It was comparatively a short distance to the elder Entriken's farm, and,
rather than invent a laborious explanation of the horse's absence all
night, Gordon walked. Numberless excuses offered him plausible reason for
his own delayed return home.--It was better to say nothing to Lettice of
his actual intention; she was already suspicious of his sudden interest in
local gatherings.
The road beyond Greenstream village crossed a brook and mounted by sharp
turns the western range. The day had faded to amethyst, pale in the
translucent vault of the sky, deepening in the valley; the plum-colored
smoke of evening fires ascended in tenuous columns to an incredible
height. He walked rapidly, with the oppressed heart that had lately grown
familiar, the sense of imminence, the feeling of advancing into a vague,
towering shadow. That last sensation was at once new and familiar--where
before had he been conscious of a vast, indefinable peril, blacker than
night, looming implacably before him? He summoned his old hardihood and
advanced over the still, bosky side of the mountain.
He descended, beyond the ridge, into the fact of evening accomplished. At
the base of the range he crossed a softly-swelling expanse of
close-cropped grass, skirted a bog and troop of naked-seeming birches, and
came in view of the maple grove toward which he was bound.
The maple trees towered compact and majestic over the level sod, holding
their massed foliage black against the green sky. Low in the right the new
moon hung like a gold fillet above the odorous, crepuscular earth; and, at
the base of the trees, the fires were like bubbling, crimson sealing wax
poured into the deeper, indigo gloom.
As Gordon advanced he saw a number of vehicles, from which the horses had
been taken and tied to an improvised railing. Figures moved darkly against
the flames; beyond familiar features flickered like partial, painted masks
on the night. In the grove the sap, stirred in the great iron kettles,
kept up a constant, choking minor; the smooth trunks of the trees swept up
from the unsteady radiance into the obscurity of invisible branches looped
with silver strings of stars.
Blurred forms moved everywhere. He searched for Meta Beggs. She was not by
the kettles of sap; beyond the trees, by covered baskets of provisions
lanterns made a saffron pool of light, but she was not there. He felt in
his pocket the cool, sinuous necklace. Finally he found her; or, rather,
she slipped illusively into his contracted field of vision.
"You didn't tell me you were coming," she reproached him.
She wore a red dress, purple in the night, with a narrow, black velvet
ribband pinned about her throat; her straw hat was bound in red. She
gained an extraordinary potency from the dark; it almost seemed to Gordon
Makimmon that her skin had a luminous quality; he could see her pointed
hands distinctly, and her small, cold face. All her dresses strained about
her provocative body, an emphasis rather than a covering of her slim
maturity. They drifted, without further speech, out of the circles of
wavering light, into the obscurity beyond.
They sat, resting against a hillock of sod, facing the sinking visible rim
of the moon. From the bog the frogs sounded like a continuously and
lightly-struck xylophone. Meta Beggs shivered.
"I'll go mad here," she declared, "in this--this nothingness. Look--the
moon dropping into wilderness; other lucky people are watching it
disappear behind great houses and gardens; women in the arms of their
lovers are watching it through silk curtains."
He gazed critically over the valley, the mountains, into the sky scarfed
by night. "I'm used to it," he returned; "it doesn't bother me like it
does you. Some people even like it. A man who came here from the city to
die of lung trouble sat for weeks looking up Greenstream valley; he
couldn't get enough morning or evening."
"But I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm going to live, too; I've
decided--"
"What?"
"To stop teaching. When the term's over, in a few weeks, I'm going to take
the money I make and go to New York. It will be just enough to get me
there and buy me a pretty hat, with a few dollars over. I am going with
those into a cafe and get a bottle of champagne, and pick out the man with
the best clothes. I'll tell him I'm a poor school-teacher from the South
who came to New York to meet a man who promised to marry me, but who had
not kept his word. I'll tell him that I'm good--I can, you know; no man
has ever fooled anything out of me--and that I bought wine to get the
courage to kill myself."
"It sounds right smart," he admitted; "you can do it too, you can lie like
hell. But," he added importantly, "I don't know that I will let you."
This, he assured himself, was purely experimental. He had decided nothing;
his course in the future was hidden from him absolutely. He thought
discontentedly of his home, of the imagined long, dun vista of years.
He was now, he realized dimly, at the crucial point of his existence: with
Meta Beggs, in that world of which Paris was the prefigurement, he might
still wring from life a measure of the sharp pleasures of tempestuous
youth and manhood; he might still dance to the piping of the senses. With
Lettice in Greenstream he would rapidly sink into the dullness of
increasing age.
He was vaguely conscious of the baseness of the mere weighing of such a
choice; but he was engulfed in his overmastering egotism; his sense of
obligation was dulled by the supreme selfishness of a lifetime, of a
lifetime of unbridled temper and appetite, of a swaggering self-esteem
which the remorseless operation of fate had ignored, had passed
indifferently by, leaving him in complete ignorance of the terrible and
grim possibilities of human mischance.
He had suffered at the loss of his dwelling, but principally it had been
his pride that had borne the wound; Clare's death had affected him finally
as the arbitrary removal of a sentimental object for his care, on which to
lavish the gifts of his large generosity.
He sat revolving in his mind the choice of paths which seemed to open for
his decision in such different directions, which seemed to await the
simple ordering of his footsteps as he chose. The night deepened to its
darkest hour; the moon, in obedience to its automatic, fixed course, had
vanished behind the mountains; the frogs, out of their slime, raised their
shrill plaint of life in death.