So there were Rosamond and Janet and the Kid, all tragically unhappy,
each in his own way; and Nugent, playing his game according to his own
rules, one of which was that a revoke was not a revoke unless it was
called, and walking through the collective disapproval of the ranch
without recognising that it existed. The boil, in the Old Man’s
language, was slowly coming to a head and causing considerable loss of
sleep and general misery meanwhile.
Craps in daytime, cards at night occupied the outfit’s leisure.
Slim would stand, bones in his left hand, two fingers of his right
extending upward, and beseech, “Allah be Allah, dice be dice!”
Al, squatted on the floor, would pronounce cryptically, “Read’m’n’weep,”
which is translated into, “Read them and weep.”
Mrs. Allenby fought her eternal fight with field mice and pack rats.
Early rising dudes in wrappers and slippers, clutching soap and towels,
hurried to the bath houses to get what one cynical woman termed the
first rim on the tub, and here and there some dashing gentleman wore a
snake rattle in his hatband.
In a word, the season was well along. And then the boil came to a head.
Janet was pretty sick of her own game by that time, and was not sleeping
any better than the Kid; but she had, in effect, got a bear by the tail
and couldn’t let go. Up to that time, too, Nugent had been skilful
enough to keep their companionship on a purely friendly basis. It had
not taken him long to find that the girl’s theatrical and worldly
contacts had not touched her.
She had, however, definitely resolved to break the thing up. She was
surfeited with revenge, and it was dust in her mouth, after all. She
hated herself and she was close to hating Nugent. She started out that
day, indeed, with the definite intention of making a complete confession
and facing an unpleasant hour to save her own soul.
And it may be said for Crosby Nugent that he, too, realised that things
could not go on as they were; that he stood ready, in that height of his
infatuation, to break with Rosamond and to ask Janet to marry him. Like
the Kid the year before, he was carried away by a new type of girl. His
imagination was excited. And Janet was a blood-stirring little figure,
with her apparently reckless horsemanship and that sort of cool defiance
with which she now faced the world.
Any pretext answered with him for a ride with her, and this day he was
going gold hunting. He had all the Easterner’s conviction that the
mountains of the West were full of hidden wealth, which it required the
higher intelligence of the East to discover, and they started for that
final ride armed with pan and hammer, saddlebags and luncheon.
Just what happened cannot be known precisely. Apparently they lunched
together in amity, and he took up his gold hunting again. They were
about ten miles back in the mountains, and had sat down on the edge of a
cliff to look over their specimens. The surmise must be that her
closeness and their isolation went to his head, and that he commenced to
make passionate love to her. All that is absolutely certain is that she
undoubtedly pushed him over the edge!
He fell only about twenty feet, and landed on a ledge, but the shock
made him furious, and he lost what remained of his temper when he found
he could neither get up nor down. He must have said some bitter things
then, for it appears that Janet must have sat for a couple of hours or
so at the top of the cliff, refusing either to help him or to go and
bring help.
Sometime in that two hours they both came to their senses. They were
absurd, and they knew it. For him the romance of the West had died with
the same thud with which he landed, and the nonsense had gone out of
Janet when he disappeared over the cliff face.
The last hour of the two Janet spent in wondering how she was to get
help to him without the Kid getting the story, and it is certain that
Nugent’s chief thought was to keep Rosamond from knowing about his
predicament. Janet had made him ridiculous before her, and his
infatuation for her had smashed to pieces along with his pride.
It appears then that when the evening shadows began to fill the cañon
below with purple, and the Bishop’s Rock high above was a massively rosy
jewel set in gold, Janet went to the cliff edge and called down to him
coldly that she was going for a rope; and that Nugent merely nodded, and
went on grimly picking splinters out of his hands with the point of his
scarfpin.
Janet was frantically determined by that time to effect the rescue
herself, and to keep the story from spreading over the ranch. She rode
slowly, to arrive as late as possible, and her plan was to reach
unperceived the barn where Midge’s stage props were kept, to get her
ropes and effect the rescue herself.
She would have succeeded, probably, but for one thing. The Kid was
corral dog that night. Checking up at nine o’clock, he had found their
two horses missing, and set himself doggedly to wait for them. Riders
came in, unsaddled and turned their horses loose, to run on an easy lope
to the pasture and the herd. The racks in the saddle house filled up,
with the exception of two spaces, and filled with rage, despair and
solid fear, the Kid stood with folded arms, staring at the mountains.
From the bunk-house windows came the sound of Slim’s voice, crying, “Hit
me! Harder!” followed, not by the sound of blows, but of chips on a
wooden table. Their hard day over, the wranglers were playing blackjack.
Far away, in the Old Man’s office, shone the green shade of his office
lamp as he pored over his accounts. The stable cat rubbed against the
Kid’s ankles, caught against his spurs and spat angrily.
At ten o’clock he saw the wavering light of an electric flash coming
toward the corral. It was Rosamond. She went first to the saddle house,
and then came back to him, turning the light on him as she did so.
“They aren’t back, are they?” she asked.
“No.”
She collapsed on a bench and sat there, twisting her hands together.
“I don’t think they’re coming, Kid.”
“They’ll come, all right.”
“He’s wild about her. He doesn’t take any trouble to hide it.”
The Kid drew a long breath.
“Well, it takes two to make that kind of a bargain,” he said, and
relapsed into sullen silence. After a time, however, he roused and said,
“I’m going to leave here. Guess I’ll hit the trail for New Mexico—and
herd sheep,” he added bitterly. He was, as a cow and horse man,
committing himself to the lowest of degradations, but Rosamond had not
even heard him.
“You know why it started, don’t you?”
“No, and I don’t care.”
“She’s paying me back for last summer, Kid. Oh, I know the ranch blames
him, but any man’s a fool in the hands of any girl if she wants him to
be. It was you.”
The Kid was dull with misery, and it was a moment or two before he
grasped what she had said. But it brought him no cheer, even then. “I
don’t care why she did it. You and I are just out of luck—that’s all.”
“Aren’t you going to put up a fight?”
“No, ma’am,” said the Kid. “If she wants him she can have him. And I
wish her luck,” he added bitterly.
“Don’t be silly!” Rosamond snapped. “You and I have made a mess of
things, and we’ve got to straighten them out—if we get the chance.”
Suddenly she began to cry against the Kid’s shoulder.
“I’m awfully fond of him, Kid,” she wailed. “I’ve got my clothes and
everything. And he’s fond of me too. It’s—it’s the altitude or
something. When you’re not used to it it makes you different.”
“You tell ’em,” gloomily assented the Kid, and patted her shoulder.
After a time he drew himself away and gave her a final brotherly pat.
“Now look here,” he said. “You go back to your cabin and crawl into bed,
and I’ll get a horse and wander up the way they went. Chances are their
horses got away and they’re walking in.”
Then suddenly he caught her arm.
“Listen!” he said.
A horse was coming in from the cañon trail. Under the cottonwoods a
hundred yards away it stopped, and a moment later the Kid had caught
Rosamond and pushed her into the shadow of the barn. Some one was coming
from the cottonwoods on foot, a shadowy figure which proceeded to do a
number of curious things.
First it went to one of the bunk-house windows and looked in. After that
it struck a bee line for the barn, and the Kid put an arm across
Rosamond’s chest and held her back against the wall. The figure entered
the barn, groped there for a time very stealthily, and then emerged and
started back toward the cottonwoods.
“Janet!” said the Kid sternly.
The figure started and dropped what it carried. The Kid picked it up and
planted himself in front of the figure.
“Now,” he said, “perhaps you’ll explain what you want with a rope this
hour of the night.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort!”
“I’ve got the rope.”
“There are other ropes. I dare say that will occur to you in time.”
“Is anybody hurt?”
“No.”
“Where’s Nugent?”
“That’s my affair.”
“Not by a darned sight!” said the Kid furiously. “It’s my business too.
I’ve sat back and let you two carry on your fool game about as long as I
intend to, and I’m through. I’m going to go and kill him. Where is he?”
“I pushed him over a cliff, and he can’t get back.”
“Why did you push him over a cliff?” demanded the Kid, standing very
tall and with his fists clenched.
“He tried to kiss me.”
Certainly Rosamond tasted the ashes of life at that moment. But
certainly, too, the tight band which had been around something in the
Kid’s left chest for some months gave with a snap, allowing his heart to
race madly.
“Janet!” he said softly. “Janet, I—”
“Will you give me my rope, please?”
“What for? Let him stay where he is. He can die and rot there for all I
care.”
But here Rosamond gave a little wail, and Janet saw her. She stiffened
at once, and threw up her head.
“He’s in the Blue Cañon,” she said. “You and Miss Carter can go and find
him.”
But when she started toward her cottage the Kid caught her by the arm.
“Not a bit of it!” he said more cheerfully than he had spoken for
months. “You did this, and you’re going to see it through. If you don’t
I’ll get the boys, and there’ll be a mouthful of talk going on around
this place to-morrow. Think it over! There’s been a good little bit of
talk already.”
“Oh, of course, if that’s a threat—”
“Sure it’s a threat, and I’m a bully! I’ve been so damned sick of
sitting down and taking my medicine like a gentleman that I’m through
being a gentleman, that’s all. How about it?”
Five minutes later a curious party of three rode out of the ranch toward
the cañon and headed into the mountains. Of the three, one was softly
whistling, one was angrily erect and silent, and one was dabbing at her
eyes with a moist handkerchief. They followed the trail in darkness,
knowing only of its climbs and steep descents by the inclination of
their saddles, until at last they emerged into the upper meadows and
starlight.
And there the Kid halted his horse and waited for Janet, to say, out of
a clear sky and very virtuously: “There’s no excuse for a girl leading a
man on, and then pushing him over a cliff because he tries to kiss her.”
“No,” she retorted. “I didn’t hear of any one going over a cliff last
year.”
The Kid could think of no appropriate reply. He rode on, no longer
whistling. But in spite of this rebuff his spirits were rising. It
seemed quite clear to him that if a girl really loved a man she wouldn’t
push him over a cliff. Therefore she didn’t love Nugent. Therefore it
was distinctly possible that she might love somebody else. This feeling
grew on him, and some time later he made a further overture:
“I made you a present last winter, but when you came back I threw it in
the creek.”
“I can’t imagine why,” was Janet’s cold comment.
Thus repulsed, the Kid lapsed into an unhappy silence; but a little
farther on he turned his head and spoke back over his shoulder: “It was
only something I made out of cow horns. It wouldn’t appeal to you these
days, anyhow.”
Janet made no comment, and thus thrown back on himself the Kid’s
resentment against Nugent had time to take form and to develop into cold
anger. By the time they had reached the place of that gentleman’s
temporary incarceration all the bitterness of the summer, against Janet,
Rosamond and himself, had crystallised into hatred of Crosby Nugent.
That Janet remained cruel and aloof; that Rosamond clung to their heels;
that even if she could have cared for him he had nothing to offer Janet
but sixty dollars a month, a saddle and himself; that men had looked for
the gold in the mountains for forty years and never found it; that he
hadn’t eaten any supper—Nugent, when they reached him, was to bear the
brunt not only of the thing he knew but of a dozen he had never heard
of.
At the edge of the cliff, having tied their horses, the Kid borrowed
Rosamond’s flashlight and bent over the edge. Some twenty feet below,
sitting sulkily on a rock, below which again the cliff fell a sheer
fifty feet, was Nugent. He looked up as the light appeared.
“Who’s there?” he called.
“Are you hurt?”
“Scratched. I can’t get up this infernal wall.”
“Well, there’s no hurry, anyhow,” said the Kid. “There are some of us
here who don’t care if you never come back.”
“Go away and let me talk to somebody with sense,” Nugent shouted. “I
don’t feel funny, if you do.”
“Sorry, old man,” said the Kid. “Only Miss Carter and Miss Allenby are
here, and neither of them wants to talk to you. But you’re mistaken. I
wasn’t being funny.”
For the first time it struck Nugent that the atmosphere above was, to
put it mildly, hostile. He lost his head and his temper.
“All right. Be as serious as you damned please,” he called angrily, “but
get me out. If you haven’t got a rope I’d advise getting one pretty
fast.”
The Kid was beginning to enjoy himself.
“What’s the hurry?” he inquired.
Nugent’s position was distinctly inferior but he did the best he could.
When he realised that no immediate rescue was being staged, braced
against the boulder and facing up, he made an address to the jury above
that for length, breadth and strength of language made the Kid hold his
ears. When Nugent finally relapsed into breathless silence the Kid sat
on the edge of the cliff and swung his legs over.
“Evidently the shock has set him to raving,” he observed. “The question
is, is he worth saving, or shall I drop a rock on him?”
Nugent’s reply to that was a request to the Kid to go to perdition, an
undiplomatic but excusable speech, which resulted in the Kid’s dropping
his contemptuous attitude and reminding him sternly that there were
ladies present.
“Now I’ll tell you how the situation lies,” he said in a conversational
tone, his long legs dangling over the lip of the cañon. “You’ve been a
nuisance on the ranch all summer. You’ve about ridden your horses to
death, and that’s a ranch crime. And you’ve swanked about until we’ve
had to grab a close hold on ourselves to keep you out of the horse
trough. And you’re where you are because you don’t know any more about
ladies than you do about horses, and that’s plenty.” The Kid paused, but
Nugent remained sulkily silent.
“As the prisoner,” said the Kid, “you’ve got a right to plead.”
The prisoner immediately again consigned the Kid to perdition, and that
gentleman smiled.
“I’ll reverse that sentence,” he said. Then he dropped his bantering
manner and bent over the edge.
“It’s like this, Nugent. The ranch isn’t going to hold you and me after
to-night. And I warn you that after the way you’ve talked I aim to put
you in the horse trough before I go to bed. But you’re not getting out
of there unless you agree to leave the ranch to-morrow, and that’s
flat.”
“Rosamond!” bellowed Mr. Nugent.
“What is it?”
“Let that maniac talk his fool head off if he wants to, or roll rocks
down here, as he threatens. You ride down to the ranch and send an
outfit up here. I’m not going to stay here all night.”
The Kid was not only beginning to enjoy himself enormously but to grow a
trifle drunk with power.
“Rosamond,” he said, “for the sake of our old love, stay where you are.”
There was a shocked silence from below, and then the Kid’s voice again
as he bent over.
“Now, Mr. Nugent,” he said, “let’s be calm about this. I’m ready to make
terms if you are. I’ve got a rope here, and I’ll snake you out of that
place with no more trouble if you think you can make the noon train
to-morrow.”
It was now himself that Mr. Nugent would see consigned to perdition
before he made any such concession.
“Janet!” he called.
“Miss Janet,” corrected the Kid softly. “Anyhow, I wouldn’t bring her
into this. She’s a trifle hasty at times. Put down that rock, Janet!” he
called, and Janet, aloof and disapproving, drew herself angrily erect.
The action sobered the Kid at once. He bent toward her and lowered his
voice.
“Don’t be angry with me, honey,” he said. “I’ve suffered so darned
much.”
In the darkness Janet moved closer to the Kid, and for the first time in
months her voice to him was the voice of the old Janet, sweet and grave
and very, very kind.
“So have I, Kid,” she said.
He caught her hand and kissed it.
Below, Mr. Nugent sat on his rock and considered the situation. He was
cold and tired, he was angry, he was afraid to face Rosamond; but most
of all he was puzzled.
“I don’t get it,” he said at last in a milder tone. “Where do you come
in on this, anyhow?”
“Janet,” said the Kid, swiftly and in a whisper, “where do I come in on
this, anyhow?”
“Tell him you’re engaged to me,” said Janet.
The Old Man had not been able to sleep that night, and so he got up and,
rather sketchily clad, wandered about the place. The cottages were dark,
the lawn deserted, but from the bunk-house windows came the glow of
lamplight, and Slim’s plaintive cry, “Hit me again! Harder!”
The Old Man, smiling and clutching his dressing gown about him, stole
past and went toward the corral. He went into the barn and moved among
the night horses, speaking to them softly.
Suddenly, outside, he heard the sound of horses moving quietly, the rub
of saddle leather, the faint clank of metal on metal. The Old Man
listened, and then stepped back deeper into the shadows.
There were, he could see, several horses, and the business of unsaddling
went on in a silence that was highly mysterious. One after another the
freed horses made off for the pasture; one after the other their silent
ex-riders carried away saddle, bridle and saddle blanket to the shed.
Then, still without speech, the party seemed to divide, and two figures
moved off into the darkness and two remained. The two which had gone
were feminine, so far as the Old Man could determine in that place of
breeched females. The two which remained were undeniably male.
“Now that the women are gone,” said one voice, “we’ll have this out, my
friend.”
“Suits me,” said the Kid’s soft drawl. “And I’ve warned you, Mr. Nugent,
what I aim to do. I’m going to wash some of your sins away in that horse
trough.”
“Try it!”
“I intend to. It may cost me my job, for the Old Man’s orders are pretty
strict. He says, ‘Keep your hands off the dudes. You might hurt ’em.’”
“Don’t worry about hurting me,” said Nugent. “I’ve stood a lot of
insolence from you to-night, and before I leave here there’s going to be
one sick cowboy.”
Very, very stealthily the Old Man moved toward the barn door, and there
peered out. Nugent was taking off his coat and the Kid was kicking out
of his chaps. When he was free of them he threw them aside and faced
Nugent with a smile.
“Better take off your pants too,” he suggested. “The water might spoil
’em.”
Nugent’s answer was a furious rush.
The ranch slept. Out in the pastures which spread over the foothills,
wire to wire a mile or two, the horses rested or grazed. A coyote barked
from a high red butte. In a cottage down the road Rosamond lay, face
down on her bed, and in her own little room Janet was standing before a
warped and bleached bit of flotsam from the creek, a strange affair of
dingy cow horns on a cracked wooden base, on which she smiled tenderly.
And in the barn doorway stood the Old Man, snorting like a war horse
with what might or might not have been anger, while before him went on a
silent and mighty battle.
Inch by inch Nugent gave way. Inch by inch the Kid fought him back. The
dust rose and circled about them. The stable cat brought a mouse and
laid it at the Old Man’s feet, but he did not see it. The cat, waiting
for approval, heard nothing but a low rumble in the Old Man’s throat,
which sounded like but may not have been “Good Kid! Good boy!” And every
inch of Nugent’s retirement led straight to the horse trough.
Some two minutes later the Kid, holding furiously to a writhing,
splashing figure in the horse trough, felt a hand on his shoulder and
looked around. One of his eyes was almost closed, but out of the other
he saw trouble, and let go his hold to stand stiffly erect.
“You don’t need to drown a sheep, boy, to kill the vermin on him,” said
the Old Man. Then, drawing his dressing gown around him, the Old Man
went back to bed.
Some time later the Kid swaggered into the bunk house with the fillet of
one of the cook’s best tenderloin steaks over an eye. In answer to
tender inquiry he stated that he had bumped into a tree, after which he
proceeded to undress and to crawl into bed.
The game went on. The Kid lay still, every inch a man and a good many
inches aching. He was very happy, too happy to sleep. The noise went on
about him, but he was alone in a great silence, with Janet.
After a time he reached under his pillow and got his mouth organ, and,
lying there, softly and plaintively he made music to the song that was
in his soul.
VII
LILY: The Philanderer
I
The party had divided in London, three to Wales, Courtney Wallace and
Vance to Cornwall and Devon. Vance had been rather insistent on the
southern tour. The other man had yielded without enthusiasm.
“I’ve done it before,” he said resignedly. “Lyme Regis, Torquay,
Tintagel, Clovelly! And you’ve done it before, Vance. Is it possible, by
any accident, that the lady from the Theatre Royal is—going south?”
Vance flushed, although he laughed.
“She is motoring with a party of friends. I believe that is their
general direction. There is hardly a chance of our running into them.”
Wallace smoked reflectively. Beneath their hotel window all London
passed. Schoolboys with top hats and canes scrambled to the tops of
buses, flower women disputed on the pavements, coster carts dodged the
traffic; the street was a thousand miracles.
Suddenly Wallace bent forward.
“Ah!” he said. “That’s too bad! That’s—that’s horrible!”
A coster’s donkey, hardly larger than a dog, had gone down and a bus had
passed over its foot. It lay on its side, a little island of tragedy in
the river of traffic that promptly divided around it. The coster, with
his face working, was on his knees beside it, fumbling with the harness
buckles.
Vance rose and glanced over the other man’s shoulder.
“It’s infamous!” he cried. “What chance had the little beast, anyhow?
Look at that! No room for it to live and hardly room for it to die!”
He flung away from the window. Wallace himself, less highly organised
perhaps, did not care to look again. Instead, he turned meditative eyes
on his companion. It was his work to study people, and Vance was good
holiday material, psychologically, not too complex for hot weather. It
was interesting to watch Vance decide that he wanted a thing and to
follow the steps by which he got it; further still, to see him justify
himself, standing his soul at attention and telling it what it needed,
what was good for it, generally bullying it into line. He liked an
audience for the process. More than once he had chosen Wallace. The
argument differed little from time to time.
“Every now and then,” he would say, “I have got to cut clean loose from
work, from everything. You know how hard I work—constant strain, and
all that. Most men leave their business when they close the office door
behind them, and don’t take it up until the next morning. But I’m always
at it. Creative work’s the devil and the strain is cumulative. At the
end of ten months, I’ve done a year’s work, and I feel it.”
“Yes,” Wallace would agree. He knew that he was only the remote
audience, that Vance was really talking to his soul, and enjoying it.
“If I were a drinking man I’d go on a terrific bust—nervous explosion,
you know. Or, if I could afford it, I’d hike to Monte Carlo. I don’t do
either. But one thing I can do, and it isn’t selfish. It’s sheer
self-preservation. I can get away from my family, and I do.”
And so on, ending of course in a eulogy of Edith, his wife, and of the
children.
“Only woman in the world who could live with me,” he would say. “She has
poise; she understands! She knows as well as I do when I’ve reached my
limit. Came down to see me off—but you saw her at the dock, of course.
How do you think she looked?”
Vance had the egotist’s habit of repeating himself, and twice now
Wallace had faced this question. Both times he had evaded it.
“There’s a certain amount of strain about such partings,” he had said.
“I thought she was depressed, naturally. I don’t see her very often, of
course.”
On one such occasion Vance had roused from his self-engrossment, at
something in Wallace’s voice.
“You used to be bully friends,” he said. “I’m sorry you don’t come out
oftener.”
“There’s a perfectly good reason why I don’t go,” Wallace returned
easily. “There is nothing quite so painful to a bachelor as the married
happiness of his friends.”
Vance had been quite satisfied.
To Wallace, sitting back in the hotel window, came the memory of Edith’s
face that day on the pier. In repose her face had been enigmatic—a sort
of tolerant resignation, with a flash now and then of humour. It was
almost, Wallace thought uneasily, as if she had reached a point where
she must laugh at herself, or weep.
There came to the older man’s mind, as Vance moved to a writing table,
odds and ends of Vance’s philosophy of life.
“I’m not a saint, of course, but my good times have never hurt anybody.”
“I am a better husband and a better father for getting away now and
then. It’s perfectly true that all of us need to invite our own souls
once in a while.”
“All my capital is in my head, and about once a year I have to look
after the investment.”
And that very ingenuous statement on the steamer, _apropos_ of a
triangle which was holding the interest of the smoking room—
“After all, if a man has any breadth of intelligence, any larger view of
life, it is almost impossible to find one woman who understands all
sides of him, isn’t it?”
Wallace had had a quizzical vision of Vance’s soul, rather nice and
young and naïve, saluting and accepting this second-hand wisdom as
Truth.
Vance was examining the proposed itinerary of the excursion and copying
it into his letter. He was writing eagerly, boyishly, and when he rose
it was with a mischievous appearance of having, by sending the word home
to Edith, clinched the arrangement. But he held two letters in his hand,
not one.
“When do you want to start?” Wallace asked.
“The car will be ready to-morrow. Why not go while the weather’s good?”
Under his carefully casual tone was an eagerness that could not be
entirely suppressed.
* * * * *
Vance made a good travelling companion. His enthusiasm, which even
infected Wallace, surmounted the minor mishaps of the journey—a broken
brake rod, tire trouble, three days of rain which tied them up in
Bournemouth, and beat the sea to a sodden plain. It was at Bournemouth
that they got to the subject of dreams. Vance had had a dream. He was
still shaken at breakfast, and he reverted to it when, in weather-proof
tweeds, they ventured through the rain to the pier.
“I daresay it’s overwork, isn’t it?”
Wallace eyed him. He looked almost ill, strained, his mouth set hard.
“Dreams are curious things,” Wallace said reflectively. “You know
there’s a theory that our dreams are our real selves.”
“I thought they were the reasonable soul run mad.”
“Not at all. During sleep seems to be the only time that the unconscious
self gets to the surface. All barriers are down. The highly cultured
part of one, which is only superstructure, of course, is off guard.
Suppressed desires come up, wishes that would horrify us in waking
moments, fears that are founded on such wishes; it’s rather abstruse.”
“‘The flattering truth of sleep,’” said Vance cynically, but he changed
colour. “It’s ridiculous! I refuse to be such stuff as dreams are made
of. I have never had a dream that was not incongruous, absurd. Even this
about Edith—”
“The brain, of course, when the will is suspended during sleep, is like
an engine without a governor. I’ll acknowledge that.”
Vance wheeled on him.
“And this dream of seeing Edith and the children sinking in a
quicksand—are you going to classify that as a fear that is founded on a
wish?”
It was a direct challenge. Wallace, who, dealing in the things of the
soul, dealt in intangibilities that were the realest things in the world
to him, could forswear neither his belief nor his friend, and
compromised.
“Not exactly that. Your unconscious self may realise that there are
times when a man, to do his best work, should not have his interests
divided. I should hardly call that disloyalty.”
Vance recovered himself slowly. It was as if he had peered over the edge
of an abyss. Wallace realised to his surprise that he was profoundly
shaken; that he must be more careful. It was a dangerous thing to turn a
man’s thoughts in. Vance, thoroughly objective, must not become
subjective. He was too mental, too imaginative. Perhaps Vance himself
was right, had, in his graceless young way, solved his own psychology,
and the girl from the Theatre Royal was a safety valve.
They had not yet encountered the other party, and after the morning on
the sands at Bournemouth, Vance seemed determined to ignore its possible
proximity. He ceased peering ahead at each motor they overtook; the inns
where they lunched were selected at random, and not, as earlier, as if
in accordance with some preconceived itinerary. He seemed to have placed
his affairs on the cold knees of the gods and was waiting.
But he still dreamed. Wallace, sharing a room with him in a small inn on
the edge of Dartmoor, found him sitting up by the window one night.
“It’s those damned dreams,” he said fretfully. “Of course I know she’s
all right, and the children too. But do you realise that I can’t send a
cable from this God-forsaken hole?”
But the mere outburst helped him. He went back to bed and almost
immediately to sleep. It was Wallace who lay awake.
Until he met the girl, Wallace could not understand the depths to which
he felt Vance had been stirred. It was not their first holiday together;
Vance, always attractive to woman, was attracted by them. More than
once, Wallace had known these holidays of the younger man complicated by
a pretty woman, had witnessed his penitential or aggressively virtuous
return, as the case might be. But this time there was a difference.
Vance was harder hit, or perhaps he had been more brain-weary than
before, and the reaction was stronger. He was not sleeping well. And
when they were near the sea he took to long walks over the cliffs.
It was at Lynton that they came up with the other party, a Mr. and Mrs.
Byron, and the girl herself. Her name was Lily Ruskin; she was a slender
girl, much younger than Wallace had anticipated, simply dressed and
without make-up. He drew a deep breath. She was so much better than he
had expected; even the way her brown hair was twisted low on her neck
was without affectation, without even that studied simplicity that is
most artificial of all. The girl was absolutely natural, rather lovely
in a slim, graceful way.
The Byrons were impossible, frankly. Mrs. Byron was a vivid person,
noisily dressed and not flawless in speech. Wallace gathered at dinner
that her main interest in life was her bull terrier, travelling with
her, and named George Broadhurst after the American playwright.
“It was in one of Broadhurst’s plays that I made my first success,” she
confided to Wallace. “I’ve got a New York offer upstairs now. If it
wasn’t for Byron, I’d go in a minute.”
“You’re not going without me. You can lay to that,” Byron put in, his
tone surly. “In this game it’s either double harness or single harness,
and no half way about it, as far as I’m concerned.”
She shrugged her heavy shoulders and turned her attention to her dinner,
eating with slow and deliberate appreciation. But later in the meal,
when Byron’s attention was distracted, she reverted for a moment to the
American tour.
“I’m going, nevertheless,” she said frankly. “If Lily goes I go. I know
a lot of Americans. We’ll have rather a cheery time.”
Lily Ruskin left the table before the others had finished, making an
excuse of the heat of the room, and Vance rose with her. Mrs. Byron
looked after him, with much the same air of deliberate appreciation she
had shown to her food.
“Rather a nut, your friend. Lily is quite mad about him,” observed Mrs.
Byron, and took some raisins.
“He’s a brilliant chap, in his line,” Wallace observed. He had lost
nothing of Vance’s protective droop toward Lily, of her almost shivering
consciousness of his nearness. And because the girl was straight—he
knew that now; he had not expected it—the situation had taken on a new
quality of tenseness. Lily was mad about Vance, mad with the unspoiled
passion of the woman who has saved herself, through God knows what
filth, clean for the one man, and who having found him is ready to give
her all. And there was worse to come.
“Fancy!” drawled Mrs. Byron. “Brilliant, handsome and young! And yet
your clever American ladies have let him escape!”
“Escape?”
“Unmarried,” she explained. “It is one of the most charming things about
America. So many of your men remain unmarried!”
Wallace caught a swift glance from under her heavy lids and met it
squarely.
“American standards of luxury are rather high,” he said gravely.
“Comparatively speaking, we have few hereditary fortunes. A man must
work for years to establish himself, before he can marry.”
Although he had preserved his impassivity, underneath Wallace was
seething with fury. Vance had gone too far. He was passing with these
people as a single man; it was puerile, childish, damnable. It was a
great deal more—it was dangerous. Wallace found himself an involuntary
accomplice, and his gorge rose.
They had their coffee in the garden that clung to the edge of the cliff.
For months after, Wallace was to remember that twilight hour, with the
terraced paths winding beneath them, the heavy fragrance of flowers
opening to the first dew of the night, the lights of a battleship far
out from land, the distant sound of the sea far below, the excited
whimpering of George Broadhurst, who had flushed a rabbit in the
shrubbery.
Vance and Lily sat a little apart. They were very silent. The girl’s
face looked set and white; she refused coffee, took a cigarette, forgot
to light it. The air seemed charged with feeling. Rather suddenly
Wallace knew that Vance had told her. Mixed with his relief came
sympathy for her. Mrs. Byron had been right. She was quite mad about
Vance. And she did not care who knew it, apparently. She sat, bent a
little forward, gazing out to sea, and one of her hands lay on Vance’s
knee. He was uncomfortable about it for a minute—then he covered it
with one of his own.
The conversation languished. They had no common ground on which to meet.
Vance made no effort. Wallace tried the Ulster uprising, and was
countered by Mrs. Byron with the flat statement that she detested the
Irish and Lady Gregory’s plays. Was Wallace a playwright? But of course
not; he was Doctor Wallace—she’d forgotten.
“M. D.,” Vance made an effort. “Doctor of Minds. Be very careful, Mrs.
Byron. He knows all sorts of spooky things. He’s a psychologist.”
It was clear that Mrs. Byron confused Wallace at once with the Society
of Psychic Research. She roused to the first interest of the evening.
“Ghosts!” she said. “Do tell me a ghost story!”
Wallace smiled.
“I deal with ghosts, of course,” he admitted, “but they are ghosts of
the mind’s own raising.”
“Any sort of ghost,” she persisted. “Once in Warwickshire, we stopped in
a haunted house. Do you remember, Lily? And how you sat up and nothing
happened?”
The girl did not reply. She spoke past Mrs. Byron, to Wallace.
“What do you mean by ghosts of the mind’s own raising?”
Having caught her attention, Wallace was determined to hold it. He had
already formulated a plan of a sort. If he could get Vance through the
evening, he thought he could talk him into reason. It was the next two
hours he dreaded. For there was mischief afoot. Vance stirred, lighted a
cigar. In the flare of the match his eyes were reckless, the eyes of a
man who has ceased to think.
When he chose, Wallace could be vastly entertaining. He made the effort
then. He held the conversational lines taut, driving hard to one point,
to hold Vance and the girl to the group. So he spoke mostly to her, held
her attention close, ignored the pitiful appeal of her white face. For
twenty minutes or more he held them all. At the end of that time Mrs.
Byron dropped asleep, her head falling forward. Byron, who had suffered
complete metaphysical submergence early in the game, emerged enough a
few moments later to take himself to the end of the terrace, the terrier
at his heels. And still Wallace talked on.
“Dreams!” he said. “Now there’s a field for fancy, Miss Ruskin!” He was
conscious that he had caught Vance’s attention. “You know, dreams show
us that we never forget things. We don’t, you know. They’re all there,
big and little. Along comes the scent of a flower, or some combination
of scents, or a strain of music, and presto, the little memory cell
closes up, completes the circuit, and we are off.”
Vance, leaning forward, lifted the girl’s hand to his cheek.
“The smell of the sea over the land of Lorna Doone,” he said unsteadily,
“and all of us, here to-night.”
“In dreams,” Wallace persisted grimly, “we’re particularly liable to go
back. Far back. I know of an interesting case of the sort. You know, no
soul is safe from us.” The girl shivered. “In the case I speak of a
young and charming woman finds she has made a mistake in her marriage.
Somewhere, deep in her soul, she holds the image of a man she wishes she
had married. Very deep in her soul—it took me two months to get to it,
for she would not acknowledge it, even to herself.”
“I know,” said Lily. “Women have to bury—so much.”
“This chap, whoever he is, evidently represents a refuge in time of
trouble, to her. It’s all unconscious. She does not know it herself.
Anyhow, when things get pretty hard for her—the husband wanders,
although he loves her—she goes back in her dreams to her early
childhood, to a fright she had, a dog that turned on her. The dream is
always the same; she sees the dog coming, and it is the other man—the
chap she did not marry, that she calls to for help. It’s incongruous,
like all dreams, but vastly interesting.”
He had the girl’s attention, at least.
“I see,” she said, slowly. “And to you this symbolizes something?”
“Perhaps not the dream alone. There were other circumstances, of course.
What she is burying is probably a feeling that in a crisis of any sort,
the—the other man would be more dependable than the husband. It is
possible, of course, that she has always cared for the other chap. If
there is a crisis, and the husband fail her—”
Lily rose, shaking off Vance’s detaining hand. She stood near Wallace,
looking down.
“And when the crisis comes, what will the husband matter, after all?”
she demanded. “Your philosophy of life is wrong—all philosophy of life
is wrong, when it is founded on law, and not on love.”
“Colonies have been founded on that principle—and failed.”
She hardly heard him. Her hands hung before her, clasped so close that
her slim fingers were blue-white.
“Law that is best for the many may be criminally wrong for the few,” she
said, and leaving them, joined Byron and the terrier at the end of the
terrace. Vance did not look up after her, but Wallace knew that no
movement of her white figure was lost to him. He waited for Vance to
speak, but he made no effort. When she did not come back, but with Byron
penetrated deeper into the garden shadows, Vance rose and flung away his
cigar.
“I’m going up to bed,” he said irritably. “This whole damned party has
hung together this evening as if every member of it was afraid of his
own society.”
Perturbed as he was, Wallace smiled. It was so like Vance to be childish
at a big moment. Of course, he knew Vance was not going to bed. He would
break up the party and then come down for his cheated hour with Lily.
Wallace stifled a groan of very weariness, and shut his jaw grimly. He
would see the thing out, if he had to sit up all night. And it came very
nearly to that.
* * * * *
Wallace sat alone on the terrace. A launch put off from the shore and
headed for the battleship. The lantern in the bow moved across the black
water like the reflection of some swift star. Wallace’s thoughts, too,
crossed the sea. He thought of Edith Vance, of the day of her wedding,
of the calm confidence in her eyes until the service had begun, of the
shade of panic in them when, at the signal, she had held out her hand
for the ring. Wallace had noticed her hands that day at the dock. It was
warm and she had slipped off her gloves. The ring had hung a little
loose.
Lily came back along the terrace, and sat down beside him. He had
thought she would come. The battle, after all, was between them! Vance,
sulking in his room, had already surrendered.
“I’ve been watching that boat,” he said. “There’s something inevitable
about the way it’s making for the ship. It hasn’t varied a foot. That’s
life, in its best sense, isn’t it—knowing what one wants, and going
directly for it?”
The speech was unlucky.
“That is life,” she replied. Her voice, that had seemed light, was
deeper now; the bell tone of passion was in it. “To know what one wants,
and to go directly—over no matter what depths.” She turned suddenly and
faced him. “You are not going to let me see him alone again. Why?”
“Because I’m in deadly fear of you.” Wallace tried to smile, saw her
eyes, and looked away instead.
“You think he—cares?”
“I think he thinks he cares. It’s just as disastrous, under the
circumstances.”
“He is—like that?”
The loyalty of male to male made Wallace hesitate.
“Well, not as bad as I’m letting you think. He’s fond of women—he is
temperamental; you can’t measure his sort with the usual yard-stick.
He’s decent enough.”
“Do you know his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me about her?”
Wallace eyed her steadily.
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“She is mad about him, of course. I wonder—will you let me tell you a
bit about myself?”
“Do you think—”
“I should like you to know. And afterwards—I shall ask you something. I
am not so young as I look. I am twenty-three. And I have been—straight.
I wanted you to know that.”
She paused. Wallace’s profile was impassive. But she knew he was keenly
alert to what she was saying.
“I have no great talent. My appearance helped—I made up well—and my
voice is good. I’ve had a lot of temptation, of course. That’s in the
game. If I stayed straight it wasn’t because of any traditions behind
me, or of any special quality in me. You know what I mean—when
everywhere around one there is a sort of elastic creed, one—”
“I understand, of course.”
“I want you to know the truth, before I come to the other. I was good
because in the end it paid. I couldn’t amount to much on the stage, but
if I was straight, I could make a good marriage. That had to be my
future. I had no other. It sounds revolting—but isn’t that after all
the truth about a great many women? Only—you never heard it before.”
“Possibly,” said Wallace. “But I absolutely refuse to believe it.”
She shrugged her slender shoulders.
“It is the absolute truth with me, anyhow.”
Perhaps Wallace’s attitude disconcerted her. She did not go on at once.
Byron passed them, the dog at his heels, and with a curt good-night went
into the hotel. Some one above flung up a window. The launch, its star
swaying in the ocean swell, clung to the side of the battleship. Lily
sat bent forward, her restless fingers interlaced.
“Of course you know—he did not tell me he was married until to-night.
All the time I said to myself that I was glad I had been straight,
because now he could marry me, and there would be nothing to forget. But
he cannot marry me.”
The little car of the cliff railway came up, after its final trip. The
night had grown so still that they could hear the guard closing and
locking the doors, could follow his footsteps as he moved, whistling
softly, along the curving street.
“I knew a girl once,” Lily went on in her sweet, deepened voice. “She
cared a lot about a man. They were not married, but everybody liked them
both. They were amazingly popular. They used to have Sunday teas at
their house, and—well, he died after a while. She was young and
good-looking, and she’d had a good offer for the next season—with Fred
Terry, I think. But she went out to the country where he was buried, and
shot herself. It’s like that, sometimes.”
The thrill in her voice took him rather by the throat. All his life he
had been denying this right of love to the throne of reason, had been
fighting the cause of the mind against the heart—except once, and that
was long ago, as love flies. It came to him all at once that the machine
is always more powerful than the engineer that controls it, that this
slim girl, in her primal appeal, was stronger than all law. For just
that moment he wondered, were Vance and she right, and he wrong? Why
sacrifice the few on the altar of the multitude? He found himself
mumbling a response.
“Yes. It is like that, sometimes. But there are few great passions. Once
in a thousand years two people meet, and there is a sort of psychic
explosion. After that, I suppose in all the world there is only for the
man the one woman—”
“—And for the woman the one man,” she finished, softly. “It happens
oftener than you think. Only—they are afraid.”
The whole thing began to seem unreal to Wallace. The women he had known
did not do battle for love. He had no precedent to guide him in such a
situation. And, like most men, in spite of his profession, he feared
subtleties. He moved out into the open.
“What do you want me to do?” he demanded. “Vance is married. I know his
wife, and I like her. I can’t stand back and see him disloyal to her.
I’m not going to leave him here—or anywhere.”
“Does she care as much as I do?”
“That’s not the question.”
“_Isn’t_ that the question?”
“There are children. Has he told you that?”
She winced, but her determination did not waver.
“Perhaps you do not understand. I am not asking him to give them up. I
understand better than you think. He cares a great deal now, but not as
I care. There is always one who kisses, and one who turns the cheek. I
think he will never forget me. Years from now, if he hears my name, he
will thrill to it. But it will be to a memory. And where he will thrill
to a memory, I shall go white. That’s the difference. You see, I know.
But he cares.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go away. Let us have the next few weeks, if that is all we are to have
out of life.” She mistook Wallace’s incredulous silence for hesitancy.
“Just think,” she went on, “I who should have all my life before me, am
offering it for a month with _him_. Oh, I shan’t kill myself,” as he
started. “I shall go on. You know. Stars live for big moments. I am
asking you for my big moment.”
She looked up at him, faintly smiling. Then, without warning, she buried
her face in her hands and cried, silently, stonily, while Wallace sat
helplessly by. The break did one thing; it gave him time. When she
lifted her head at last, he was ready.
“Perhaps you are right, from your viewpoint. You are free; your life is
yours. You can do what you like with it. I’m not preaching morality now.
It’s hardly a question of that. I mean, of course, that you are
determined to evade that issue. But we cannot live to ourselves alone.
If Vance wanted to go to the devil and it involved himself only, I’d
probably let him alone. But he has a wife.” He met her eyes squarely.
“I’m going to prevent this thing if I can.”
A coarser woman would have defied him, confident in her power over the
other man. But Lily only eyed him rather wistfully.
“I see,” she said slowly. “How solicitous you are for _her_! I wonder—”
She hesitated, more careful of him than he had been of her. “I hope you
are not in love with her. If you are, and if you are suffering what I
have suffered to-night—”
Wallace drew his breath in sharply. But she had risen, and stood looking
up at the darkened façade of the hotel. Somewhere, behind its windows,
Mrs. Byron slept placidly. Byron had exchanged his half-sullen apathy of
the day for noisy slumber. Tourists gorged with sight-seeing rested
tired muscles and weary eyes. On all save these two in a garden, and
Vance keeping vigil above, the night had descended with healing wings.
Lily had noticed Wallace’s sharply taken breath after all. For she
turned and held out her hand.
“How we take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies!”
she said wistfully. “I with my perplexities, your dream-woman with hers,
and now—you. Good-night.”
She turned and went into the house.