AS the days were told off one by one in anticipation of the arrival of
Trenholme Dare, the young architect and landscape gardener of Montreal,
with his army of workmen, Louise became more conspicuously reticent,
more conspicuously addicted to her books on socialism and metaphysics,
her chats with the wives of luckless ranchers, her Quixotic jaunts
north, south, east, and west in search of lonely school-teachers to be
befriended, sick cattle to be disinfected, odd lots of provisions to be
acquired from hard-up settlers. On the very day that a site was to be
chosen for the foundation of her private greenhouse, she fled from
Hillside and rode sixteen miles over the muddy roads of early spring for
a mere ice-cream soda; yet when she had heard of the recurrence of
little Annie Brown’s chronic earache, she had foregone a dance at the
Valley to sit up all night and heat linseed oil, smooth pillows, and
sing old French ditties.
She realized the extent of her hostility to Keble’s plans one day when a
particular adverb escaped from her subconsciousness apropos of her
husband’s look of boyish pleasure and surprise, a sort of diffident
radiance in his face, as he glanced through a budget of documents which
changed his status from that of a dependent young rancher on probation
into an independent estate-holder. He seemed odiously contented, she
thought, then checked herself. “Odiously” was the adverb, and in fear
and wonder she rode down towards the range to reflect, to read herself a
long, abundantly illustrated sermon on heartlessness, and, if possible,
reduce herself to a state of remorse and penitence.
In this attempt she failed signally, and indeed went so far over into
the opposite scale as to say with a passionate flick of the reins which
made Sundown leap, “Then if we must, we must, that’s all, and I’ll be
Nero. The sooner Rome burns the better. _Vas-y donc, bonjour!_”
The spring rains had set in, and water coursed down the usual channels
with a volume and roar that attracted one’s attention to brooklets which
in other seasons flowed by unnoticed. Water lurked in every depression,
as though the earth were some vast sponge, red and brown and green. Near
the river, the road was washed away. In some places rude bridges that
had served the previous summer were now rendered ridiculous through a
capricious change in the course of the stream. The bi-weekly mail wagon
had left deep ruts now filled with water the color of cocoa. The
mountains were still topped with thick white snow and reminded her of
frosted cakes. There was a heavy, rich fragrance and vigor in the air.
When a hare darted across the trail into the miniature forest of sage
bushes, she, in spirit, darted with him, in a glee. As she cut herself a
switch from a bush of willows she welcomed the drops of water that
showered over her face and ran up her sleeve, as though, like some
intelligent plant, she knew that the drops would make her grow. Even the
mud that spattered her boots and stirrup straps she cheerfully accepted
as seasonable. And she rode on at haphazard, as carelessly, yet with as
much vigorous assurance as had been manifested by the hare. Like the
hare she had no idea whither she was bound. Like the hare she was
swiftly, gracefully making for the unknown destination. Temperamentally
she was hare-like; that would make Keble a tortoise; and according to
the fable he would win the race; that thought would bear
investigation,—but not for the moment. For the moment she chose to
intoxicate herself with the conviction that nothing in the world
mattered. The ills that most people complained of,—ills like little
Annie’s earaches and her own increasing estrangement from her
husband,—merely lent life an additional savor, and she could conceive
of acquiring a taste for chagrin, as one acquired a taste for bitters;
if not a taste, then at least an insensibility. Her whole philosophy
amounted to a conviction of the necessity of behaving as though the odds
weren’t there.
There was only one thing that could have brought her atonement with the
spring world nearer to perfection, and that would have been to have
Keble riding at her side. Not the correct Keble who studied blue prints
and catalogues, who read prose that sounded like poetry and poems that
sounded like prose, but some idealized Keble who, with the same eyes,
hair, hands, strength, honesty, and “nice back-of-his-neck,” could do
what the actual Keble could not do: keep ahead of her, command her,
surprise, shock, and seduce her, snatch her off her feet and whirl her
through space with a momentum that prevented thought,—the Keble, in
short, who failed to exist but whom she loved against hope. Love was a
mystery to which she had gladly abandoned herself, but which, while
appearing to receive her with open arms, had remained as inscrutable at
close range as it had been from a distance. When the arms folded about
her she felt imprisoned and blinded; when she drew back for perspective
the arms fell, or, what was still more disheartening, methodically
turned to some unallied, if useful employment, leaving her restlessly
expectant and vaguely resentful. The consequence of which was that her
great supply of affection, like the cascades pouring down from the
hills, spread over undefined areas, capriciously turned into new
channels, leaving, here and there, little bridges of a former season
spanning empty river beds. That very morning at breakfast Keble had said
to her, “Good morning, dear, did you sleep well?” That phrase was a
useless old bridge over a flat stretch of pebbles. To Miriam he had
said, “I’ve had a reply from the cement people; would you like to type
some more tiresome letters to-day?” And that was a new bridge over God
knew what.
She forgot that she had just been glorying in the conviction that
nothing in the world mattered. Once she had said to her father that she
sometimes wondered if anything were right. She blushed at a sudden
humiliating guess as to what might make _everything_ right. Humiliating
because,—for all her fine theorizing,—it might be, after all, more
physio- than psyhcho-logical.
2
Keble’s corner of creation had become a chaos of felled trees,
excavations, foundations, ditches, scaffoldings, cement-mixers, tripods,
lead pipe, packing-cases, tents, and Irish masons. Four years before, on
returning to London from a journey around the world, he had heard his
father say that a young man who had “anything in him” couldn’t help
desiring to exert himself even to the point of great sacrifice in the
attainment of whatever most interested him. That remark had discouraged
Keble, for he could imagine nothing for which he could have an
overwhelming desire to sacrifice himself: least of all British politics,
which was the breath in his father’s nostrils.
The remark had sent him roaming again, not to see more of the world but
to think. And, thanks to a hunting accident which confined him several
weeks to a log cabin in the wilds of Alberta, he had not only thought,
but found the thing for which he desired to exert himself to the point
of sacrifice. At the moment when the lure of a new country was driving
from his memory the vapid gaieties of West End night clubs, he met a
girl who seemed to be the human counterpart of all the mystery and
spaciousness in nature which had cast a spell upon him. The acres which
his father had acquired many years before for the mere fun of owning
something in Canada were a jumble of forest primeval, clear waters,
prairies, untamed animals. Louise was a jumble equally enticing. And the
passion to reclaim the one became inextricably allied with a passion to
reclaim the other. It mattered no more to him that his rivals in the
latter case were cowboys than that, in the former, his opponents were
inexperience and a sceptical family. In both cases he saw possibilities
that others hadn’t seen.
His forests and fields, being without a purpose of their own, yielded
docilely to his axes and ploughshares and grouped themselves into the
picture he had conceived of them. But his wife, after the first months
of submission, had begun to sprout and spread with a capricious and
bewildering luxuriance.
For some time he felt the change, but not until the arrival of Trenholme
Dare did his feeling become statable. Not that there was any technical
lack of affection or good will or loyalty; there was simply a great lack
of common effort. The original trust and enthusiasm had vanished, and
since no one was to blame, he was beginning to be anxious about its
return. At times he suspected that he ought, in some fashion, to assert
himself. But, fundamentally humble, as well as proud, he could do
nothing more than watch Louise’s progress in a sort of despairing
approbation, and go on cultivating his own garden.
What changes had taken place in himself, with increasing seriousness of
purpose, he could not have said. The changes in Louise were
multitudinous, in the sense that a tree in spring is more multitudinous
than the same tree in winter. She had acquired foliage and blossoms. He
trembled to see what the fruit would be. Once he had been priggish
enough to wonder whether he could be contented with a wife brought up in
such primitive simplicity; his priggishness received a final snub in
Palm Beach, where instead of the impetuous creature whose cultivation he
had once bumptiously promised himself to take in hand, he was met by a
woman who had herself so completely in hand that she set the tone for
everybody within range. Vaguely he suspected that the transformation was
the result of a process undertaken with the intention of pleasing him.
But to have claimed this would have seemed to him presumptuous. He now
found in her a cautiousness, politeness, and undemonstrativeness that,
to his dismay, he recognized as an echo of his own; and, their positions
reversed, he had some conception of the hurt he must have inflicted on
her. Whereupon he longed for her old headlong assaults and
gamineries,—longed for them for their warmth and for their value as
examples to learn by.
The only encouraging factor in the situation was Louise’s honesty. In
that respect at least there was no change. He was convinced that she had
told him only one lie in her life, and that was a pathetic fib for which
he was more than ready to answer to Saint Peter, since it was a
by-product of the process of self-improvement Louise had undertaken, as
he suspected, to do him honor. Being the first lie, it was overdone: for
Miriam Cread was, of all the women he could think of, perhaps the least
like a Harristown schoolmistress. He had never challenged the story, and
it had never been officially contradicted. Neither Louise nor Miriam
knew that one day, in looking through a bundle of old illustrated
weeklies, his eye had been arrested by the photograph of a group of
people in the paddock at Ascot, prominent among whom was “Rear Admiral
Cread of Washington, D. C. and his daughter,” chatting with a dowdy old
princess of the blood royal at the very moment,—as Keble took the
trouble to calculate,—when Weedgie Bruneau was alleged to have been
improving her acquaintance with Miriam in a remote normal school in the
Canadian northwest.
How Miriam had got to Hillside, what she had come for, and why she
stopped on, were questions whose answers were of no importance.
Important was the fact that Miriam’s presence had had the effect of an
electrolized rod plunged into the chemical solution of his marriage. As
a result of which Louise and he had separated into copper and NO_{3}. In
short he had relapsed into a rather flat solution, and she had come out
a very bright metal.
Miriam was not a source of anxiety to him. Whatever machine she had
dropped from, she had played fair. At times she was a positive boon:
sweet, serene, solid. “I wish you could see her, my son,” he had once
written to Walter Windrom. “Even your flawless Myra Pelter’s nose, if
not put out of joint, would have to be furtively looked at in the
mirror, just once, to see that it was still straight.”
But the _man_ from the machine.
He was entirely self-made, and, as Keble was the first to admit, a
tremendously good job. Miriam’s comment was that, though his thumbs were
too thin-waisted for a Hercules and his shoulders too broad for an
Apollo, he was undoubtedly of divine descent. Louise, on first seeing
him, had shrugged her shoulders and said, under her breath, the one
word: “Cocksure.”
Keble’s impression of Dare was recorded in his latest letter to Windrom,
with whom, as a relief from his recent solitary self-catechism, he had
resumed a more intensive correspondence. “He takes possession of you,”
wrote Keble, “Chiefly, I think, with his voice, which is more palpable
than most men’s handshakes: one of those voices that contain chords as
well as single tones, that sink and spread, then draw together into the
sound of hammer on steel, and scatter into a laugh which is like a
shower of sparks. If I were a sculptor I would model him in bronze
fifteen feet high and label him the twentieth century, if not the
twenty-first. If I owned a monopoly of the world’s industry I would make
him general manager. If I were the sovereign people I would cheerfully
and in a sort of helpless awe make him dictator, all the while deploring
and failing to understand his views. He would simply thunder forth
policies in a voice full of chromatic thirds, and with frantic, nervous
huzzahs I would bear him shoulder-high to the throne.”
Dare struck Keble as a philosopher who through excess of physical energy
had turned to mechanical science. Or perhaps a born engineer whose
talent for organizing matter had a sort of spiritual echo. At one moment
he would make his facts support his philosophical speculations; at the
next his philosophy, like a gigantic aeroplane, would mount into the sky
with tons of fact stowed away in neat compartments. The result was that
Keble didn’t know whether to marvel at the load Dare could mount with,
or be alarmed at the whirling away into space of so much solid matter.
“Contact with this chap,” wrote Keble, “has taught me this, that to me
who,—it must alas be admitted,—am merely on the brink of understanding
my epoch, individuality has seemed almost an end in itself, as though
the object of life were achieved when the flower blossomed. (I remember
romantic nights during my furloughs in Paris when I paid mute tribute to
long-haired, be-sandalled creatures who were, to my excessively English
eyes, ‘being individual’). But egos are _passé_; mass ego, it seems (or
egi) have come in. For Dare the blossoming, even the fructifying, are
incidental. His interest (at least in the reflective lulls after dinner,
for during the daytime he’s the most practical of men) extends to the
cosmic activity which is (in some manner I have yet to comprehend)
rendered possible by the virtually automatic living and procreating and
dying of millions upon millions of violets and pine trees and rabbits
and ladies and gentlemen and glaciers and republics and solar systems.
He assaults the subject with these stimulating volleys of odds and ends.
“Now imagine, Walter, for only you can, the effect of all this on my
wife. It’s turning into ‘a case unprecedented’, and before long I may,
like Bunthorne, have to be ‘contented with a tulip or li-lie’. Louise
long ago talked me into a cocked hat. Miriam, through the mysterious
licence she had been endowed with, kept up a semblance of intellectual
alto to Louise’s dizzy soprano. But now, oh dear me _now_, Miriam and I
aren’t even in tempo with her, much less in key. My household,—I still
claim it as mine through force of habit, which is always imperative with
me,—has become a china shop for the taurean and matadorean antics of
two of the most ruthlessly agile products of the age.
“Louise is for the moment (and you can only define her momentarily) an
interpreting link between Dare (twenty-first century) and me
(nineteenth). Her original association with me awakened her
consciousness to a delicate scale of weights and measures in matters of
taste and opinion. When she had acquired my acuteness of perception she
discovered that she was naturally endowed with Alpine talents that made
my hilltop look like a mound. From her easy victories over Miriam and me
she concluded that there were endless enterprises awaiting her. When she
was alone she began to feel herself operating on a higher gear, making
for herself new speed records. Now that I look back, I know that my
cautiousness, in more than one crisis, gave her ample excuse for going
her own gait. I have it from her lips that she has kept her love
(whatever we mean by that enormously capacious word) for me brightly
burning, as I, in all the welter, have done. Her religious nature, for
want of a cult, has always centered round an exquisite instinct which I
suspect to be a sort of sublimated eroticism: something that I suppose
no man ever understands,—or would some other man? That’s the devilish
puzzle of it. Yet almost without being aware of it she seems to have
kindled new fires before an altar so much more important and
all-embodying than her feeling for me or mere anybody else that the
light of her little lamp of constancy is like the light of a star in the
blaze of noon.
“What one does in a case like that is more than I know. All I am sure of
at this moment is you, my son, a lighthouse that flashes at dependable
intervals through my fogs. Do you, for one, stay a little in the rear of
the procession if every one else gets out of sight. I don’t deserve it
of you; I merely exact it,—again through force of habit: the same habit
that, in our school holidays suffered me to play with _your_ yacht on
the Kensington round pond after I had wrecked my own.”
3
Miriam, who had watched Louise as one watches an acrobat,—with
excitement and dread,—felt herself in a sense frustrated by Louise’s
continued apathy. If it had been punctuated by new verbal heresies, new
feats of talk with Trenholme Dare, now the dominating figure at
Hillside, Miriam, like Keble, would at least have been able to account
for it even had she failed to sympathize. But Louise’s indifference
seemed to have spread even to the realm of ideas, and there had been
very few acrobatic displays of late. Possibly Louise was in love; but if
so, it would have been much more like her to say so, flatly.
The effect of this on Miriam was to make her more sharply conscious of
the anomaly of her rôle. More than once she had argued that her mission
was at an end, but in each instance Louise had induced her to remain.
Having yielded at first with a faint sense of guilt, Miriam had come
through custom to accept her position with all its ambiguities. As
Keble’s activities increased, she had stepped into the breach and
relieved him of many daily transactions, delighted at being able to
offer a definite service for the cheque which was left on her dressing
table every month. Keble ended by turning over to her his ledgers and
most of his correspondence.
But her feeling of guilt recurred at moments when the house seemed to be
an armed camp, with Keble and herself deep in their estimates; and
Louise inciting Dare to phantastic metaphysical speculation. At such
moments her mind persisted in criticizing Louise. It was not exactly
that she lacked confidence in her, for Louise was in her own fashion
surefooted and loyal. But Miriam was a little appalled at the extensity
of the ground Louise could be surefooted on, the sweeping nature of her
conception of loyalty. Louise, scorner of the ground, was all for
steering in a direct line to her goal and ignoring the conventional
railway routes whose zigzags were conditioned by topographical
exigencies not pertinent to fliers. Her loyalty would not fail Keble,
for she could cherish him in the spirit without subscribing to him in
the letter. Louise’s loyalty might be expressed in idioms which were not
to be found in Keble’s moral vocabulary. Just as there were some eternal
truths which could be expressed more adequately in French than in
English, so, conceivably, there might be vital experiences which Louise
could obtain more adequately through the agency of some man other than
Keble; certainly she would not acknowledge any law that attempted to
prevent her doing so, had she a mind to it.
There were times when Miriam felt herself to be an interpreter; more
than once in tête-à-têtes with Keble she had found herself de-coding
some succinct remark of Louise’s to explain away a worried line in his
forehead, and it was on those occasions that she had felt especially
guilty,—not because she ran the risk of giving an unfair
interpretation, but because it was conceivable that, had she not been
there to decipher, Louise would have taken more pains to employ a
language Keble could understand.
This qualm she could dispel by reminding herself that at the time of her
advent Louise and Keble had been drifting apart through very lack of an
interpreter. Then it was Keble’s language which had been too precious
for his wife, and Louise herself had taken energetic steps to increase
her vocabulary to meet the demand. Would Keble take steps to learn her
new words? At least there was evidence that he suffered at not being
able to speak them. But after all Keble was a man, and no man should be
expected to grope in the irrational mazes of a woman’s psychology. It
was a woman’s duty to make herself intelligible to the man who loved
her; Miriam was tenaciously sure of this. Yet Louise nowadays made no
effort to share her ideas with Keble; she merely challenged him to soar
with her, and when he, thinking of Icarus, held back, she went flying
off with Dare, who certainly made no effort to bear any one aloft, but
whose powerful rushing ascensions either filled you with a desire to fly
or bowled you over.
Dare, for all his impetuosity, was, like Louise, prodigiously
conscientious; but like her he was more concerned with the sense of a
word than with its orthography. He was too certain of the organic and
creative nature of experience to live according to any formula. You felt
unwontedly safe with him, just as you did with Louise, but safe from
dangers that only he had made you see, dangers on a remote horizon. As
you ambled along, with nothing more ominous than a cloud of dust or a
shower of rain to disturb your pedestrian serenity, Louise and Dare
would swoop down, armed to the teeth, gleefully to assure you that
nothing fatal would happen, that accidents to limb held no terrors for
moral crusaders worthy the name; then, leaving you to stand there in
bewilderment, they would swoop off again to catch up with unknown
squadrons beyond the rim of vision, whence, for the first time, a
muffled sound of bombing came to your ears. And your knees would begin
to tremble, not on their account,—oh dear no, _they_ could take care of
themselves,—but on your own. Suddenly your pedestrian course seemed
drab to you,—long, weary, prosaic; but you lacked wings, weapons, zeal,
and endurance.
Louise was a Spartan both morally and physically. She could ignore
transgressions of the social code as easily as she could ignore bodily
discomforts. Recently Miriam had seen an example of each. When Pearl
Beatty, the schoolteacher, had been made the topic of scandalous gossip
which echoed through the Valley, Louise in defiance of her husband and
the public had fetched Pearl to the ranch for a week-end, and said to
her in effect, “Pearl dear, I’ll see that you don’t lose your job,
provided you don’t lose your head. If it’s a _man_ you want, wait till
you find the right one, then bring him here and I’ll protect you both.
But if it’s a lot of men you want you can’t go on teaching school in our
Valley; it’s too complicated. The only way to play that game with
pleasure and profit,—and I doubt whether you’re really vicious
enough,—is to save your money, go to a big city, buy some good clothes,
and sit in the lobby of the leading commercial hotel until fate’s finger
points.” As a result of this manoeuvre some of Pearl’s thoughtless
exuberance rushed into a channel of devotion to Louise, who seized the
occasion to build up in the girl a sense of her own value and then
bullied the Valley into respecting it.
As for physical courage, only a few days previously Louise, uttering an
occasional “Oh damn!” to relieve her agony, had stoically probed with a
needle deep under her thumb-nail to release a gathering that had formed
as a result of rust poisoning, while Miriam stood by in horror.
Far deeper than her dread of anything Louise might do was a dread
engendered by lack of confidence in herself. Within herself there was
some gathering of emotion for which, unlike Louise, she hadn’t the
courage to probe. As she had told Louise at their first meeting,
responsibility could frighten her; and she now shrank before the
responsibility of her inclinations. The most she dared admit to herself
was that she was growing too fond of the life around her. In her first
youth she had fancied herself a real person in a pleasantly artificial
setting, mildly enamoured of glittering symbols of life; in this faraway
corner, renovated by solitude, physical exertion, and obligatory
self-analysis, she saw herself as an artificial person in a pleasantly
real setting, enamoured of life itself. She had come to teach, and had
remained to learn. In the old days a horse had been a sleek toy upon
which one cantered in Rock Creek Park or Rotten Row or the Monte Pinchio
gardens until a motor came and fetched one home to lunch. A dog had been
a sort of living muff. Camping expeditions had been an elaborate means
of relaxing overwrought nerves. Nowadays a horse was a friend who
uncomplainingly bore one great distances, who discovered the right path
when one was lost. A dog was a companion who escorted one through
fearsome trails, who retrieved the grouse one hit, and kept watch by
night at the cabin door. Camping expeditions were a serious means to
some explorative end; one slept on the hard ground under a raincoat
simply because there was nothing else to sleep on, and eagerly looked
forward to doing it again. Men and women whom one would once have sent
down to the kitchen for a cup of tea were now one’s convives. And far
from losing caste on this level, one acquired a useful perspective of
society and a new conception of one’s identity. Association with a girl
like Pearl Beatty, for instance, not only opened one’s eyes at last to
some blunt facts about one’s own nature, but also furnished the clue to
scandals concerning which one had been stupidly supercilious in the days
when life consisted in the automatic fulfilment of projects announced
beforehand on pieces of cardboard.
Yet for the first time in a dozen years she was not sure of herself. So
far she had been loyal in thought as well as deed, but the present
inventory of herself revealed claims for which she had also little
rebellious gusts of loyalty. Louise herself counted for something in
this development, since however much one might deprecate Louise’s bold
convictions, one couldn’t deny that they were often ingratiating. “It’s
more honorable to hoist your own sail and sail straight on a reef than
it is to be towed forever!” When Louise tossed off remarks of that sort
one was tempted to lengths of experiment that one would once have
drastically disapproved. Louise’s philosophy might end by producing
inedible fruits, but meanwhile there was no denying the charm of the
blossoms she flaunted under one’s windows and virtually defied one not
to smell.
As long as Louise was plying at verbal thunder and lightning, Miriam’s
confidence in herself underwent to qualms. For at such times, she, in
comparison with Louise, personified all that was discreet. But when
Louise’s effervescences died down, when the last waterspout of her
exultant proclamations had collapsed on a lake of apathy too deep and
dark to be penetrated, Miriam felt the wavelets radiating to the shore
at her feet, gently communicating a more daring rhythm to her own
desires.
The first definite effect of these reflections was Miriam’s decision to
leave. Otherwise she would be forced to come to an understanding with
herself and run the risk of discovering that she was ready to—steal.
It was late in September. Dare’s army of workmen were fighting against
time to complete the exteriors of the new house and outbuildings before
winter. Miriam drew rein as her horse reached the top of the hill from
which she had obtained her first glimpse of the lake more than a year
ago. The sun was not yet up, but the world was expecting it. The lake
which only yesterday had been an emerald was now a long, flat pearl
encircled in a narrow, faintly amethystine mist which like a scarf of
gauze broke the perpendicular lines of the farthermost shore. In it were
mirrored the colossal rocks forming the jagged V of the canyon, and
threadbare clouds of pale rose and jade, lemon and amber. The oily brown
log cottages silhouetted near the outlet had the pictorial value of
black against the living pearl of the water, and Louise’s flower beds
were banked with something mauve dulled by dew. Frost-bitten, orange-red
geraniums in wooden urns raised high on crooked tree-stumps made hectic
blurs on each side of the main cottage. Farther off, and higher than the
tops of the pine trees which rose above the pervasive lavender mist,
were clusters of yellow and crimson foliage and slender tree trunks that
stood out like strokes of Chinese white. Higher yet were stretches of
rusty gorse which finally straggled off to bare patches of buff-hued
turf ending in the rock walls of Hardscrapple, whose irregular peaks,
four thousand feet above, were faintly edged with silver light.
At the end of the pine ridge to the right of the lake, surmounting a
broad meadow, standing out from the wooded slope of the mountain, and
bringing the whole landscape to a focus, was the Castle with its severe
lines, its broad balconies and high windows. One terrace dominated the
lake, while another looked over the top of the pine ridge towards the
distant valley where the river twisted its way for thirty miles through
a grey-green sage plain broken by occasional dark islands of pine and
bounded on the farther side by patchy brown and green risings
culminating in a lumpy horizon.
Everything visible for fifty miles had been stained bright with the hues
of the changing season, only to be softened by the clinging mist, which
seemed to hush as well as to veil.
From three kitchens,—Louise’s, Mrs. Brown’s, and the workmen’s
encampment,—white ribbons of smoke rose straight up as though to
reinforce the pale, exhausted clouds. Grendel, Miriam’s retriever, was
standing in the wet grass, one paw held up and tail motionless as though
awaiting confirmation of a hint of jack-rabbits. An acrid odour gave
body to the air: an odour whose ingredients included the damp earth, the
bark of the firs, the bunches of rust-colored berries, the leather of
the saddle, and the warm vitality of the horse. Once there was a sound
of whinnying from the slopes beneath, and once a distant sound of
splashing,—Keble or Dare at his morning plunge in the lake.
How splendid to be a man, with a man’s vigorous instincts! Even the
pipes they smoked at night were condonable, when you thought of the
strong teeth that clenched their stems, the strong fingers that twisted
the stems out during the cleaning process, and the earnestness that went
into the filling and lighting, the contented bodily collapse, as of
giants refreshed, that followed the first puff.
Splendid to be a man, certainly. But how much more wonderful to be at
the disposal of some clean, earnest, boyish creature who would be
comfortingly gigantic when one felt helpless, enticingly indolent when
one felt strong. As for being a victim to a capacity for tenderness
which one had no right to indulge,—that was simply unfair.
The sound of loose planks disturbed by running feet came up to her on
the motionless air. It was Keble, in sandals and dressing gown,
returning from the boat-slip to the cottage. She leaned forward and
patted her horse.
Near the foot of the winding road she drew rein again. Grendel had
dashed ahead to play practical jokes on a colony of hens. Joe was
chopping wood. Mona was moving tins in the dairy. Annie Brown was at the
pump, getting water on her “pinny”. Some one was whistling. Grendel
barked at the top of his lungs and came bounding back through the grass.
The sun was beginning to turn the mountain peaks into brass and bronze.
The flat pallid clouds were trailing away. A flush of blue crept over
the sky.
Miriam’s throat ached with the kind of happiness that is transformed at
birth into pain. She remembered the remark she had made to Louise on
first descending this road: “You very lucky woman!”
Half an hour later, at the breakfast table, she was struck by the pallor
of Louise’s cheeks, which normally glowed. Louise was chatting with a
show of good spirits that failed to hoodwink her. She broke open an egg
with a slight feeling of vexation, for it was nerve-racking to be faced
daily with a human puzzle. She was more than willing to be sorry for
Louise, but one couldn’t quite be sorry until one knew why.
A moment later their eyes met. Louise gave her a characteristically
friendly smile, and suddenly Miriam guessed. She was assailed by a
nameless envy, a nameless resentment, sincere compassion, then, by a
strange relief that left her almost comically weak.
When breakfast was finished and the men were out of the room she went to
Louise, grasped her by the shoulders, looked into her eyes with kindly
inquiry, then, having been assured, said, “My dear, why didn’t you tell
me? Or rather, how could I have failed to see!”
To Miriam’s amazement Louise bit her lips and trembled,—Louise, the
Spartan! Miriam kissed her cold cheek and gave her arm an affectionate
pat. She felt awkward. “What’s there to be afraid of?” she scoffed. “You
of all people!”
“It’s not fear,” Louise quietly contradicted. “It’s disgust.”
“How does Keble take it?”
“He is as blind as you were. And I haven’t been able to bring myself to
telling him. That explains better than anything my state of mind. He
will be so odiously glad.”
Miriam was shocked.
“Yes, odiously,” Louise petulantly repeated. “I know it’s abominable of
me to talk like this. But he will be so suffocatingly good and kind
. . . Oh Miriam!”
She burst into tears and let Miriam’s arms receive her. “I loathe
hysterical women,” she sobbed, then turned to Miriam with appealing
eyes. “You will stay won’t you?”
Miriam hesitated. The decision she had come to on her solitary ride
broke down as other similar decisions had done.
“Why, yes, dear,—yes, of course I’ll see you through it,” she replied,
and allowed Louise’s grateful caress to silence a little exulting voice
within her.
4
A singular, poignant peace brooded over Hillside through the long months
of Miriam’s second winter at the ranch. While the outer world stood
transfixed with cold, its lakes and streams frozen and its heart stifled
under the snow, the people indoors went about their tasks and diversions
with an orderliness that recalled old times to Louise and Keble and
tended to persuade Miriam that her doubts about herself had been
exaggerated.
To break the monotony of correspondence, books, cards, and skiing trips
there had been countless boxes to unpack in the unfinished house on the
hill: boxes of furnishings and ornaments, music to try over and books to
catalogue. To give unity to the winter, there was the dramatic suspense
of waiting for the human miracle. The attitude of Louise combined
tolerance of Keble’s solicitude with amusement at Miriam’s
half-embarrassed excitement. For the rest she accepted with common sense
a situation which she privately regarded as an insult on the part of
fate.
The apathy which Miriam had noted so uneasily in the early autumn had
not disappeared, although it had lost its trance-like fixity, in the
place of which had come a more regular attention to daily tasks, a quiet
competence. Miriam’s admiration for Louise had steadily grown, despite
her distrust of Louise’s intellectual “climbing” and her
half-acknowledged envy of Louise’s power to enslave Keble, to give Dare
Rolands for his Olivers, and to bind maids and cooks, farm hands and
horse wranglers, neighbors and creditors together in a fanatical
vassalage. On none of her slaves did Louise make arbitrary demands. If
she exhorted or scolded them, it was always apropos of their success or
failure in being true to themselves. If Miriam’s admiration ever
wavered, it was on occasions when Louise, carried away by her own
_élan_, cut capers merely to show what capers she could cut,—like an
obstreperous child shouting, “Watch me jump down three steps at a time.”
But recently Louise had not been cutting capers, and as she sat before a
fire that gave the lie to the incredible temperature that reigned beyond
the storm doors, calmly stitching garments for an infant whose advent
was distasteful to her, Miriam regarded her with the protective
affection she might have felt for a sister ten years her junior.
“I can’t make you out,” she said. “In your place I would be obnoxiously
proud of myself.”
“When I was first married I wanted him. Then as time went on I hoped
there wouldn’t be any him at all. Saw to it, in fact. I’ve been
negligent.”
“Why _him_?” Miriam inquired.
“Because it’s my duty to produce a member of the ancient and honorable
House of Lords. His forebears expect it. As for me, I’d rather have a
monkey.”
Grimness had replaced the old zest and elasticity, and Miriam noted with
surprise that this single fact completely altered the personality of the
household. If the present mood proved permanent, she reflected, the
Castle, for all their pains, would have the character of a house to let.
Dare had left in the late autumn and would return in the spring, perhaps
remaining for the house-warming which was to be the occasion of a visit
by members of Keble’s family. At the time of Dare’s departure Miriam had
watched Louise with intense curiosity. She had longed to know the nature
of the rôle played by Louise’s heart in her relation with Dare,—a
relation which both so freely acknowledged to be exhilarating. During
one of their final evenings Louise had said to Dare, “When you leave
Hillside I shall climb to the top of Hardscrapple, chant a hymn to the
sun, and dive head first into the canyon, for there won’t be anything to
live for, except Keble and Miriam, and they’re only the land I’m a fish
on, whereas you’re the water I’ll be a fish out of!”
To which Dare had instantly retorted, “Indeed I’m not the water you’re a
fish in. I’m the whale you’re a swordfish attacking, and I shall be glad
to get back east where there’s nothing I can’t either swallow or
out-swim.”
Miriam had been exasperated at not being able to read between the
bantering lines. For there must be a situation, she reasoned; two such
abounding persons, no matter how adroit, could never have got so far
into each others’ minds without having got some distance into each
other’s blood.
But the situation, whatever it was, was not divulged, and Miriam was
denied whatever solace her own unruly heart might have derived from the
knowledge that Keble’s wife’s heart was also unruly.
Whether Louise’s sense of duty had a share in it or not, a “him” was
duly produced and ecstatically made at home. Even his mother ended by
admitting that he was “not a bad little beast.” She had vetoed Keble’s
plan to import a nurse from England, and had trained Katie Salter for
the post. As motherhood had once been Katie’s passionate avocation,
Louise could think of no better way to translate into deeds the spirit
of her outlandish funeral sermon on neighborliness than to promote Katie
from the wash-house to the nursery.
Keble and Miriam came in from an hour’s skating one afternoon late in
December to find Louise at the tea-table submitting to Katie’s proud
account of the prodigy’s gain in weight. She was mildly amused to learn
that the tender hair on the back of babies’ heads was worn off by their
immoderate addiction to pillows.
Keble leaned over the perambulator, not daring to put his finger into
the trap of his son’s microscopic hand lest its coldness have some dire
effect. He had an infatuated apprehension of damage to his child, having
so recently learned the terrific physical cost of life. His tenderness
for the infant had a strange effect on Louise. It made her wish that she
were the baby. Tears gathered in her eyes as she watched him, still
aglow from his exercise and fairly hanging on Katie’s statistics.
She began to pour tea as Miriam threw aside her furs and drew up a
chair. Miriam had hoped, in common with Keble and Katie Salter, that
Louise’s indifference would disappear as if by magic when the baby came
within range of the census. She was forced to admit, however, that
Louise was not appreciably more partial to her son than to Elvira Brown
or Dicky Swigger.
“Could you desert him long enough to drink a cup of tea?” Louise
inquired after a decent interval. She liked the solemn manner in which
Keble talked to the future member of the House of Lords. Like Gladstone
addressing the Queen, Keble addressed the baby as though it were a
public meeting. “You must make due allowance for the incurable
knick-knackery of woman kind,” he was saying, as he smoothed out a lace
border in which two tiny fingers had become entangled and against
which,—or something equally unjust,—a lusty voice was beginning to
protest.
“He’s not as polite as you are, if he does take after you,” Louise
commented when Keble had praised the toasted cheese cakes.
Keble judged this a fair criticism, and Miriam was of the opinion that a
polite baby would be an unendurable monstrosity. “I like him best of
all,” she said, “when he kicks and twists and screams ‘fit to bust his
pram’, as Katie says. Although I’m also quite keen about him when he’s
dining. Yes, thanks, and another cheese cake . . . And his way of always
getting ready to sneeze and then _not_, that’s endearing. And his dreams
about food.”
“You wouldn’t find them half as endearing if you had to wake up in the
middle of the night and replenish him.”
“Oh I say, Weedgie! Must you always speak of him as though he were a
gas-tank, or a bank account!”
“Pass me your cup. After skating you also want a lot of replenishing,
like your greedy heir. Now let’s for goodness’ sake talk about something
else,—the New Year’s dance for instance.”
Keble was always ready nowadays to talk on any subject in which Louise
showed signs of interest. The recognized household term for it was
“trying to be the water Louise is a fish in.”