_"One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one
travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-class
staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless,
one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on
a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other
hand, one may know marriage as Kipling's Mowgli knew the forest,
because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy
ground._"--_Dr. Richard Cabot, in "What Men Live By."_
With "Dear Brutus" there was the usual surprised delight when the
curtain rose, at the birds and sunshine in the English garden, the
piquant fascination of the dwarf magician, then the unfolding of the
tragedy of the failure-lives begging a second chance, and the
whimsical fairy tale of the enchanted garden--the land of "Might Have
Been."
Billy was accustomed to the impulsive touch of a hand on his sleeve,
at the high spots in plays, not a nervous, bothersome little hand,
but a warm electric contact as quickly withdrawn while the girl kept
her eyes fast on the stage. Sometimes he lost the effect of half the
best acting in his amusement at watching her, like a child actually
living for the moment in the drama going on before her. He was
accustomed also to the tears that welled up at emotional parts, tears
usually with a smile shining through them. But he was not prepared
for the deluge that swept her when the impenetrable darkness came
down over the enchanted garden and the little dream daughter, who
might have set things right for the misunderstood artist, cried in
the hopelessness of a child's terrified loneliness "I don't want to
be a 'Might Have Been.'"
He had seen her weep in poetic enjoyment of pathetic parts before,
but this was different and offered no explanation for itself. Sitting
as close as the arm of the chair and the formality due in a public
place would allow, he got the impact of each fresh shock. He was
genuinely concerned. It was a most helpless situation. There were
ways of meeting it, of course, which he knew--but not in a public
theatre.... If only the lights would go out! Still it troubled him a
little. And when it was over her sole comment was "Wasn't it
wonderful!"
"You liked it!"
"It was the most beautiful thing--"
"Even the garden? Just what was the trouble?"
"I hardly know myself. Sometime I'll try to tell you."
There would always be something left to tell--a new world dawning
every morning, new mysteries unfolding every evening--a wonderful
blessing on a long journey together.
When he left her he stood bareheaded, boyish in his humility, and
spoke, as thousands of lovers had done before him, of the time when
she would go all the way home with him.
* * * * *
It came in October. The painters had fairly crowded the carpenters
out of the house, and before the last varnish was dry on the woodwork
Billy had cleared away the wreckage of mortar, boxes and discarded
scaffolds and left the house standing trim and solid between the
sentinel pines, unmistakably new, but looking as though it had grown
there. The next day Ruth's aunt, accompanied by a capable charwoman
and a truck load of boxes, known in the housewife's vernacular as
chests, decorously chaperoned her niece to her future home to arrange
furniture and hang curtains and give the last touches toward making
it sufficiently habitable to begin with. The aunt wasn't just sure
that it was the proper thing for a girl to visit her fiancee's house
before she was married. She didn't know that Ruth had rope-walked the
naked joists in the moonlight with Billy many times while the
building was in progress; that they had measured the windows for
curtains by the gleam of a flashlight a month before, else how could
they have planned every last chair and hanging. The next night they
came home to the house together.
The girl had protested at the idea of a wedding trip. "We both like
that hill farm better than anywhere else in the world," she said.
"Why should we go racing off to some place we don't care about?"
"And defy an old custom like that?" he argued; but he knew that she
knew how much he had wanted exactly that.
So they had gone to the church in the afternoon and had come back to
a reception at the aunt's afterwards--a very nice affair with the
luxurious old rooms candle-lighted and hung with autumn leaves. And
their best friends had come to wish them well, with all the noise and
chatter common to such occasions, even among very well bred people;
and as soon as they could, they kissed the aunt and slipped away,
getting a last glimpse of Jean and the Agricultural Representative,
apparently completely lost in some panorama unfolding itself before
them in the open fire.
The car swung out of the city streets on to the smooth, winding
country road, a familiar road, but somehow different. At the crest of
the hill they stopped and looked back at the city glittering in a cup
below them.
"Sure you're not sorry you're leaving it?" Billy asked.
"Quite sure. But it isn't the city's fault. It isn't a natural place
to live; but it has a lot to give in other ways."
"Things we must try to keep in touch with."
"Only there are times when neither city nor country, nor anything
else, matters. It's only people that count--"
But Billy was very appreciative and that sentence was never quite
finished.
* * * * *
They were miles from the lights of the city now. A long stretch of
road through woods and pastures, a white frost glittering on the
fields and fences, a golden moonlight filtering through the branches
of wind-swept trees and yellowing the dead leaves on the moist, black
roadway, a cold white mist lying in the valley and never a sound but
the steady purring of the engine. Presently a little cabin stood out
alone in a clearing, its lights out, a faint white plume of smoke
arising slowly from its chimney.
"Always seems a sort of lonely little house," Billy remarked. "It
must be a jolt to come out of the heart of a city to a spot like
this. The compensation, of course, is that people have to love each
other harder--sometimes there isn't much else. When they don't, the
result is terrible."
It was late when they turned in at their own gate. Earlier in the
evening a neighbor had come in and lighted the fire and gone away
again; the red light glowed warmly in the living-room windows. They
went in together. It was the same room where they had hung curtains
and adjusted furniture the day before, the same room Billy had
looked back upon happily before he left the house that afternoon, but
it seemed to have come alive, somehow. The firelight played over the
brown walls, the rich red and brown and gold bindings of the books,
the warm autumn tints in the curtains.... A new, strange shyness held
them. She slipped out of her coat and he took it from her with his
best drawing-room adeptness; she waited while he found a place for
it. Then they turned their attention to the fire--there was always
something that might be done to a fire.
But standing there in the fresh warmth of the blazing logs, with
Billy's eyes upon her, serious and friendly, she realized suddenly
how appealingly boyish he was in his anxiety to make her feel at
home. And just as suddenly it dawned on Billy that she was, after
all, just a wisp of a girl, such a rare, whimsical, comrady bit of a
girl, who had staked everything so sportingly to come with him. And
his arm went about her with the quick, reassuring pressure of a guide
to be trusted.
"We're going to be awfully happy here," he said, just as though he
hadn't said it a thousand times before.
And the girl pressed closer to the good, rough sleeve of his coat and
let it go at that.
The lights went out in the little house. The smoke still rose from
the chimney like incense from an altar. Somewhere in the distance
an owl hooted, a far off lonely cry--one of the calls of the wild
places which seldom fails to stir the human soul with kindred
desolation, or a throb of security in the nearness of its mate. And
the old pines dozed in dreamy retrospection. They had watched other
lovers come and go. They were at the happy beginning of a new story.
Transcriber's Notes
Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page Original
Emendation
26 And the people had snug
And the people had sung
62 The representative didn't ask any questions
The Representative didn't ask any questions
63 wished the representative had kept that last argument to himself
wished the Representative had kept that last argument to himself
95 it will be the best thing that ever happened them
it will be the best thing that ever happened to them
133 a big velvety cycopia moth
a big velvety cyclopia moth
146 looked upon it is the one chance
looked upon it as the one chance
166 ain't for the likes of me.
ain't for the likes of me,
176 Billy thought, he he drove home
Billy thought, as he drove home
208 She was smiling in a way that was not beautiful, and she said.
She was smiling in a way that was not beautiful, and she said:
264 "Wonderful, the Representative replied
"Wonderful," the Representative replied