busy life of a popular young
girl. But there was one place where no one ever entered. I never told
any one of this before. I tried to tell Dr. Sanborn about it once, but I
felt he might not understand; I tell you because--because you can
understand and because you may be influenced by it and understand your
wife when she comes to you. These days come to many women at seventeen
and, though we can't spare them out of our lives, it doesn't mean
disloyalty to our present ideals. I think you understand?"
"Very well indeed," he said. "I have such memories myself."
"Then I resolved to be a physician. I felt that he would not have died
if he had been treated properly; the connection was obscure but powerful
enough to consecrate me to the healing profession. Then I met Dr.
Sanborn. I love him and I couldn't live without him, but there is that
figure back there--to have him and all that he means go out of my life
would take part of my heart away." Her voice had appeal in it.
"You understand me? It was all clean and innocent, but it was my first
passion and I can't spare it. Rose may have such a memory. It has
nothing to do with today, with her present ideals. It is not
disloyalty--it is--"
"The love of love," said Mason. "I thank you for your trust in me. Rose
is what she is, not what she has been." And then in perfect stillness
the boat swung around and drifted toward the shore, where a ruby lantern
was swinging. Isabel turned and her voice was tremulous with
earnestness.
"Warren, Rose loves you--not as she loved when a girl, but as a woman
loves. I think I understand your hesitancy--and I say you are wrong. You
need her and you will do her good. You will develop her."
"She will suffer through me."
"That is a part of development."
The boat was nearing the wharf and Sanborn's hearty voice came from the
shore:
"See here! Isn't it pretty late for a pair of rheumatic old folks to be
out sailing? It's 9:30 o'clock."
"The breeze failed us," Isabel answered, as Mason took her hand to help
her ashore.
"And the night was so beautiful," said Mason. Before she loosed his hand
Isabel shook it hard and now Mason understood. He mailed the letter that
night, and Rose held his future in her hand.