"TERRY!"
Evening came heavily, the river, flattened to an unearthly yellow
calm, had thrown back all day field-heaviness, the prolific scent of
grasses. The house was hot, the trees held lax droop of layered leaves.
Languidly in the tepid air moved hundreds of unseen little ships of
pollen, bringing to human breathing a thickness as of a new element.
The fire-flies carrying their lanterns slowly up from dark grass,
clotted beneath a shrub, or hung in tiny constellations by a tree;
while out on the roadways the black automobiles rolled pompously like
haughty monsters whose eyes, scornful and contemptuous, looked far
ahead past all poetry of tree and water toward future summer nights
when all the world should be a shattering brilliance of moving engines.
The house seemed to ache with loneliness and the desolation of souls
at variance. There was no noisy gathering of the Bunch on the porch
of the Judge's home. Miss Aurelia worried over the absence of Minga
and Dunstan. She had retired early to "collect her thoughts," she told
herself, supporting this enterprise by taking with her a novel by which
her friend, Mrs. Spoyd, set great store and which, so its owner told
Miss Aurelia, contained "not one unpleasant thing." Miss Aurelia who
read a chapter out of "Something" every night, now read a blissful
chapter out of this novel. Here there were such minute descriptions
of crockery and curtains as delighted her soul; here married people
all "got on" well; in this book the children arrayed in fresh pinks
and blues played happily with clean spools or pretty blocks against
backgrounds of hollyhocks. The little brooks ran without roiling, mad
dogs kept away from villages and arranged their lives to be killed when
convenient by intrepid lads educated for the purpose. The minister was
handsome, good and healthy, and said what was expected, the doctor
cured all fractures whether of skull or mind, the tax collector sent in
his bills only when people had the money, and the young people sprang
up together in couples like Noah's ark and married and started on a
wonderful advertisement-perfected housekeeping.
"Why?" asked Miss Aurelia, yawning and settling down for the night.
"Why don't more people write pleasant books and plays like this? I
think all writers who write disagreeable things should be snubbed and
made to feel uncomfortable, they should not be asked to dinner nor
treated politely in any way until they stop writing about slums and
dirty people and of unpleasant married problems. That," said Miss
Aurelia, putting out the light, "would soon discourage them from
writing horrid books, and then life would become normal and we should
forget the things we don't want to think about. I should think,"
soliloquized Miss Aurelia, putting her handkerchief under her pillow,
"that writers should realize that unless they write only about normal
things that they will never be popular."
It was after ten, but Sard had not gone up-stairs, yet the figure of
the Judge, sitting aloof in one corner of the piazza, smoking and
staring at the river, magnetized while it antagonized her. Her father
had not spoken to her since the day Colter went away. The girl believed
that he knew in some way that she had met Colter after his forbidding
it. She could explain the seeming disobedience of this final interview.
She wanted to explain it. With all the misery of her young heart she
wanted to explain.
Sard, moving wistfully under the great trees, looked up into the
branches spread over her. "What are your laws?" she asked as of old.
The girl, hot with surging new things, with new blind impulses and
passions, asked but one thing, to be true to a law, to the highest
laws of all, yet the great law that called men and women fiercely,
insistently to each other seemed to be set forever at variance with
other laws, laws that those same men and women themselves had made and
sustained. What should one be faithful to, what repudiate?
"What shall be my laws?" whispered the girl. She felt trembling that
fierce law of blood and ardent spirit that bade her follow Colter now,
get to him if she could, this night! Sard looked up, her eyes wide, her
body swept on the tidal streams of summer night, her tremulous being
still vibrated to the remembered clasp of a man's hand, of the sense of
mystery surrounding that man, his unuttered call to her.... His truth
for her truth.
The isolation of youth, such as Sard's, is very great. No human hand
can help it. It walks a way of loneliness that glimmers and is drenched
with strange lights that bewilder and if it comes to any help at all it
is the knowledge of the glory of loneliness, the glory of the fighter,
who at last prefers the sense of ambush and the hazard of the wrong
trail. Who prefers to pierce the jungle and fight his way out into a
clearing--alone.
Yet to those who question the night, that time when the earth is
abandoned by its one angel, the sun, there comes inevitably out of the
dreaming quiet the one word, Patience.
"Our law is Patience," said the trees to Sard. The girl, a swift hand
passed over her eyes, went in by way of the terrace; she passed the
dark form sitting there; half pushing herself, half afraid she tiptoed
toward it, to make peace, to ask forgiveness. Then, as softly, she
tiptoed back; for deep in her heart Sard knew that there would be only
one condition of forgiveness, that she repudiate the best and dearest
thing that had come into her life, she must give up Colter.
Now passion swept over against any calm she could win, the girl saw
vehemently that one man's face with the look of gentleness and dumb
pain. "I can't give him up," she said fiercely. Sard drew a long
breath; she began climbing slowly up-stairs to bed.
As she stood at the foot of the tower room stairs the hall clock struck
eleven; there was a sudden whir of wheels and lights on the drive
outside; she heard indistinctly lowered voices of men, some long thing,
covered, was taken to the kitchen, sudden stir and commotion ran like
wild fire through the house.
Like a spell the summer night was breathless and Sard was aware of
heat and suffocation in her own throat; the telephone began ringing,
a man's voice speaking with the Judge. Her father's questions and
commands were issued curt, annoyed, angry and then finally hushed and
with a knife-like anxiety the girl flew to the head of the lower stair;
there were slow footsteps coming up into the upper hall. The light fell
upon a stretcher,--Dunstan--his boyish head bloody, his mouth slightly
open. Two men climbing gently with something collapsed and, stricken in
their arms, the little huddled form of Minga. Suddenly from the kitchen
Dora's piercing wail, "Terry! Terry!"