To Hugh Garth the girl told her story at last. She seemed to realize
only dimly that there were two other living beings in this house, to
her a house of darkness peopled only by voices--Pete’s modest, rare boy
speeches, Bella’s brief, smothered statements. The great music of Hugh’s
utterance must indeed have filled her narrowed world. So it was to him
she turned--he was always near her, sitting on the pelt beside the chair
to which, after a day and night in Bella’s bed, she was helped.
She had a charming fashion of speech, rather slow motions of her lips,
which had some difficulty with “r” and “s,” a difficulty which she
evidently struggled against conscientiously, and as she talked, she
gesticulated with her slim little hands. She was a touching thing
sitting there in Hugh’s carved throne--he an abdicated monarch at her
feet, knee in hand, grizzled head tilted back, hazel eyes raised to her
and filled with adoration.
“I am called Sylvie Doone,” she said with that quaint struggle over
the “S.” “I was always miserable at home.” She gave the quick sigh of
a child. “You see, my father died when I was very little, and then my
mother married again. We lived in the grimmest little town, hardly
more than a dozen houses, beside a stream, up in Massachusetts--farming
country, but poor farming, hard farming, the kind that twists the men
with rheumatism, and makes the women all pinched and worn. Mother
was like that. She died when I was thirteen. You see--there I was, so
queerly fixed. I had to live with Mr. Pynche--there was no other home
for me anywhere. And he kind of resented it. He had enough money not
to need me for work--a sister of his did the housework better than I
could--and yet he was poor enough to hate having to feed me and pay for
my clothes. I was always feeling in the way, and a burden. There was
nothing I could do.
“Then I saw something about the movies in a magazine, and pictures of
girls, not much better-looking than me, making lots of money. I borrowed
some money from a drug-store clerk who wanted to keep company with
me--I’ve paid it back--and I went to New York. I did get a job. But I’m
not a good actress.”
She faltered over the rest--a commonplace story of engagements, of
failures, until she found herself touring the West with a wretched
theatrical troupe. “We were booked for a little town off there beyond
your woods, and the train was stalled in a snowstorm. We got on a
stage-coach, but it got stuck in a drift on one of those dreadful roads.
I was freezing cold, and I thought I’d make a short cut through the
woods. The road was running along the edge of a big forest of pines. I
cut off while they were all working to dig out the horses.
“Mr. Snaring said, ‘Look out for the bears!’ and I laughed and ran up
what looked like a snow-buried trail. There was a hard crust. The woods
were all glittering and so beautiful. I ran into them, laughing. I was
so glad to get away by myself from those people into the woods where it
was so silent and sort of solemn--like being in a church again. I can’t
think how I got so lost. I meant to come round back to the road, but
before I knew it, I didn’t know which way the road was. The pines were
so dense, so all alike, they looked almost as if they kept sort of
shifting about me. I tried to follow back on my footprints, but in
some places snow had shaken down from the branches. And there were so
many--so dreadfully many other tracks--of animals--” She put her hands
over her face and shrank down in her chair.
“Forget about them, Sylvie,” Hugh admonished gently. “Even if there had
been bears about, they wouldn’t likely have bothered you any.”
“I can’t bring myself to tell you about that time--I can’t!”
“Don’t, then--only, how did you live through the night, my dear?”
“I don’t know--except that I never stayed still. I got out from the
trees because I was afraid of bears, and I lost my hat. The sun was like
fire shining up from underneath and down from up above. My eyes began
to hurt almost at once, and by the time night came, it was agony. The
darkness didn’t seem to help me any either; the glare still seemed to
come in under my lids. I couldn’t sleep for the pain. I knew I’d
freeze if I stood still, so I kept moving all night, trampling round in
circles, I suppose. Next morning the terrible glare began again. Then
everything went red. I was nearly crazy when you found me, Mr. Garth.”
“Please call me Hugh,” he murmured, taking her hand in his. “I feel in a
way that you belong to me now--I saved you from dying alone there in the
cold and brought you back to my home. I’ve got jettison rights, Sylvie.”
She let him hold her hand, and flushed.
“You’ll never know what it felt like to hear your voice call to me, to
feel you pulling me up. I’d only just dropped a few minutes before, but
I’d never have struggled up. It would have been the end.” She trembled
in the memory, and he patted her hand. “I don’t know why a man like
you lives off here in this wild place, but thank God, you do live here!
Though,” she added with wistfulness, twisting her soft mouth, “though I
can’t ever quite see why God should care much for a Sylvie Doone.” She
touched the lids of her closed eyes. “I wonder why it doesn’t worry me
more not to be able to see. Now that the pain’s gone, I don’t seem to
care much.”
“Thank God. Perhaps, though,” he added half-grudgingly, “in a few days
you’ll see again.”
She smiled. “I’d just love to see _you_. You must be wonderful!”
“What makes you think that?” he asked, his warped face glowing.
“You’re so strong and young, such thick hair, such finely shaped hands
and such a voice.” Sylvie’s associates had been of a profession that
deals perpetually in personalities. “If I’d been blind a long time, I
suppose I could just run my hand over your face, and I’d know what you
look like. But I can’t tell a thing.” She felt for his face and brushed
it eagerly with her fingers, laughing at herself. “I just know that you
have thick eyelashes and are clean-shaven. Is Bella your wife? And that
big little boy your son?”
He started. “No, she’s a faithful thing, the boy’s nurse. And the
kid’s my young brother--a great gawk of a boy for his age, a regular
bean-pole.”
“It’s so hard to tell anything about people if you can’t see them. I
wouldn’t have thought he was so big. Is he about fourteen or fifteen? He
speaks so low and gently; he might be any age.”
“And a man’s height--pretty near too big to lick, though he needs it.”
“And Bella, what’s she like?”
“A dried-up mummy of a woman.”
The kitchen door creaked. Hugh started and shot a look over his
shoulder. Bella stood on the kitchen threshold with an expressionless
face and lowered eyelids.
“Why did you jump?” asked Sylvie nervously.
Hugh wet his lips with his tongue. “Nothing. The door creaked. Go on.
Tell me more, child,” he urged.
“No. I want to hear about you now. Tell me your story.”
Hugh clenched his hands and flushed darkly. He glanced over his shoulder
with a furtive look, but Bella had gone.
“No one else rightly knows my story, Sylvie. Will you promise me never
to speak of it, to Bella, to Pete, to any one?”
“Of course, I promise.” Her face beamed with the pride of a child
entrusted with a secret.
Then, lowering his voice and moving closer to her chair, he began a
fictitious history, a history of persecuted and heroic innocence, of
reckless adventure, of daring self-sacrifice. The girl listened with
parted lips. Her cheeks glowed. And behind the door, Bella too listened,
straining her ears.
The murmur of Hugh’s recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic
climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by
Sylvie’s ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block,
colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what
she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the
kitchen and out into the snow.
There, in the broad light of the setting sun, Pete rhythmically bent and
straightened over his saw. The tool sang with a hissing, ringing rhythm,
and the young man drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and
back, forward and back, in alternate postures of untiring grace. The
air was not cold. There was the cloudy softness premonitory of a spring
storm; the sun glowed like a dying fire through a long, narrow rift in
the shrouded west. Pete had thrown aside his coat and drawn in his belt.
The collar of his flannel shirt was open and turned back; his head was
bare. The bright gold of his short hair, the scarlet of his cheeks,
the vivid blue of his brooding eyes, made shocks of color against the
prevailing whiteness. Even the indigo of his overalls and the dark gray
of his shirt stood out with a curious value of tint and texture. His
bare hands and forearms glowed. He was whistling with a boy’s vigor and
a bird’s sweetness.
Bella caught Pete’s arm as it bent for one of the strong forward sweeps.
He stopped, let go of his saw, and turned to her, smiling.
Then--the smile gone: “What’s wrong?”
Her eyes flamed in her pale, tense face. “We’ve got to stop it, Pete,”
she said. “It’s horrible!”
“What? Don’t stand out here with those bare arms, Bella.” He was pulling
his own shirt-sleeves down over his glistening bronze forearms as he
spoke.
“We can’t talk in the house,” she said, “and I’ve got to talk. I--Do you
know what Hugh’s doing--what he’s telling that girl? What he’s letting
her believe?”
Pete shook his head, but at the same time turned his blue eyes away from
her toward the glowing west.
“Lies,” said Bella. She laughed a short, explosive laugh. “He’s got his
ideal audience at last--a blind one. She thinks he’s young and handsome
and heroic. Pete, she thinks he’s a hero. She thinks he’s buried himself
out here for the sake of somebody else. Oh, it’s a regular romance, and
it’s been going on for hours--it’s still going on. By now he believes
it all himself. He’s putting in the details. And Sylvie: ‘Oh!’ she’s
saying, and ‘Ah, Mr. Garth, how you must have suffered! How
wonderful you are!’ And--look at me Pete--do you want to know what we
are--according to him--you and I?”
He did not turn his eyes from the west, even when she shook his arm.
“I’m a dried-up mummy of a woman--faithful?--yes, I’m faithful--an old
servant. And you’re a child, an overgrown bean-pole of a boy, fourteen
or fifteen years old.”
The young man stood tall and still--a statue of golden youth in the
golden light--the woman clutching at his arm, her face twisted, her eyes
afire, all the colorlessness of her body and the suppressed flame of her
spirit pitilessly apparent.
“Look at me, Pete.”
“Well,” he sighed gently, “what of it?” He looked down at her and
smiled. “It’s the first good time he’s had for fifteen years. You know
we don’t make him happy. I don’t grudge him his joy, Bella, do you?
It can’t last long, anyway. Fairy tales can’t hurt her--Hugh
believes--almost--in his own inventions. She’ll be going back--her
friends will be hunting for her. I’ll let her think I’m a bean-pole of a
boy if it makes him any happier to have me one. And why do you care?”
She drew in her breath. “Oh, I don’t suppose I care--so much,” she said
haltingly. “But--think of the girl.”
His eyes widened a little and fell. “The girl?”
“She’s falling in love with him!”
Pete threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Oh, Bella, you know,
_that’s_ funny!”
“It’s not. It’s tragic. It’s horrible. You’ll see. Watch her face.”
“I have watched it.” He spoke dreamily. “It’s a very pretty and sweet
face.”
“Pete, Hugh’s robbing _you_.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you’re young. You’re ready for loving. This child--God sent her to
you, to get you out of this desolation, to lead you back to loving and
living, to give you what you ought to have--Life.”
It was as though she had struck him. He started and drew himself away.
“Shut up, Bella,” he said with boyish roughness and limped past her into
the house.