tension, recalling the appealing droop of Keble’s lips as he had turned
away from her a few minutes before, she was obliged to face the fact
that some chord within her had responded to the appeal, despite her
stern censorship. She was obliged to admit that even when her path
became definitely distinct from Keble’s, when she should finally throw
all the weight of her personality into a passion worthy of her emotional
possibilities, or that failing, into some project so vital that she
would become oblivious to the trifles that filled so much of Keble’s and
Miriam’s attention, she would not be able to extinguish the fragrance of
the flower of sentiment that Keble had been the first to coax into
blossom. Her feeling toward any new friend who might tread her path
would exhale the odor of the phial of affection labelled “Keble”, though
that phial lay on a neglected shelf.
Even in the recklessness that had overtaken her beside Billy’s grave,
there had been some purring _obligato_, a running commentary to the
effect that her wanton experiment was in Keble’s name, that all the
thrills in the universe were reducible to the quieter terms of mere
charm, that all the charming things in life were reducible to “Keble”,
and it was inherent in the nature of charm that it could not be captured
and possessed, except in symbols, or by proxy. One could be so
profoundly loyal to one’s personal conception of life,—a conception
which exacted unflinching courage at the approach of new ideas and high
venturesomeness in tracking down concealed ideas,—that one could accept
clues from a stranger even though the accepting might involve a breach
of what the world called constancy. Incidentally, the fact that her
first breach, whatever it may have meant to Dare, was an erotic fiasco
as far as she was concerned, had by no means discountenanced further
experimentation. Life should pay her what it owed her, even if she had
to pay heavy costs in collecting her due.
On making the shocking discovery that marriage was no solution of her
destiny, she had vigorously bestirred herself, only to make the even
more shocking discovery that she was shedding her husband as a
caterpillar sheds its cocoon. Now, poised for flight, she could cherish
a tender sentiment for the cocoon but could scarcely fold her wings and
crawl back into it.
She recalled the cruel little poem, still unaccounted for, which had
thrown open a door in her mind.
_For, being true to you,_
_Who are but one part of an infinite me,_
_Should I not slight the rest?_
Those lines had come at her with a reproachful directness. In them, or
rather in the blue pencil which marked off the poem on its printed page,
she had read Keble’s impatience with her limitations. Her reason had
seen in the lines a justification against which her heart rebelled. From
that moment she had been disciplining her heart. So effectively indeed,
that now,—were it not for that appealing little droop and for the
sentimental fragrance which still clung to her,—she might have flung
the poem at him and cried, “_Voilà la monnaie de ta pièce_. I’ve learned
my lesson in bitter thoroughness. Now it is I who point to ‘rude
necessary heights’ intent upon a goal _you_ are unable to see.”
The nature of the goal was not clear even to herself, nor could she
exactly define the help that Dare had given her in mounting towards it.
Certainly the upward journey had been easier since he had first
appeared, and certainly her climbing prowess had seemed more notable in
moments when she and Dare on some high ledge of thought had laughingly
looked down at Keble and Miriam exchanging mystified glances, in which
admiration for the agility of the two on the ledge was blended with
misgivings as to the risks they ran.
Although she was lured upward by the hope of wider views, there were
times when she scrambled and leaped for the mere joy of climbing. There
were other times when she was intoxicated by a sense of the vastness of
causes to be advocated and the usefulness of deeds to be done. She had
visions of jumping up on platforms and haranguing masses of people till
they, too, were drunk with the wine of their own potentialities. She had
only the sketchiest notion of what she or they were to accomplish. The
nearest she came to a definite program was the vision of a new
self-conscious world blossoming forth into unheard-of activity, giving
birth to new institutions and burying the old. Any cause would be hers
provided it were intelligent, energetic, and comprehensive. In the joy
of being awake she needed to rouse the world from its lethargy, make it
cast away its crutches. In her consciousness of rich personal resources
she needed to make everybody else dig up the treasures latent within
themselves. Most of all, she desired that the world should “get on”,
that its denizens should abandon their moral motorcars and leap into
moral aeroplanes until something still more progressive could be
devised.
Despite the vagueness of her goal there was no lack of impetus in her
pursuit of it, and every day, on a blind instinct which she had learned
to revere, she did deeds in point, deeds which, when done, proved to be
landmarks, in a perfect row, on her route towards the unknown
destination. This encouraged her to believe that the future would help
her by showing a tendency to create itself.
The visit of Keble’s family had proved a negative hint as to the nature
of her goal, for clearly her direction was not to be one that led into a
bog of kind, complacent social superiorishness. Whatever errors she
might make she would not end by being gently futile, like her
mother-in-law; she would not turn into a wet blanket like Girlie, nor a
noisy, nosy Christmas-cracker like Mrs. Windrom. Alice Eveley had been
the most satisfactory woman of the four, yet Louise particularly hoped
she would not land in Alice’s bog; for Alice, while intelligent, had
turned none of her intelligence to account; while bright, she shed only
a reflected light; while frank, she could politely dissemble when
downrightness would have been more humane; and while sympathetic, she
held to conventions which had it in them to insist upon mercilessness.
Alice was, one could sincerely admit, a jolly good sort, but only
because she had not opposed favoring circumstances of birth, wealth, and
privilege. Girlie was a less jolly good sort because she had avoided
even the gentle propelling force of favoring circumstances and loitered
in back eddies,—she had been “dragged” to Italy, for instance, and had
brought back no definite impression save that of a campanile which had
made recollection easy for her by leaning! Alice at least floated down
the middle of the stream. But neither had struck out for herself, and
Louise’s complete approval was reserved for people who swam. In that
respect the men of the party had had more to commend them.
But even the men moved in a hopelessly restricted current. One could
point out so many useful directions in which they wouldn’t dream of
venturing. That was where Dare had shown to advantage. Even though Dare
had kept his tongue in his cheek, his real superiority had been manifest
to Louise. Compared to Mr. Windrom, a renowned old Tory, Dare was a
comet shooting past a fixed star. Mr. Windrom had undoubtedly swum, but
only in the direction of the political current in which his fathers had
immersed him. Dare, like herself, had swum against the current. Like
herself and her father and Aunt Denise and misguided Uncle
Mornay-Mareuil, Dare had emerged from obscurity and poverty. She and
Dare had swum to such good purpose that they had attained the smoothly
running stream that bore on its bosom the most highly privileged members
of civilization. And while momentarily resting, they had caught each
other’s eyes long enough to exchange, with a sort of astonished grunt,
“Is _this_ all!” Was it to be expected that they should stop swimming
just because every one else was contented with civilization’s meandering
flow? To have done so would have been to degrade the valor that had gone
into their efforts thus far.
Yet the mere fact that they had reciprocated a glance of intelligence
had been pounced upon by one of the privileged members as evidence of
treasonous dissatisfaction with the meandering current, and Mrs.
Windrom’s last words to her, pronounced in a voice which every one was
meant to hear, were, “Do say good-bye to Mr. Dare for me. I’m sorry he’s
not well; but I know what a devoted nurse you will be.”
Of course Alice and Lady Eveley and Miriam and all the others _might_
have good enough memories to associate Mrs. Windrom’s remark with
Walter’s accident, but the chances were that they would not, and that
left in their minds an equivocal association between her devotion as
nurse and the particular case of Dare’s indisposition. Louise was aware
that Mrs. Windrom meant her remark to convey this hint, and while she
didn’t care a tinker’s dam for Mrs. Windrom’s approval, she did object
to underhandedness.
Walter had swum, and although he might not have the prowess of herself
and Dare, still he had shown enough independence of the complacent
stream to qualify in the class which included Dare, herself, and,—by a
narrow margin,—Keble and Miriam. For Miriam had not merely floated. If
she had not made as good progress as Walter or Keble, she was none the
less to be commended for the distances she had covered, for Miriam was
handicapped in having no family or money to lean back on in moments of
fatigue and discouragement.
Alice had lost some of her standing with Louise by saying to Miriam
before departing, “I hope we shall see something of each other in the
future, Miss Cread. I take it that you will be returning east this
autumn.”
It was natural enough for Alice to “take it” that Miriam would be
returning. But, in the light of that trifling episode during the dance,
Louise felt that Alice’s express assumption of Miriam’s departure was
almost a hint; and having learned to read Miriam’s countenance, she was
almost sure that Miriam had felt the remark to be, if not a hint, at
least a warning. And that Louise resented; for the fact that Alice had
not been born athletic enough to strike out for herself gave her no
right to curb the athleticism of others. And if it was a warning, and if
Alice justified it to herself on the score of sisterly protection, then
how did Alice justify her many sisterly neglects? Louise felt that if
she had been in Alice’s place when Keble, sick of the war, had first
struck out into the wilds, no power on earth could have prevented her
from following at his heels to fry bacon over his camp fires. If she had
had a brother she would have guarded and bullied and slaved for him with
the single object of making him what Minnie Hopper as a little girl
would have called “the champeen king of the circus.”
Whether Miriam’s continued sojourn was in the best interests of all
concerned was another matter. Obviously Miriam, despite her protests,
desired to stay. But that was none of Alice Eveley’s business. It was a
matter for Miriam alone to decide, and she should not be hampered in her
decision. In a sense it was Keble’s business too. Certainly not his
wife’s, though long before Keble’s sister had appeared on the scene,
Louise had sometimes arrested herself, as Alice had done, and chosen a
different course in order not to break in on some apparent community of
interest between her husband and Miriam Cread.
A perambulator appeared at the corner of the terrace, propelled by a
stolid nursemaid. The monkey, rosy and fat, was making lunges at a white
hillock in his coverings which he would have been surprised to know was
his own foot. On seeing his mother he abandoned the hillock to give her
a perky inspection. His bonnet had slid down over one eye, and the tip
of his tongue protruded at the opposite corner of his mouth.
Louise broke into a laugh. “Katie! Make that child put in his tongue or
else straighten his hat. He looks such an awful rake with both askew.”
Katie missed the fine point of the monkey’s resemblance to a garden
implement, but, as Dare had recognized, Katie was as immortal in her
ignorance as philosophers are in their erudition. She straightened the
monkey’s headgear, this adjustment being less fraught with complications
than an attempt to reinstate his tongue.
“His granpa and gramma come into the nursery before breakfast,” Katie
proudly announced. “They said it was to give me a present, which they
done,—but it was really to see the monkey again.”
Louise had risen and gone over to shake the white hillock, an operation
which revived the monkey’s interest in that phenomenon.
“Any one would think he was _their_ baby!” she said sharply.
2
As she was turning to go into the house she met Miriam, whose face was
anxious. “Oh, there you are,” Miriam began. “I wish you would go up to
Dare. They can’t make him drink the things you left for him. Now he’s
arguing with Aunt Denise, who says he’s in a fever. He says he’s not,
and he’s saying it with feverish intensity.”
Louise gave a start. “Miriam! Papa had two cases of smallpox a few weeks
ago. Those Grays, you know,—down the river.”
“Wasn’t it one of the Gray girls that Dare rescued the day we went to
Deer Spring? She had climbed a tree and couldn’t get down.”
They hurried upstairs. “You wait here,” Louise ordered, leaving Miriam
at the door of the bedroom.
“Thank God it’s you,” said a half delirious voice, as she appeared, and
Dare sank back into bed.
Louise made a rapid diagnosis, then turned to Aunt Denise. “I think it’s
smallpox,” she whispered. “Will you fumigate the nursery? You’ll find
everything in the medicine chest. I’ll have him moved to one of the
cabins. _Je sais ce qu’il faut faire._”
There was no timorousness in Aunt Denise. A competent, strong woman
herself, she took competence and strength and a stern sense of duty for
granted in any member of her family.
When she had gone Louise went to the door to report to Miriam. “Get
somebody to take a few blankets over to your old cabin. Then find Mr.
Brown and have him send up some sort of stretcher. Mrs. Brown will help
you straighten the cabin and build a fire to air it. Then telephone
Papa.”
“What are you going to do?” Miriam ventured.
“Nurse. There’s no one else. Besides he wouldn’t obey a stranger. You
won’t mind keeping an eye on the house, will you? Don’t let Aunt Denise
be too thrifty. Above all, keep Keble from fretting. He rears like a
horse when he’s frightened.”
“But can you keep from catching it?”
“I can do anything I make up my mind to. Now hurry, dear.”
Miriam was seriously alarmed, yet Louise’s confidence was tonic.
Moreover this development gave her an elasticity of motion of which she
was a little ashamed.
When Keble returned for luncheon he found the table set on the terrace
and a strong odor of disinfectants issuing from the house. Miriam
explained, and although Keble was familiar with his wife’s rapidity of
organization, he was bewildered to find that she was installed in a
cabin across the lake, and that his first visit to her was already
scheduled. He was to accompany Miriam in the launch at three. Louise
would talk to them from the boat-slip, where they would leave supplies.
“That’s all very well,” he agreed. “But what about Louise?”
“Nurses always protect themselves,” Miriam reassured him. “And Louise
would be the last woman to make a blunder.”
It was harder than she had foreseen to keep Keble from panic, for every
reassuring remark seemed merely to arouse new images of disaster. He was
sorry for Dare but considered it clumsy of him to have collected Thelma
Gray’s germs.
“You would have done the same,” Miriam reminded him.
“But I wouldn’t have gone prowling bareheaded all over the northwest
after a warm evening of dancing,” he said with a sharper accent.
Miriam had been sleepless after the dinner party, and at dawn from her
window had seen Dare, dishevelled, cross the meadow through the wet
grass and let himself into the house. It came to her as a shock that
Keble had witnessed this incident, of which no mention had been made.
Had Keble, too, spent a sleepless night? Had that any bearing on his
habit, more conspicuous of late, of nervously whistling, and leaving his
seat to wander about the house? Miriam was a little unstrung and was
grateful for the presence of Aunt Denise, whose rigidity held the
household together, even if it occasionally stood in the way of a free
and easy routine.
Miriam and Keble were at pains to conceal from each other their
consternation at the situation created by Louise’s prompt retirement
into quarantine. Aunt Denise, the most straight-laced person at
Hillside, was probably the only person in the neighborhood who took
Louise’s step as matter of course. Keble was proud of his wife’s medical
talent; it emphasized her womanliness, and it was the essentially
feminine qualities in Louise which he had unflaggingly admired. Yet he
was tormented by the thought of her self-imposed duties, and if he had
had to choose a patient for her he would probably have chosen anyone
rather than Dare. He was also angry at her unconditional veto on a
trained nurse from Harristown.
To Louise the fitness of her conduct was a matter of so little
consequence that it did not enter her head. In the beginning she saw
that she would have a trying case on her hands. Although her presence
had a soothing effect on Dare, his unfamiliarity with illness made him a
difficult patient, and Louise had to adopt drastic methods, a cross
between bullying and ridiculing him into obedience. Her greatest
difficulty came in changing his wrappings, an operation which had to be
performed with the least possible variation in temperature. Dare
obstructed the task by struggling to free himself, and by trying to
prevent her from bathing him with her lotions.
In one access of delirium he sat up, glared at her with unrecognized
fury, and shouted, “Get to hell out of this room, before I break in your
skull!”
Whereupon she walked straight to the bed, pinned his shoulders to the
pillow, and retorted, “Don’t you say another word till I tell you to; if
you order me out I may go, and if I do there’ll be no one to give you a
drink. Now lie still.”
She held his eyes until she saw a return of lucidity. He collapsed, and
said feebly, “Have I been bad? I can’t have you overhearing me if I
ramble.”
She had overheard many illuminating scraps of confession. “Listen, Mr.
Dare dear,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “If you’re going to get
well soon, you must be perfectly quiet. The rambling doesn’t matter, but
try to fix it in your mind that you mustn’t be rough. You’re so terribly
strong!”
“What’s the use of getting well?” he moaned.
A few moments later his good intentions were consumed in the heat of new
hallucinations. “Is that Claudia?” he shouted. “Oh God, it must be a
thousand in the shade.”
Sometimes he hummed a few bars of a lively melody, in appallingly
unmusical tones. With a remorse that closed her ears to the
grotesqueness of the performance Louise recognized the tune of their
dance.
In a few days the ranch settled down to the new order. Miriam and Keble
made daily visits to the boat-slip, the doctor came as often as he could
arrange the long trip, sometimes remaining overnight, and Mrs. Brown,
her mind on the nights when Mrs. Eveley had sat and held Annie’s hand,
cooked tempting dishes and brought them to the window. She also took
turns at sitting outside Dare’s window while Louise lay down in the tiny
sitting room of the cabin. Twice during the doctor’s visits Louise had
gone for a short gallop, but gave up the practise on learning that Dare
had asked for her during her absence.
At the Castle Aunt Denise ruled with a sway that awed the servants but
failed to produce the industry that Louise could inspire with a much
laxer code. Keble and Miriam, after faint attempts to restore an
unanalyzable comfort that had departed with Louise, fell into step
behind Aunt Denise and were always relieved when the time came to go out
of doors or repair to the library on business. During the first days
Keble had been haunted by a fear that illness would break out in the
house. Once in the middle of the night when he had been awakened by the
sound of crying he ran to the nursery, half expecting to find the monkey
speckled like a trout. Katie, with a trace of asperity, persuaded him
that Baby was only suffering from wind, and this seemed plausible, for
at the height of their wrangle the monkey relapsed into an angelic
slumber, broken only by a motion of lips that implied health of the
serenest and greediest description.
Miriam found a deep, wistful contentment in trying to keep Keble’s mind
occupied. In the evenings Aunt Denise played patience and retired
punctually at ten. Miriam usually remained another half hour at the
piano, then Keble went alone to read in the library with his pipe and a
decanter. He grew more taciturn than she had ever seen him, and this
mood she dreaded, for it stirred the rebellious ego within her which had
grown during the past months to unmanageable proportions.
_En revanche_ Keble had moments when a new side of him came to light, an
amiable, tender side which Miriam had long felt he took too great pains
to suppress. After mornings and afternoons during which each had been
employed in personal work or diversion, after evenings of music or cards
or reading, there was an indescribable charm for her in the recurrence
of Keble’s boyish moods, when his man’s mask was laid aside. It might be
the recounting of some lark at school; it might be an experience in the
trenches or in a corner of Greece or China during his bashful tour of
the world; it might even be an admission of incurable dudishness in the
face of some recent native provocation. Whatever it was, it was the
essential Keble, the Keble whom Miriam might have met in a London
drawing-room. His wife induced playful moods in him, but rarely did the
playfulness Louise provoked keep within the bounds of veiled, correct
irony. For his wife’s delectation Keble rendered his playfulness ever so
slightly frisky, exaggerating the caricature of himself; whereas for
her, Miriam liked to persuade herself, he projected a more ironically
shaded sketch of himself which amused without being distorted.
“It’s such a blessing to have you here, Miriam,” he confessed one
evening. “I should have gone quite dotty alone with Aunt Denise; Louise
and Dare would have come back and found me with a rosary around my neck,
gibbering the names of saints. I believe you were sent to us by some
kind providence of God to be a universal stop-gap in our strange ménage.
I wonder you bear up under the strain.”
She was tempted to say, “I was sent to you not by God but by Walter
Windrom,” but she couldn’t. Nor could she smile, for his timid candor
gave her a pretext for reading into his remark some depth of feeling for
which the tyrant within her clamored. But she succeeded in replying, “Oh
I bear up wonderfully,—so well, in fact, that if everything were to run
flawlessly I think I should be selfish enough to pray for another gap,
that I might stop it!”
The tyrant had forced the words into her mouth, but her anxiety was
dispelled by his manner of taking them. He passed his hand over his hair
and said, whimsically, sadly, “Well, I don’t see any immediate prospect
of gaplessness . . . I suppose most ménages are the same, if you were to
explore into them. They muddle along, sometimes on an even keel, more
often pitching about in cross currents. And I suppose one half of the
ménage always feels that the other half is at fault, and there’s no way
of judging between them, because no two people are born with the same
mental apparatus.”
Disconcerted at the length he had gone, with a characteristic desire to
efface the self-revelatory words, he came abruptly out of the mood by
adding, “Is it apparatuses, or apparati? I see I’ve been talking
nonsense again,—good-night.”
Miriam wished that he had not seen fit to go back on his
semi-confession, but she could not deny herself the comfort his
soliloquy had given her, and for some days it served as a sop to her
tyrant.
She had moments of futile compunction as she saw Louise growing haggard.
Twice a day Miriam appeared at the boat-slip, but quite often Louise had
seized those moments for a short nap, and there was nothing to do but
leave the packets and messages on the jetty and return, or go for a walk
with Grendel. She found in herself a dearth of inspiration when it was a
question of making the day less tedious for her friend. Louise with her
resourcefulness would have thought out endless ways of diverting her,
had she been Dare’s nurse. Miriam had pleaded to be allowed to assist.
It was not only that she wished to spare Louise; she envied her the
opportunity as well as the skill that called into play such magnificent
services. Her own life seemed barren in contrast. Although ten years her
junior, Louise had been at the very heart of life, had loved, been
loved, suffered, given birth, and grown strong through exercise. Miriam
envied her the gruelling experience she was going through. She blushed
to think how incompetent she herself would be in Louise’s place, and how
prudish; but incompetence and prudishness could be outgrown, and she
longed to outgrow them.
She resented the fact that Keble seemed not to notice the degree of
strain on Louise, the dark rings under her eyes, the drawn mouth. Louise
was partly responsible for his failure to see, for whenever he called at
the slip she forced herself to be bright and facetious. But any woman
would have seen through Louise’s brightness, and Keble as a man far less
obtuse than most, ought to have seen through it, ought not to have wrung
their hearts by his casual manner of calling out, in a recent leave
taking, “Don’t overdo it, Weedgie; we mustn’t have _you_ breaking down.”
A night finally came when the little doctor announced that the crisis
was passed, that the patient would recover. Only then did he admit that
he had almost despaired. Had it not been for Louise’s vigilance, Dare
would not have survived a week, for he was one of those giants who often
succumb under the first onslaught of a complication of ailments.
“Louise has been splendid,” Keble acknowledged. “It’s lucky for Dare
that they were such good chums.”
The doctor turned on him with a suddenness that surprised Miriam no less
than Keble. “You don’t understand Louise,” he said. “She would take as
much pains to cure a wounded dog as she would to cure the
Governor-General. She would do as much for the stable boy as she would
do for you; under certain circumstances, more. For she gives her
strength to the helpless. Dare was helpless, body and soul. If you had
watched him tossing and heard him moaning your eyes would have opened to
many things. He was not only physically lost, he was lost in spirit. An
ordinary nurse would have tended his body. Louise has tended his spirit.
By a thousand suggestions she has restored his faith in himself, created
him. For you that spells nothing but the service of a clever woman for a
friend. What do you know about service? What do you know about
friendship? What do you know about the sick man? What do you know about
life? What do you know about Louise? Precious little, my boy!”
The doctor disappeared in a state of exaltation, leaving Keble
bewildered. “There’s a blind spot in me somewhere, Miriam,” he said.
“Can you put your finger on it?”
“I’m afraid we’re both blind,” she said feebly. “At least we haven’t
their elemental clairvoyance. The doctor is doubtless right in his
flamboyant way, and we are right in our pitiful way. We can only try, I
suppose, to be right at a higher pitch.”
“By Jove,” Keble suddenly exclaimed, with a retrospective fear, “it was
a closer shave than we had any idea of. I wonder if Louise realized.”
Miriam smiled bitterly. “You may be quite sure, my dear Keble, that she
did. If you have been spared a great load of pain, you may take my word
for it that it’s Louise you have to thank.”
Keble was pale. In his eyes was the look which Miriam had seen on
another occasion, just before the birth of his son. “Then I do wish,” he
quietly said, “that my friends would do me the kindness to point out
some of my most inexcusable limitations, instead of letting me walk
through life in a fool’s paradise.”
Miriam was ready to retort that even such a wish reflected the _amour
propre_ that determined most of his acts, but she had been touched by
the emotion in his eyes and voice,—an emotion which only one woman
could inspire. “I think we’re all trying desperately to learn the ABC’s
of life,” she said.
She was unnerved by the self-abasement that had stolen into his
expression. For the first time in her life she went close to him and
took his hand in hers. “Don’t mind if I’ve spoken like a preacher,” she
pleaded in a voice which she could control just long enough to finish
her counsel. “The sermon is directed at my own heart even more than
yours.”
He returned the pressure of her hands absent-mindedly, and she sought
refuge in her room.
Keble was restless and turned towards the library through force of
habit. A book was lying face down on the arm of his chair, but after
reading several sentences without hearing what they were saying, he got
up and poured himself a glass of whisky.
He would have gone to the piano, but Miriam’s superior musicianship had
given him a distaste for his own performances. He wandered through the
drawing-room to the dimly-lit hall, and found himself before the
gramaphone. Every one had gone to bed, but if he closed the shutters of
the box the sound would not be loud enough to disturb the household. At
haphazard he chose a record from a new supply.
A song of Purcell’s. He threw himself into a deep chair. The opening
bars of the accompaniment were gentle and tranquilizing, with naïve
cadenza. A naïve seventeenth century melody, which was taken up by a
pretty voice: high, clear, pure.
_Those words!_ He leaned forward, and listened more intently.
“I attempt from love’s sickness to fly—in vain—for I am myself my own
fever—for I am myself my own fever and pain.”
As though a ghost had stolen into the dark room, Keble started slowly
from his chair. His eyes riveted on the machine, he paused, then
abruptly reached forward to stop it, inadvertently causing the needle to
slide across the disk with a sound that might have been the shriek of a
dying man.
For a long while he stood holding the disk. Only when he became
conscious of the startled beating of his heart did he throw off the
spell.
He was staring at the record in his hands—the ghost. He dreaded the
noise that would be made if he were to drop it on the floor,—even if he
were to lay it down carefully and snap it with his heel.
He got up swiftly, unbolted the door, and walked out in the cold air to
the end of the terrace, past the stone parapet, down the grassy slope to
a point overhanging the shore of the lake. Far, far away, through the
blackness, were tiny points of light, marking the location of the
Browns’ cottage. His eyes sought a gleam farther along the shore, but
there was nothing in all that blackness to indicate Miriam’s old cabin.
They were there, perhaps asleep, perhaps wearily wakeful, with only
their souls left to fight for them against some vague, sinister enemy.
Perhaps she was watching over him as he slept; preparing his draughts;
stirring the fire with a little shiver. Perhaps she, too, had been
approached by spectres. Perhaps she was ill, despairing, afraid. Tears
came into his eyes.
He could feel the disk pressing against his fingers, and the tiny hard
rills through which the needle had traced its uncanny message.
“What do you know of the sick man!” Above the mysterious silence of the
night a phantom voice, thin, clear, dainty, was singing the answer into
his understanding: “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain; for
I am myself my own fever and pain.” It could so airily sing, as though
it were a toy song and a toy sentiment, words which were as irrelevantly
indicative as flowers nodding over a grave.
Many years ago he and Walter had played a game called “scaling”. You
chose round, flat pieces of slate and sent them whirling through the
air.
He scaled, and waited for the splashing sound far out on the water.
Poor little record, it had meant well enough.
CHAPTER IV
KEBLE had received a petition signed by Conservatives throughout the
county inviting him to present himself as candidate for the provincial
elections. He had foreseen this, but hesitated to accept the nomination.
In the first place he was barely thirty; in the second place success at
the polls would mean protracted absences from the ranch; in the third
place he was not sure that Louise would approve. He remembered her
saying, apropos of her Uncle Alfred Mornay-Mareuil, “If he had only been
able to control his ambition! Politics is as demoralizing as gambling.”
And Keble quite often took Louise’s remarks at their literal value.
When it came time to select a candidate for the elections, the scattered
Conservatives of the district, knowing that the only hope of making a
showing against their entrenched opponents was to induce Keble Eveley,
with his important holdings and the prestige of his name, to stand for
them, had encountered opposition from the supporters of the mayor of
Witney, who in several consecutive elections had suffered defeat at the
hands of the Liberal candidate, but who had learned to look forward to
his periodical worsting as an agreeable break in the monotony of his
days. The repeated success of the Liberal representative had resulted in
over-confidence on the part of that gentleman. He had been weaned from
his county, had invested his savings in the capital, and returned home
only to collect rents or sell at a substantial profit stock which he had
acquired at bargain prices. A feeling was abroad, among Liberals and
Progressives, as well as Conservatives, that the electors were being
“used for a good thing.”
The Conservative leaders knew Keble through business dealings or
hearsay. Some of them had joined in a deputation to receive Lord Eveley
and Mr. Windrom at Witney. They all saw the wisdom of putting up a
vigorous, intelligent, and earnest young man, and the supporters of the
veteran Conservative candidate, in the hope of a change of luck, ended
by yielding to the suggestion. The official invitation was brought to
Hillside by Pat Goard, the campaign manager, and his henchman, the
editor of the “Witney Weekly News”.
It was on a mild October afternoon. Keble received the delegates in the
library, heard their arguments, and asked for an hour to consider. Aunt
Denise had bowed with frigid graciousness and withdrawn. Keble asked
Miriam to show the visitors over the grounds, then ran down the path to
the jetty, jumped into the launch, and motored across the lake, which
to-day was an expanse of bright blue rippled by the most gentle of
breezes. The slender white trees on the lower shore with their scanty
remnants of pale yellow foliage, the bare branches of other hardwoods,
and the deep rust of the underbrush were the only tangible proofs of the
season. Everything else was gold and sapphire.
As he neared the boat-slip Keble saw that Louise had set up a deck chair
in a sunny patch before the cabin, and had installed Dare in it. It was
his first glimpse of Dare in several weeks and he was shocked at the
wasted face that appeared above the rugs. For the first time he had some
inkling of what the other man had been through, and a wave of compassion
and affection surged through him.
Louise was sitting at Dare’s side, and they were talking quietly,
intimately. Although there was almost a life and death contrast between
the two, Keble was no longer blind to the fact that his wife had worn
herself to a dangerous margin, and while he could approve of her act, in
the sense in which Aunt Denise approved of it, he could not, like Aunt
Denise, look on unmoved. Something in the languor of the scene,
something in the intimacy which seemed to unite the two, aroused a
throbbing ache within him. Like Miriam he had felt futile in the face of
this struggle, and now he almost envied Dare the suffering that had
opened to him a secret garden. He paid blind tribute to whatever force
in Dare,—a force transcending mere personality,—awakened in Louise a
spirit that he had never been able to evoke. “I blunder and obtain
forgiveness,” he reflected, “while Dare is right, and pays terrific
penalties.”
Louise came to the end of the jetty to meet him, and they talked about
Dare’s first day outside the improvised hospital.
“Only for an hour,” she said. “Then he has to go back. But it marks the
beginning of a new era.”
Keble would not let himself speculate on the nature of the new era. “And
you can soon rest,” he said. “Be very careful now. This is the most
dangerous time of all for you.”
She waved away the fear. “Who are those men on the terrace?”
Keble explained their mission. “I’d like you to decide for me.”
She remembered an occasion when Keble had wished her to decide upon
decorations for the Castle, and she had hurt him by her indifference.
As she sat thinking, her arms resting limply in her lap, Keble noted
with a pang the absence of her old elasticity. She looked older, and
tired. He had an impulse to get out of the boat and take her in his
arms. He reflected that a man like Dare, in his place, would have
scouted her precautions. But there was the baby to think of,
and,—cautious men were cautious.
“I’m hesitating,” Louise finally said, “only because I’m timid about
deciding for you. But I don’t mind saying that if you accepted and were
successful the monkey and his grandfathers and I would be highly
gratified.”
Tears came to Keble’s eyes,—an indiscretion which he lost no time in
correcting. “Right-oh! . . . Tell Dare how glad we are to know he’s on
the mend, and find out if there’s anything he’d especially like. The
people in Vancouver wrote that his ticket to Japan will be valid for a
reservation on any later boat . . . Good-bye dear. Miriam and I will
call again after dinner.”
“Bring a volume of Swinburne if you think of it. We’ve been trying to
recall some lines.”
He promised, and she laughed to see him make a methodical note of it.
“Good luck!” she called out, as he started the engine.
“Thanks, old girl. Awfully decent of you to think I may have a chance.”
“It’s in your blood!”
“It’s a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal constituency,” he deprecated. “And what
isn’t Liberal leans towards the Progressive.”
“I’d despise a victory I hadn’t had to fight for!”
“I believe you would,” he laughed, as though her militancy were one of
her amusing caprices.
Miriam’s unwieldy charges were drinking whisky and soda on the terrace,
in preference to tea in the drawing-room.
“How’s the patient?” she inquired.
“Able to sit up and take a little Swinburne,” Keble reported with a
truculence that wasn’t meant to be as unkind as it sounded.
“Consulted the missus, have you?” inquired a business-like campaign
manager.
“I have. The answer is in the affirmative.”
Keble received a thump on the back that made him vividly conscious of
the sort of thing he had now let himself in for. Could he thump, he
wondered. The first attempt was not too great a success, but one would
undoubtedly improve with practise.
“Now let’s get down to tacks,” said Mr. Goard, when further drinks had
been consumed in honor of the event.
The delegates required a message to take back to party headquarters, and
Keble dictated an outline of his political credo, the logic of which was
warmed and colored in conformity with the ejaculated amendments of Pat
Goard.
“Will that do the trick?” Keble finally asked.
“That’ll do for a start,” Mr. Goard replied, and Miriam went to
transcribe her notes at the typewriter.
“Our best to the missus,” said the manager half an hour later as he got
into the car that had brought him to Hillside. “You couldn’t have a
better platform than _her_.” Mr. Goard went on to express the opinion
that it would be the “best fight ever put up”, but added that “those
birds took a lot of beating”.
Keble promised to fight his hardest, and had a final word for the
newspaper man. “Be sure to emphasize that it’s a straight program of
common sense,—without flummery or mud-slinging or rosy promises that
can’t be fulfilled.”
The editor acquiesced, but privately reserved the prerogative of serving
up Keble’s phrases at a temperature and with garnishings adapted to the
Witney palate. He had seen elections won by lungs and knuckles.
“Well,” Keble laughed on returning to Miriam’s side. “That’s done it! Do
you remember the play, ‘What Every Woman Knows’? You’ll have to be
Maggie Wylie and edit my speeches.”
Miriam’s tyrant exulted, but her honesty compelled her to say, “I doubt
whether your supporters will appreciate my genius; it runs to neatness
of copy and pluperfective subjunctives. Maggie Wylie put damns into her
husband’s speeches, and Louise is the only person who can find the
Witney and Valley equivalents. Is there any occasion she can’t rise to,
for that matter?” This last remark was a trifle bitter.
In Keble’s mind was an image of Louise sitting beside her patient,
quoting Swinburne. “We’ll submit our efforts to her,” he agreed. “We’ll
pack Louise into an imaginary hall on the boat-slip, and I’ll stand up
on an imaginary platform and rant. Louise will be the proletariat and
boo, clap, or heckle. Then we shall know where we stand.”
“We are babes in the wood, you and I,” Miriam observed, with a familiar
sense of incompetence.
For days they collected statistics, held consultations with visiting
politicians and office-seekers, wrote and answered letters, made rough
drafts of speeches which were in turn delivered before the “vast
audience of one” on the boat-slip. More than once Keble and Miriam,
seated in the launch, glanced at each other in dismay as Louise tore
their sentences limb from limb.
“It’s beautiful _comme_ argument,” she once commented, “only it lacks
drama. Remember, darling, you have to sway them, not convince them. Once
you get inside the Assembly you may be as cool as a cucumber and as
logical as Euclid, but if you wish the natives to _get_ you there, you
have to tickle and sting them! That argument about neglected roads needs
to be played up stronger. Picture the perils of taking your best girl
for a Sunday drive from Witney to the Valley, with the horse getting
mired and the off wheel starting an avalanche down the side of the
Witney canyon and your best girl rolling down the hill to kingdom come;
then suddenly turn serious and describe what decent roads would do for
everybody, including yourself. Don’t be afraid to make the farmers see
that you yourself have something to gain. Show them how the reforms you
advocate would stimulate your trade as well as theirs and increase the
value of your property.”
After this comment a detailed overhauling of the address in question was
commenced, with Keble dictating and Louise, insinuating metaphors in the
local vernacular. Dare from his deck chair in the distance watched or
dozed until the boat had departed.
“How is the campaign progressing?” he asked after one prolonged
consultation.
“Splendidly. Keble and Miriam are up to their neck in statistics. They
go to Witney to-morrow for a preliminary duster . . . Papa says we’ll be
out of quarantine before election day.”
Dare watched her silently for some time. “Why do you always bracket
their names? You seem to do it deliberately, as though it were a
difficult phrase which you were bent on mastering.”
“It may be.”
“You can confess to me, you know. We’ve proved at least that.”
She patted his hand.
“May I guess out loud?” he asked.
She nodded.
He paused to choose his words. “You feel that Keble and Miriam have
grown to depend on each other in some way analogous to the way in which
you and I depended on each other.”
She did not deny it.
“With us, our relation flared up one day into a white flame which for
you seemed merely to cast a light over your past and future, but which
for me burnt into me till I—began to rave.”
Again she stroked his hand. Lines of fatigue showed in her face, and her
eyes were fixed on the ground.
“For the sake of the good we had brought each other, you felt that when
I,—the weaker of the two as it turned out,—collapsed, you owed it to
me and to yourself to patch my life together again. You felt that we had
gone into an expedition together, an intellectual expedition, and that
one of us had succumbed to an emotional peril. Like a good comrade you
stood by. When you had wrestled with the Angel of Death you made sure
that the Angel of Life should have a fair field. When I was strong
enough to realize what had made life too great a burden, you began
tenderly, wisely, patiently to make me see that, even without the
fulfilment of the greatest boon I had ever craved, life still held
possibilities. You dug up all my old sayings, pieced together my damaged
philosophy which had seemed sufficient in the days before the white
flame burned my cocksure ideas to a crisp, and you made a more beautiful
garment of it than I had ever succeeded in fashioning. You showed me how
I could keep the fragrance of the flower without crushing the flower
itself. You read me passages, God save the mark, from _La Nouvelle
Héloise_ which a few years ago I would have dismissed with a snort, but
in which you made me believe. You read me one of your early poems which
bore to your present wisdom the relation of a chrysalis to a winged
faith and you ended by persuading me that my collapse merely marked the
transition of my old chrysalis of a philosophy into something winged and
courageous like yours,—a transition that cannot be accomplished without
pain. . . . The patience, the love even, that you expended on me ended
by making me see, as you intended it should, that this crisis, my
overthrowing of my angel of selfishness, was a greater blessing than any
blessing which could have grown out of a surrender on our part to the
urge we both felt,—for you did feel it, too, I think . . . You led me
back to my own path by quoting the lines:
_In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,_
_To sleep for a season and hear no word_
_Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,_
_Only the song of a secret bird._
Your faith in me,—a generous faith that wasn’t afraid of caresses,—was
a faith in life, in human decency. And now you are extending it, on some
generous impulse, to another quarter. I think I’m guessing right?”
Louise showed no wish to interrupt him, and he ventured on. “In the
companionship of Keble and Miriam you see something which suggests an
analogy with our relation. We had adventurousness to offer each other;
they have inhibitions to share. You feel that interference on your part
would deprive them of a right you have claimed yourself: their right to
work out some problem of their own; just as interference in our case
would have denied us a privilege of deep understanding and sacrifice.”
He paused for a moment. “That’s my guess. Now may I offer a suggestion,
for what it’s worth?”
“Go on.”
“You have one terrible weakness. In mending another’s life you are
infallible. You are less sure when it comes to taking care of your own.
The thought that you might be prompted by selfish motives would be
enough to make you refrain from interference. But have you the right to
stand by and see two lives drifting on a course that might entail your
own destruction? If you had been able to put yourself irrevocably into
my keeping, that would have been one thing. But you weren’t quite. At
the same time you came far enough in my direction to jeopardize your old
security. If you were to become lost, now, on no man’s land, I should
never forgive myself for letting myself be persuaded by you . . . I’ve
put an extreme case because I know you’re not afraid of facing any
conceivable contingencies.”
“There’s more in it than that,” she finally replied, and her voice
announced a maturity born of suffering. “Because it’s a relationship for
which I am responsible. If I were to get lost on no man’s land, which
isn’t at all likely, it would be a direct result of my objection to
trenches, and no one but myself could be made to pay the penalty of my
recklessness. I brought Miriam here for my own reasons, and kept her
here. Keble and I were traveling independently; for I couldn’t resist
dashing off his pathway whenever the mood seized me. The more liberties
I took, the more obvious it became that Miriam and Keble had a similar
gait. They were always _there_, together. I was glad for Keble’s sake,
and certainly, since I felt free to scamper about in any direction I
chose, I couldn’t deny him the right to the companionship of any one who
could keep in step with him. People _have_ to have companions.
“I have even been glad for Miriam’s sake. Miriam gave me more than I
asked of her. At times I must have got on her nerves. What had she by
way of compensation? By way of penalty she had a gradual alienation from
her old life. I could no more think of destroying her new sources of
interest than I could think of destroying the new sources of interest to
which she brought me the clue. The fact that Keble may have become the
central figure of Miriam’s new interests is an accident over which I
have no control, just as the fact that you became a vital force in my
new enthusiasms was an accident over which Keble had no control, over
which no one but myself had any control, and not even until I had
learned its full significance. Life is an uncharted ocean full of such
reefs; only fools try to sail through them; wise people sail _around_
them. If I’ve learned anything in the last two years I’ve learned that
freedom, like everything worth having, costs heavily; every great
happiness is bought at the price of a great unhappiness. That’s only
fair. And I _won’t be niggardly_ . . . When Keble and Miriam learn the
full significance of their problem, as I have already done, they will
find their own solution. Human liberty means that, if it means anything
. . .
“You and I fought out our issue and came to our conclusion, which
happened to be that our ways lie apart. You have the song of your secret
bird. I have something equivalent,—though it doesn’t exactly sing! If
one has played the game according to one’s own rules, and not
cheated,—not enough to count,—then that in itself puts a sort of
backbone into one’s life . . . At times a lot of horrid little devils
come tripping up through me, tempting me to be cheap and jealous, to
interfere, to kick and scratch,—oh Mr. Dare dear, why do you let me say
all these rubbishy things? I talk like a book of sermons to convince
myself, but the real me is terribly wordless and weak and silly and bad
and preposterous——”
She broke down, and Dare drew her head to his side, stroking her hair
and patting courage into her shoulders.
2
Once Dare was safely on the high road towards recovery his progress was
rapid. Before long he was able to walk into the maze of trails which led
away from the end of the lake, and the day at length came when Dr.
Bruneau lifted the ban.
Clad in fresh garments, Louise and Dare made a bonfire of the clothing
and bedding and books from the cabin. “There go all the outlived parts
of us,” Dare commented as the flames leaped up into the frosty blue-grey
morning air. “We’ll be phoenixes. . . . I shall never be able to express
my gratitude to you; a man has nothing to say to the person who has
saved his life, any more than he has to say to the forces that
originally gave life to him. He can only accept, marvel, venerate, and
use!”
When the fire was low enough to be abandoned with safety, they turned
towards the lake, sharing a sense of freedom and poignant exultation
that could only find expression in a deep sigh. “There’s no sign of the
boat,” Louise said. “Let’s walk. We can take it slowly, and it’s a
glorious morning for walking.”
It was; but Louise couldn’t deny that it would have been pleasant to
have been sought out, this particular morning, to have been called for
and escorted back to the Castle. She would have warmed to some
manifestation of extra thoughtfulness on the morning when all Hillside
knew that she and Dare were to be released from their imprisonment.
Besides, she was tired.
When, hand in hand, they reached the familiar short-cut across the
meadow and saw the house standing out in cold sunlight from the base of
Hardscrapple, Louise felt more keenly than ever before what a beautiful
home she had possessed. The broad terraces and frost-nipped hedges, the
withered flower stocks, the pretty hangings behind polished plate-glass,
the bedroom balcony with its tubs of privet, the smoke ascending from
the chimneys, the perambulator standing outside the door of the
sun-parlor, the road bending away towards the dairy and barns,—it all
held associations for her sweeter than she would have admitted, and her
sense of joy in possession was flavored with a sense of the
precariousness of possession. She recalled one of her introspective
phrases, that “it was inherent in the nature of charm that it couldn’t
be captured or possessed,—except in symbols or by proxy”. How terrible
it would be to find oneself in possession of symbols from which the
charm had departed!
A woman in black appeared at the door and came out on the terrace.
Louise turned suddenly to Dare with a whimsical smile. “If you have only
one funny, cross old lady in the world to represent your stock of
sisters and cousins and aunts, and who really ought to have been a
Mother Superior, you’re obliged to love her, aren’t you?”
Dare judged that you were.
“And if you love Aunt Denise, it’s perfectly obvious you can’t dote on
people like Mrs. Windrom and Ernest Tulk-Leamington and lots of others.
Don’t you agree?”
“I’ll agree fast enough, but I can only take your word that it’s
obvious.”
“She really is pure gold under all that black,—but she’s so far under.”
Aunt Denise waited with outstretched hands. “You are both very welcome!”
she cried, and turned to congratulate Dare. “_Toi, mon enfant_,” she
continued, with her arm about Louise’s shoulders, and using the familiar
pronoun for the first time since her arrival, “_Tu as bien fait. Tu es
vraiment la fille de ton père, et de ta pauvre mère. Du Ciel elle t’a
envoyé du courage._”
Louise went indoors and her eyes feasted on the colorful tapestries, the
shiny spaces, the blazing logs, the flowers, the vases and rugs and
odors, the blue and gold vistas through high window-doors. As she
entered the library Keble and Miriam looked up from a broad table
littered with papers.
Keble came running to greet her. “Why, my dear, we weren’t looking for
you so early! We planned to take the launch and fetch you.”
“Couldn’t wait.” She went to kiss Miriam. “It’s quite all right, dear.
There’s not a germ left. We’ve exterminated the species. How is the
campaign?”
“We’re in the throes of final preparations,” said Keble. “To-night is
the big meeting in the Valley. The telephone has already been humming.
Yesterday our enemies cut the wires; that shows that they dread us.”
“I’ll run off and let you work,” said Louise, “till lunch.”
“It’s to be a gala lunch,” Miriam warned. “Don’t give a single order.
They’re all jubilant at your return,—so are we, dear.”
“Have they been starving you?”
“Do we look starved?”
Louise surveyed them. “No, you look jolly fit. I believe you have got
along quite comfortably without me; I rather hate you for it.”
Keble kissed her. “Go see the monkey,” he suggested. “We’ll be out as
soon as we get through this. Explain to Dare.”
As Louise closed the library door she combated a desire to cry, then
went out not to see the monkey, but a friendly band of slaves that
happened to include Katie Salter, _ergo_ the monkey.
Lunch proved festive. Keble was excited; Miriam played big sister; and
Aunt Denise reigned with clemency. Dare was still far below par, and his
smile was wan; but he was sufficiently his old self to enter the spirit
of the occasion.
Talk turned to politics. “You’ll come to-night, of course?” Keble
invited Louise. “Your father has offered to put us up. We leave for
Witney to-morrow morning. If you’re too tired to go on you can stay at
your father’s till the tumult and the shouting die.”
“What about my patient?”
Dare answered for the patient’s welfare. “In the absence of his hosts,
he will install himself at their table, take second helpings of
everything, then pray for the speedy advent of the next meal, oblivious
to the political destinies of the Dominion.”
“Glad to see your appetite back,” said Keble. “Does a man good to see
you so greedy.”
After a stroll with Keble, Dare came back to the sun-parlor, where he
found Louise checking items in a mail order. He took up a magazine and
lay in the hammock.
“I’m ordering some winter provisions,” she informed him.
“You haven’t let much grass grow under your feet.”
“The grass has become knee-deep since I’ve been away.”
Miriam came to the doorway, but hesitated a moment on hearing this last
remark, which alluded to goodness knew what. “We’re to be ready at
four,” she said. “Keble wonders if you could put tea ahead a half hour.”
Louise got up, giving Dare’s hammock a little shake. “Tea at four
instead of four thirty, do you hear, Mr. Dare dear? Are you thrilled?”
“Couldn’t make it three thirty, could you?”
Louise had caught Miriam’s arm and was towing her into the hall. “Don’t
look so glum,” she commanded. “Let’s find Gertie and tell her tea at
four, then pack our bags.”
“What will you wear?” Miriam asked, surveying Louise’s khaki and
wondering what Louise had meant by “glum”.
“What I have on,” replied Louise.
“What! Riding breeches on the platform?”
“Pooh, everybody in the Valley knows my legs by heart! Besides, an
election eve mass meeting isn’t like a speech from the Throne.”
Miriam was wondering whether she should ask for an explanation of
“glum”, but remained silent as Louise “told Gertie tea at four”, then
led the way upstairs. In Louise’s room, however, the chatter irritated
her, and again Louise intrigued her by saying, “For heaven’s sake,
Miriam, what’s up?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“Something is.”
“Well if it’s anything,” Miriam temporized, “it’s so little that it’s
practically nothing. Besides it’s none of my business.”
“All the more, then.”
“The more what?”
“Necessary to spit it out, darling. Excuse my vulgarity. It’s only my
real nature coming out in the joy of getting away from that shack. If
not your business, probably mine. Fire away.”
“You’ll think me Mrs. Grundyish.”
“Anything to do with the patient?”
“Thanks for helping me. With Mr. Dare _dear_, so to speak.”
“Oh!”
“It’s only that,—well, now you’ve brought him through, shall you need
to be as attentive to him?”
“Conspicuously attentive?”
“It amounts to that.”
“People been saying catty things?”
“People always do.”
“You and I don’t let ‘people’ dictate our actions.”
Miriam stopped to ask herself how much territory Louise’s “you and I”
might be meant to cover. “No,” she assented, “yet there’s something to
be said for not giving people unnecessary topics for gossip, especially
now that the Eveleys are on exhibition. It would be a pity if your
generosity were to be misinterpreted.”
Louise snapped the cover of her bag and sat on a chair facing Miriam.
Her face had become serious. “Miriam, dear, are you sure you know why
you are so agitated about my attentions to Dare?”
Miriam bit her lip. Had Louise guessed that her appeal was in the nature
of a final effort to make Louise intervene between herself and the
tyrant which had been inciting her to snatch at any fact or appearance
favoring the disloyal cause? “Whatever the cause of my agitation, as you
call it, I hope you won’t dismiss my caution as mere meddlesomeness.”
Louise got up and came to place her hands over Miriam’s knees, with an
impulsive yet earnest directness. “Our lives are fearfully unstable,
dear. We’re constantly raising little edifices in ourselves which we
think are solid; then along comes some trickle of feeling and washes the
edifice away, leaving only a heap of sand. The problem is to find
materials within us more reliable than sand, impervious to chance
streams of feeling, with which we can reinforce our edifices, so that
they will see us through a lifetime . . . Only after a series of
washouts do we recognize the necessity of using a durable mortar, and it
takes still longer to discover what materials in us are durable and how
to mix them. We’ve only experience to go by. I don’t think I’m
over-conceited in saying that I’ve learned my lesson; and I don’t think
I’m claiming too much for Dare when I say that he has learned his. In
any case we’re answerable only to ourselves, and I don’t see why any one
need worry.”
Miriam’s agitation was now undisguised, though its cause was not called
into question. Only her impatience restrained her from weeping. “I don’t
understand you,” she finally said. “You have outlandish moods which make
you do outlandish things, then you offer outlandish explanations in the
form of universal laws . . . How are ordinary mortals to be helped by
your offhand statement that the solution of personal complications is to
find some durable material to cement everything together? That’s begging
the question. If you have the durable materials within you, they should
protect you from washouts; on the other hand, if you suddenly find
yourself in a mess and discover simultaneously that you’re nothing but
sand and water, what are you going to do? You can’t borrow concrete from
your neighbors.”
“Yes you can. That’s what churches and philosophy and art and schools
are for. The other name for concrete is Wisdom. There’s heaps of it in
the world; one has only to help oneself.”
“Again you’re begging the question. That wisdom abounds doesn’t imply
that everybody is wise enough to prefer it to folly.”
Louise got up and walked back to her dressing table. “But there, as Dare
once reminded me, is where nature steps in. If people are hopelessly
weak-willed, they have to be cared for and put up with; it’s not their
fault. But nature’s average is quite high on the side of strength. Human
beings are on the whole wise, just as they are on the whole healthy. And
each human being who feels himself weak in spirit can take a spiritual
tonic or go in for spiritual gymnastics, and if he doesn’t get better,
why I suppose he just becomes a spiritual corpse . . . We’re getting
almost morbidly serious about nothing on earth. I haven’t the vaguest
idea what started us,—oh yes, your objection to my Mr. Dare dear. Let’s
go and see if tea’s at four yet.”
“Louise!” Miriam cried, in a half-choked voice. “What a treasure you
are.”
“Don’t be prosy,” said Louise, brushing Miriam’s forehead with her lips.
“That fawn thing of yours wears like iron, doesn’t it. I’m in rags. If
Keble gets in we’ll make him stand us a trip to New York for some duds.”
Miriam was grateful for the delicacy which had led Louise to terminate
her homily with a flippant flourish, thus giving Miriam an opportunity
to withdraw intact from the compromising currents into which she had
nervously forced the interview. But the tyrant felt cheated, and only
subsided at the tea-table when Keble drew Miriam into a final
consultation and Louise challenged Dare to a toast-eating competition.
CHAPTER V
BEFORE Louise had been an hour in the Valley she saw that the election
was not going to be the “walk-over” that Pat Goard was predicting,
despite the solid support which Keble was receiving at the hands of all
the commercial interests. Although she could be contemptuously
disregardful of public opinion, she seldom made the mistake of
misreading it to her advantage, and as she moved about among groups of
idlers in Main Street she intuitively discovered that there was a
formidable undercurrent of opposition to her husband.
It came to her with a shock that part of the opposition was directed at
herself. She knew there were people in the Valley who thought of her as
a “menace”. There were women who resented what they regarded as her
superior airs, her new way of talking, her habit of dashing into town in
an expensive motor. She found that her frivolous treatment of the
far-off Watch-Night service had not been forgotten, had even been
exhumed by people who had boisterously profited by Keble’s hospitality
on the night in question. She discovered that sarcastic equivocations
were being circulated regarding her “sick man” and Keble’s “secretary”.
Further than that, capital was being made of the fact that Keble had
brought laborers from the east to work on his land. This was a
particularly malicious weapon, since Keble had advertised months in
advance for local workmen, and of the few who had offered their
services, he had engaged all who qualified for the work in hand.
She made a rapid computation of her enemies, then a rapid computation of
her friends. Luckily she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Boots to her house
during the visit of her English guests. That had greatly strengthened
the Eveley prestige among the faithful. Mrs. Boots recalled that she was
the first to tell the Eveleys that they should go in for politics. Even
the tongue of the mail carrier’s wife had wagged less carelessly since
Louise had invited Amy Sweet to dinner with a lord. Pearl Beatty, who
had recently become Mrs. Jack Wallace, was a tower of strength for
Keble’s cause, for while the women of the Valley whispered about her,
Pearl’s respectability was now unchallengeable and most of her
detractors owed money to Jack for ploughs and harness bought on credit.
Moreover, Pearl, as a university graduate, could make the untutored
respect her opinion, and she was phenomenally successful on the stump.
The opposing party had, early in the campaign, strengthened their cause
by dropping the man who had represented and neglected them for so many
years, and chosen as their candidate the much more redoubtable Otis
Swigger, proprietor of the Canada House, a director of the Witney bank,
and the holder of many mortgages. Oat was a good “cusser”; he always had
a chew of tobacco for any one amiable enough to listen to his anecdotes;
he was generally conceded to be an enlightened citizen; and he was a
typical product of his district. Moreover, he was popular enough to
enlist the support of many Progressives, who had decided not to put up a
candidate of their own.
For Louise, whose erratic ways of arriving at conclusions in no sense
invalidated the accuracy of the conclusions arrived at, the factor which
made Oat Swigger a dangerous opponent was that she had, for her own
reasons, decided not to invite him and Minnie to what the Valley
referred to as her “high-toned house-warming”. In the drug-store Minnie
had tried to pass her without speaking, her chalky chin very high in the
air. Louise had grasped Minnie’s shoulder, with a smile on her lips but
a glint in her eye, and said, “You’re getting near-sighted Minnie. How
are you?”
“Oh, I’m all right, Smarty!” Minnie had retorted, and broken away.
“Never better in my life!” she flung back.
“For God’s sake touch wood!” Louise had screamed after her, with a wink
for the man behind the counter. “You’re going to vote for us, I hope,”
she said to him.
“Sure thing!” he agreed.
It was with these discoveries bubbling in her mind that she sought out
Keble to present a hasty report before the “monster meeting” in the
Valley town hall.
Keble and Miriam seemed to have taken stock of most of the points she
had observed, but they had thought of nothing as good as the satirical
counters which leaped to her tongue, and in the short interval before
the meeting, Keble jotted down hints.
Of the three, Louise was the only one who was seized with misgivings
when Pat Goard came to say that the hall was full and it was time to go
on the platform. She held Keble back for a moment. “Do let me speak
too,” she pleaded.
Keble laughed and she saw a glance pass between him and Miriam which
seemed to say, “That incurable theatricality cropping out again!”
“I’m afraid there’s no room on the program,” he said.
“As if that made any difference!” she retorted. “It wouldn’t take me
five minutes to say my piece.”
“An extempore address might spoil everything,” he remonstrated. “I’m
using your suggestions; they will be the plums in my pudding.”
She gave it up, but only because the glance between Miriam and Keble had
abashed her. Perhaps it was mere play-acting, she rebelliously
reflected, but it would be first-rate play-acting, and she had meant
every word she had said weeks ago when she had warned Keble that drama
must be infused into politics if he wished to carry the mass.
She sat on the platform in her khaki riding suit and was startled by the
volume of applause which greeted Keble when it came time for his speech.
She was also cut by the hissing and booing which seemed to be
concentrated in the back of the hall, where she recognized a number of
hoodlums, probably paid.
She was also startled by the effectiveness of Keble’s speech. It sounded
honest, and she thrilled to a note of authority in his voice and a
strength in his manner for which she had not given him credit. Miriam
seemed not at all surprised,—but Miriam had heard him speak in public
before.
The audience was attentive, at times vociferously friendly. There were
occasional interruptions and aggressive questions, which Keble found no
difficulty in answering. At the end there was some cheering, and as the
meeting broke up scores of men and a few women came to shake hands with
Keble.
Louise greeted friends and used every acquaintanceship in the interest
of propaganda, but secretly she was panic-stricken. She had seen the
Valley in all its moods, and she knew that this evening’s hearty good
will had not been fired with the enthusiasm that won Valley elections.
She was afraid to meet Keble’s eyes, and was glad that in his flush of
triumph at the cheers and individual assurances, he failed to see her
doubt.
They reached the doctor’s house late in the evening, and went straight
to bed in order to be fresh for the strenuous day at Witney. Louise did
not sleep. She was haunted by the sight of earnest, slightly puzzled,
friendly and unfriendly faces, and by the sound of jeers. Her brain
revolved a dozen schemes, and before she fell asleep she had drawn up a
private plan of campaign.
After breakfast she went to the bank and cashed a cheque. Then she made
a round of the garages and stables and hired every available conveyance.
While Keble was talking with groups of men in the town, she was using
every minute, unknown to him, to collect influential members of the
community and make them promise to travel to Witney for the final rally
that evening. The cars and wagons were to leave an hour after her
husband’s departure. Nothing was to be said to him about the scheme, for
she was reserving it as a surprise. Her conscience told her it was what
Keble would spurn as “flummery”. Well, it was a flummery world.
After dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Witney, followed by anteroom
interviews, Keble and his band of supporters, to the blare of trumpets
which made Miriam conceal a smile, proceeded to the Arena, a wooden
edifice with a false front rising proudly above the highest telephone
poles. Flags, posters, slogans, confetti, and peanut shells abounded.
There were argumentative groups outside the doors, while within, every
available seat was taken and already there was talk of an overflow
meeting. Louise had had the satisfaction of seeing her phenomenal
procession of cars, wagons, and beribboned citizens from the Valley
swarm into the town, headed by the Valley band. It had taken all her
skill to prevent Keble from discovering the ruse. Later on he would find
out and be furious. For the moment she didn’t care what he thought.
Besides, it wasn’t bribery to offer people a lift over a distance of
thirty-five miles to listen to a speech. She wasn’t bribing them to
vote; they could vote for or against, as their feelings should dictate
after she had got through with them. Moreover, even if it was trickery,
she had used her own money,—not Keble’s. She smiled at the reflection
that Walter’s predictions were coming true; how it would have amused him
to see her being, with a vengeance, “one decent member of society”!
The applause on Keble’s appearance was not deafening. After all, Witney
was less well acquainted with Keble than the Valley, even though it had
pleasant recollections of the compliments uttered by his father from the
back platform of a governmental railway carriage. Keble’s address was
similar to former addresses, though throughout this final day he had
brought together concise counter arguments to new attacks, and had
prepared a damaging criticism of his opponent’s latest rosy promises. He
was more than cordially received, but again Louise felt the absence of
enthusiasm which represents the margin of a majority.
When he had resumed his seat, Mr. Goard, in accordance with a secret
plan, called on Mrs. Eveley, to the amazement of Miriam and Keble, and
to the wonderment of the big audience, who had had three serious
speeches to digest and who sensed in the new move a piquant diversion.
“Last night,” Louise began, “I asked my husband to let me speak at the
Valley mass meeting, and he objected. So, ladies and gentlemen,
to-night, I didn’t ask his permission at all. I asked Mr. Goard’s, and
as you all know, Pat Goard could never resist a lady.”
Already she had changed the mind of a score of men who had been on the
point of leaving the hall.
“I wouldn’t give my husband away by telling you he refused, unless it
illustrated a point I wish to make. The point is that no matter how hard
a man objects,—and the better they are the more they do object,—his
wife always takes her own way in the end. Not only that, ladies and
gentlemen, but the wife adds much more color to her husband’s public
policies than the public realizes. You’ve heard the proverb about the
hand that rocks the cradle. I don’t for a second claim that the average
wife is capable of thinking out a political platform; certainly I
couldn’t; but she is like the irritating fly that goads the horse into a
direction that he didn’t at all know he was going to take. What it all
boils down to is this: when you elect Keble Eveley at the polls
to-morrow, you’ll elect me too. And if you were by any mischance to
elect Oat Swigger, you’d be electing Minnie Swigger. Minnie Swigger is a
jolly good girl, one of my oldest friends. But the point is, ladies and
gentlemen, I can lick Minnie!”
Shouts of laughter interrupted her. Miriam and Keble had ceased being
shocked. However much they might deprecate her sops to the groundlings,
they were hypnotized by her control of the mass which had a few minutes
earlier been heterogeneous and capricious. Her direct personal allusions
had dispelled a hampering ceremoniousness that had prevailed all
evening.
“Once when we were girls together at the Valley school,” Louise
continued, seeing that her audience appreciated the reference to Mrs.
Swigger. “I _did_ lick her. I had more hair for her to pull, and she
made the most of it. But I had a champion’s uppercut. Now gentlemen,
when you go to the polls to-morrow, don’t back the wrong girl.”
She took a step nearer the row of lamps and held them by a change of
mood. “A little while ago somebody said that Keble Eveley was a dude. If
he were, his wife would be a dude too; and though I’ve come up against a
lot of rough characters in my time, nobody has yet been mean enough to
call me a dude to my face; things said behind your back don’t count. So
now, man to man, is there anybody here who has the nerve to call us
dudes? If there is let him say it now, or forever hold his peace.”
There was a silence, then a shuffling sound directed attention to a
corner, whence a facetious voice called out, “His father’s a sure enough
dude, ain’t he?”
Louise darted a glance to see who had spoken, paused a moment, smiled,
and took the audience into her confidence. “It’s Matt Hardy,” she
announced. “Matt’s a clever boy (Matt was fifty and weighed fifteen
stone), but like many clever people he overshoots the mark. Matt says
Keble Eveley’s father is a dude; and his obvious implication is that we
are therefore dudes. For the sake of argument, let’s admit that Lord
Eveley is a dude——”
“A damn fine dude at that,” interposed a friendly voice.
“A damn fine dude,” echoed Louise. “We’ll admit that.” She wheeled
around with dramatic suddenness, facing Matt’s corner. “Now Matt Hardy’s
father used to live in Utah. The obvious implication is that Matt is a
Mormon with six concealed wives.”
There was a howl of enjoyment while the discomfited Matthew tried to
maintain a good-humored front against the nudges with which his
neighbours plagued him. The success of the sally lay in the fact that
every one knew Matt for a bachelor who paid his taxes and enjoyed an
immaculate reputation.
Louise’s spirits rose as she leaned forward over the lights and focused
attention again by a gesture of her arms.
“It doesn’t in the least matter whether we’re dudes or not,” she said.
“You’re going to elect us anyway. Bye and bye I’ll tell you why. My
husband told you some of the reasons, but there are a lot of others he
hadn’t time to touch on. Never mind that now. Before I get to the
reasons I must sweep the ground clear of objections. That’s the quickest
way. I’ve disposed of one. Are there any other objections to us as your
representatives in the Legislative Assembly? Any more objections, Matt?”
Matt was still smarting. He had been harboring a desire for revenge. But
his wits stood still under provocation.
“Matt’s cartridges are used up,” she announced, turning away.
“No they’re not,” he shouted, with a sudden inspiration. “You’re
French.”
His voice was drowned by a chorus of jeers. Louise motioned for silence,
then smiled imperturbably. “That’s what Minnie Swigger said, ladies and
gentlemen. That’s what we fought about. And Minnie was half right. But
only half. She overlooked the fact that _me mother was Irish_!”
The success of this was almost too great. It threatened to rob the
session of its seriousness. After the first delight had simmered down,
individuals were suddenly seized with a recollection of the wink and the
brogue and burst into renewed guffaws or slapped their legs with
resounding thwacks.
Louise saw the necessity of counteracting this levity, and for several
minutes talked straight at the issue, pointing out the practical changes
that had come about as a result of her husband’s efforts to civilize and
develop his district, and the far-reaching improvements that he, of all
people, was in a position to effectuate. She heard herself enunciating
facts and generalizations which had never occurred to her before. Once
again, as in the case of Billy Salter’s funeral, she found herself
thinking in public more rapidly and concisely than she had ever thought
in private. And under the surface of it all was a wonderment that she
should be so passionately supporting Keble in a plan that had been
distasteful to her.
Only once she relieved the tenseness by another flash of humor, when,
referring to the candidature of Otis Swigger, she said that while Oat’s
barber shop in the Valley had always been recognized as a public forum,
Oat would be at a distinct disadvantage in Parliament, because he
couldn’t lather the faces of the other members, consequently no one
would be obliged to listen to him.
She brought her address to a climax with the instinct of an orator, just
when the whole audience had settled down comfortably for more.
She paused a moment, exulting in the silence, then, changing from an
earnest to a girlish manner, she dropped her arms and said quietly,
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, you still have twelve hours to think over
the truth of all I’ve said. Are you going to vote for us?”
The answer was in an affirmative that shook the rafters of the Arena and
made Miriam turn pale. The air was charged with an enthusiasm which for
Louise, as she sank back exhausted, spelt Majority. Keble was forced to
acknowledge the prolonged acclamation, and Pat Goard quickly followed up
the advantage with a few words of dismissal.
Excitement and lack of sleep, following on her long ordeal, had
overtaxed Louise. She felt weak and a little frightened as she walked
towards a side door in a deserted back room of the building, followed by
Keble, who came running to overtake.
“I know it was cheap,” she quickly forestalled him, “but I couldn’t help
it.” He seemed to have been subdued by the pandemonium she had let
loose, as though suddenly aware that he had been satisfied with too
little until she gave a demonstration of what pitch enthusiasm could and
must be raised to. “It’s my love of acting,” she added. “I hope you
weren’t annoyed.”
Keble was in the grip of a retrospective panic. “Why am I always finding
things out so late!” he cried, with a profound appeal in his voice. “I’m
always walking near a precipice in the fog. Why can’t I see the things
you see?”
Her fatigue made her a little hysterical. “Why do you keep your eyes
shut?” she retorted.
A cloud of feeling that had been growing heavier for weeks burst and
deluged Keble with the sense of what his wife meant to him. He saw what
a jabber all social intercourse might become should she withhold her
interpretative affection from him or expend it elsewhere. He had long
been restive under her continued use of the weapon of polite negativity
with which he had originally defended himself against her impulsiveness.
Now he longed to recapture the sources of the old impulsiveness, to
defend them as his rarest possession, and his longing was redoubled by a
fear that it was too late.
“Why——” he commenced, but his voice broke and he reached out his arms.
It was dark. She was dazed, and seemed to ward him off.
“Then what made you do it?” he finally contrived to say. “You’ve saved
the day, if it can be saved. Not that it really matters. Why? Why? Why
not have let me blunder along to defeat, like the silly ass I am?”
“No woman likes to see her husband beaten,” she replied, in tired,
tearful tones, “by a barber!” she added.
“Louise!” he implored, in a welter of hopes, fears, and longings that
made him for once brutally incautious. He caught her into his arms, then
marvelled at the limpness of her body. He turned her face to the dim
light, and saw that she had fainted.
2
Not until Dare had been driven to Witney, there to entrain for the
coast, did Louise give in to the weariness with which she had been
contending for many days prior to Keble’s election. Only her
determination to spare Dare the knowledge that she had overtaxed her
strength for him kept her from yielding sooner. On the day of his
departure she retired to her bedroom, drew the blinds, got into bed, and
gave an order that nobody should be admitted. They might interpret her
retirement as grief at Dare’s departure if they chose; for the moment
she didn’t care a tinker’s dam what any one thought.
Aunt Denise discouraged Keble’s immediate attempt to telephone for Dr.
Bruneau. “She doesn’t need medicine,” she said, “but rest. Leave her to
me; I understand her temperament.”
Once more Keble and Miriam could only pool their helplessness.
“We had better leave matters in her hands,” Miriam decided. “The
Bruneaus seem to be infallible in cases of illness.”
Keble was only half reassured. “Usually when Louise has a headache that
would drive any ordinary person mad, she goes out and climbs
Hardscrapple. I have a good mind to telephone in spite of Aunt Denise.”
“If you do,” said Miriam, “Louise will be furious, and that will only
make matters worse. It’s merely exhaustion. Even I have seen it coming.”
“I wish to God I’d fetched a nurse from Harristown when Dare was ill.”
“Louise wouldn’t have given up her patient if you had imported a dozen.”
Keble was vexed and bitterly unhappy. “What are you going to do with a
woman like that!” he cried. “I don’t mind her having her own way; but
damn it all, I object to her doing things that half kill her. That’s
stupid.”
One of the most difficult lessons Miriam had learnt in her long
discipleship under Louise was how and when to be generous. She saw an
opportunity and breathed more freely. “I think it’s cruel of you to call
her sacrifice stupid. If she breaks down it is not that she has
undertaken too much; but that other people undertake so little. When
Louise resolved to nurse Dare she did it because there was, as she said
to me, no one else. But during that period she was putting the best
brain-work into our campaign. The minute she was free she went to the
Valley, worked like a horse, and turned the tide single-handed because,
as she might have put it, there was nobody else. She thinks and acts for
us all. It isn’t our fault if we are not alert enough to live up to her
standard, but the least we can do when she becomes a victim to our
sluggishness is to refrain from blaming her.”
“Well, Miriam, I give it up! I don’t understand Louise; I don’t
understand Aunt Denise; I don’t even understand you. You women have one
set of things to say for publication, and then disclose amendments which
alter the color of the published reports. Each new disclosure rings
true, yet they don’t piece together into anything recognizable. I no
sooner get my sails set than the breeze shifts. . . . There’s only one
thing left for me to do, and that is to go on as I began, just crawling
along like a tortoise, colliding into everything sooner or later. By the
time I’m eighty I may have learned something and got somewhere. If not
I’ll just stumble into my grave, and on my tombstone they can write,
‘Poor devil, he meant well’.”
Miriam had been laughing at the funny aspect of his misery, but her
smile became grim. “That isn’t a bad epitaph. I wish I could be sure
that I’ll be entitled to one as good.”
Keble glanced at her curiously. “You’re morbid, Miriam. I don’t wonder,
with the monotony of our life here.”
“No,” she corrected, despite the tyrant. “The life here has done more
than anything to cure me of morbidness. Although, to tell the truth, I
wasn’t conscious of the morbid streak in me until after I’d been here
for a while.” To herself Miriam explained the matter with the help of a
photographic metaphor: Keble’s personality had been a solution which
brought out an alluring but reprehensible image on the negative of her
heart; Louise’s character had been a solution which had gradually
brought out a series of surrounding images which threw the reprehensible
image into the right proportion, subordinating it to the background
without in any way dimming it. Miriam was now forced to admit that one
overture on Keble’s part, one token of a tyrant within him that
reciprocated the desire of her tyrant, would have sufficed to overthrow
all her scruples.
“I don’t see what you mean,” said Keble.
Miriam thought for a moment. “You deserve an explanation. I can’t
explain it all; it’s too personal.” She had almost said too humiliating.
“But I’ll make a partial confession. Louise imported me here long ago as
a sort of tutor, at her expense. You weren’t to know; but it can’t do
any harm to give the game away now. While I was supposed to be tutoring
her, I was really learning. By watching Louise I’ve learned the beauty
of unselfishness, trite as that may sound. I can’t be unselfish on
Louise’s scale, for I can’t be anything on her scale, good, bad, or
indifferent. But like you I can mean well, and since I’ve known Louise I
can mean _better_.
“You sometimes speak of Louise’s play-acting. When your people were here
we once said that she was having a lovely time showing off. I know
better now. I’m convinced that she was trying, in her own way, to
reflect distinction on you, just as I’m convinced that when she
jerrymandered the proletariat she was going it in the face of bodily
discomfort and your disapproval simply because she couldn’t bear the
thought of your being disappointed. I don’t think either of us has given
Louise enough credit for disinterestedness, chiefly because she doesn’t
give herself credit for it. She prates so much about her individual
rights, that we assume her incapable of sacrificing them. At times we’ve
mistaken her pride for indifference. Do look back and see if that isn’t
so. I’m inclined to think that even her present illness is merely the
nervous strain consequent upon some splendid reticence.”
Miriam paused, unable to confess that the reticence had to do with
herself, as she suspected it had. She saw that she had permission to go
on.
“Then her interest in Dare. That, you and I have avoided referring to,
and I think we were a little hypocritical. But the core of the secret is
connected with Dare, and I can’t do Louise the injustice of not telling
you. It was unpardonable of me to listen, but I did. I was in the
sun-parlor, in the hammock, dozing, and she and Dare came and sat by the
fire in the hall. The door was open.”
“When was this?”
“Only yesterday. They were talking about the elections. ‘When I saw all
those idiots wavering between Oat Swigger and Keble,’ she said,
‘something snapped. From that moment I had only one determination: to
make them feel the worth of all the things Keble stood for in the
universe’ . . . The conversation swung around to the monkey. She told
Dare, as she had long ago told me, that before the monkey arrived she
hoped he would be a boy, not for her sake, but to gratify his
grandfathers. Then when he did turn out a boy, she was amazed to find
herself thankful for your sake. The grandfathers were forgotten, but she
was indifferent. Then after the elections she was for the first time
conscious of cherishing the monkey for her own sake. That feeling grew
until she suddenly resented your rights in him. Then yesterday she took
it into her head to bathe the monkey, and had an insane delusion that
she could wash off his heredity,—scrubbed like a charwoman till the
poor darling howled. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘I was sorry, and by the time I
had got on all his shirts I felt that I had put his heredities on again,
and was glad and kissed him and he flapped his arms and squealed. Then I
cried, because, deep down, I was terrified that perhaps Keble might some
day, if he hasn’t already, resent _my_ contribution to the monkey’.”
Miriam waited. “I couldn’t resist passing on that monologue to you, for
it seems the most complete answer to many criss-cross questions, and
Louise might never have brought herself to let you see. It would be
impudent of me to say all this had we not formed a habit out here of
being so criss-crossly communicative, and if you hadn’t tacitly given me
a big sister’s licence. Anyway, there it is, for what it’s worth. At
least I mean well.”
Keble was too strangely moved to trust his voice, and walked out of the
house to ride over the rain-soaked roads.
That was the most bitter moment that Miriam had ever experienced. She
had come to know that Keble had no emotion to spare for her; but that he
should fail to see into her heart, or, seeing, refuse her the barest
little sign of understanding and compassion,—it was really not quite
fair.
She had letters to write. She had decided to leave, but apart from that
her plans were uncertain. Her most positive aim was to avoid living with
her old-fashioned aunt in Philadelphia. Grimly she looked forward to a
process of gradual self-effacement. In two or three years she would
probably not receive invitations to the bigger houses. Then there would
be some hot little flat in Washington, on the Georgetown side, with
occasional engagements to give lessons in something,—at best a post as
social secretary to the wife of some new Cabinet Member full of her
importance. Something dependent, and dingy. Each year would add its
quota to an accumulation of dust on the shelves of her heart. And with a
sigh she would take down from a shelf and from time to time reread this
pathetic romance in the wilderness. From time to time she would receive
impulsive invitations from Louise, and would invent excuses for
declining. Perhaps, some years hence, when she could view the episode
with some degree of impersonality and humor, she would write a long
letter of confession to Louise. In advance she was sure of absolution.
That was her only comfort.
Dare had guessed her secret, and she had been too hypocritical to take
him into her confidence. Now that he was gone she regretted that she had
not been flexible enough to enter into the spirit of his overture. By
evading, she had not only screened her own soul, but denied
commiseration to him. In future she would try to be more alert to such
cues. She wondered whether inflexibility might not have had a good deal
to do with the barrenness of her life. She even wondered whether at
thirty-five one would be ridiculous in vowing to become flexible,—would
that be savoring too strongly of the old maids in farces?
From her window, as she was patting her hair into place before going
down to tea, she caught sight of Keble’s tall, clean figure dismounting
at the edge of the meadow. Katie was passing along the road with the
perambulator, and Keble went out of his way to greet the monkey. His
high boots were splashed with mud. His belted raincoat emphasized the
litheness of his body. The face that bent over the carriage glowed from
sharp riding against the damp air. The monkey was trying to pull off the
peak of his father’s cap, and Keble was pretending to be an ogre. Katie
looked on indulgently.
“Even Katie,” thought Miriam, “puts more into life than I do.” A few
months before, Miriam would have thought, “gets more out of it.”
The mail had been delayed by the state of the roads. Miriam found a
letter from London. When tea was poured she read as follows:
“My dear Miss Cread: I don’t know whether you are still at Hillside or
whether you will be at all interested in the suggestion I am about to
make, but I am writing on the off chance. My old friend Aurelie
Graybridge is leaving soon on a visit to America. Yesterday, during a
chat with her, I happened to mention your name. She recalled having met
you some years ago, and inquired minutely after you. She has been
looking for a companion to help her keep the run of her committees, and
so forth. For several years a cousin was with her, but her cousin
married and that leaves her with no one. I suggested that you might be
induced to go to her, and she asked me to sound you.
“You would divide your time between England and the continent. The
duties would be light, chiefly correspondence. A good deal of spare
time; travelling and all expenses provided, and a decent allowance.
“Aurelie plans to sail next week. I’m enclosing her address. Please
write her if the idea appeals to you. I hope it may, for that will mean
that I shall be likely to see you from time to time. You may of course
have much more interesting plans, in which case don’t mind this
gratuitous scrawl.”
It was signed by Alice Eveley. Miriam restored the letter to its
envelope, and was thankful that Keble and Aunt Denise were too occupied
to notice her face.
Her anger was redoubled by the realization that the offer was too good
to be turned down. She knew she would end by despatching an amiably
worded letter to Mrs. Graybridge, then write Keble’s sister a note
thanking her for her kind thoughtfulness.
“The cat! Oh, the cat!” she was saying under her breath.
3
In the third week of December Keble returned to Hillside after his first
session in the Provincial Assembly. He had been loth to leave his wife
at the ranch, but she had been too weak to accompany him and was still
somewhat less energetic than she had formerly been. Keble found her on a
divan in her own sitting room, with the monkey propped up beside her.
“It’s just as you said it would be,” he remarked. “Having to waste
precious weeks in that dull hole makes the ranch so unbelievably
wonderful a place to come back to!”
When the first questions had been answered, Louise held up a prettily
bound little volume from which she had been reading. “Look! A Christmas
present already,—from Walter Windrom. A collection of his own verse.”
Keble admired it, then Louise, in a tone which she succeeded in making
casual, said, indicating one of the pages, “That’s a strange sort of
poem, the one called ‘Constancy’. Whatever made Walter write a thing
like that?”
Keble read the poem. “I’ve seen it before. It’s quite an old one. Girlie
clipped it from some review or other and sent it to me.”
“What does it mean?” Louise insisted.
“How should I know?” he laughed. “Girlie had a theory about it. Walter
was smitten with an American actress for a while,—what was her name?
Myra something: Myra Pelter. She treated him rather shabbily. Took his
present, then threw him down for somebody else, I believe, after they’d
been rather thicker, as a matter of fact, than Girlie quite knew. Walter
is romantic, you know, for all his careful cynicism; he’s always singing
the praises of bad lots, and that makes Girlie wild, naturally. Girlie
said the poem was Walter’s attempt to justify this Myra person’s uppish
treatment of him, an attempt to make her out a lady with duties to
art,—all that sort of blether. It’s Girlie’s prosaic imagination: she
can never read a book or a poem without trying to fit it, word for word,
into the author’s private life. I had quite forgotten its existence.”
It was difficult for Louise to conceal her relief after years of pent-up
unhappiness caused by her over-subjective interpretation of the poem’s
mission. “How could a man as clever as Walter ever take Myra Pelter and
her art seriously. Miriam and I went to see her once. She’s only a
Japanese doll!”
“Dolls are an important institution. They have turned wiser heads than
Walter’s.”
Louise looked again at the historical lines. “I hate it,” she mildly
remarked.
“Tell Walter so—not me!”
“Oh no,” she sighed. “The poor little lines meant well enough.”
While her remark did not make sense to him, it seemed an echo of
something he had once said to himself; it brought a dim recollection of
pain.
“But I _would_ tell him at a pinch,” she continued. “I’m no doll that
says only the ugly things for which you press a button in its back!”
“Ungainly sentence, that!”
He remembered now. It was the ghostly little gramaphone record, that had
brought him a message about Dare.
“It’s an ungainly subject,” she retorted, absent-mindedly.
“Change it then. There’s always the monkey.”
“Yes, there’s him. Aren’t you glad?”
“Rather! . . . I don’t suppose anything could be done about his legs.
They’re as curved as hoops. If he ever tries to make a goal he’ll have
to stand facing the side-lines and kick sideways like a crab.”
Louise buried her nose in the monkey’s fragrant dress and shook him into
laughter. She was languidly wondering where her own goal was, whether it
was still ahead or whether, as Walter had so discouragingly predicted,
she would find it at her starting post. She was happy; but she suspected
that she was happy only for the moment. The complacence with which Keble
had accepted their revival of interest in each other was already
stirring a little singing restlessness of nerves within her. He so had
the air of having won the race. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he always
would. But she was none the less hare-like, for all that! She looked
into the monkey’s eyes. “Tell your daddy,” she said, “the important
thing is to _make_ the goal,—whether you do it sideways or frontways or
whatever old ways!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.