It was eight o'clock when she let herself into her apartment. She had
given the maid a whole holiday. When Fanny had turned on the light in
her little hallway she stood there a moment, against the door, her hand
spread flat against the panel. It was almost as though she patted it,
lovingly, gratefully. Then she went on into the living room, and stood
looking at its rosy lamplight. Then, still as though seeing it all for
the first time, into her own quiet, cleanly bedroom, with its cream
enamel, and the chaise longue that she had had cushioned in rose because
it contrasted so becomingly with her black hair. And there, on her
dressing table, propped up against the brushes and bottles, was the
yellow oblong of a telegram. From Theodore of course. She opened it with
a rush of happiness. It was like a loving hand held out to her in need.
It was a day letter.
“We sail Monday on the St. Paul. Mizzi is with me. I broke my word to
you. But you lied to me about the letters. I found them the week
before the concert. I shall bring her back with me or stay to fight for
Germany. Forgive me, dear sister.”
Just fifty words. His thrifty German training.
“No!” cried Fanny, aloud. “No! No!” And the cry quavered and died away,
and another took its place, and it, too, gave way to another, so that
she was moaning as she stood there with the telegram in her shaking
hand. She read it again, her lips moving, as old people sometimes read.
Then she began to whimper, with her closed fist over her mouth, her
whole body shaking. All her fine courage gone now; all her rigid
self-discipline; all her iron determination. She was not a tearful
woman. And she had wept much on the train. So the thing that
wrenched and shook her now was all the more horrible because of its
soundlessness. She walked up and down the room, pushing her hair back
from her forehead with the flat of her hand. From time to time she
smoothed out the crumpled yellow slip of paper and read it again. Her
mind, if you could have seen into it, would have presented a confused
and motley picture. Something like this: But his concert engagements?...
That was what had happened to Bauer.... How silly he had looked when her
fist met his jaw.... It had turned cold; why didn't they have steam on?
The middle of October.... Teddy, how could you do it! How could you
do it!... Was he still lying in a heap on the floor? But of course the
sneaking little Jap had found him.... Somebody to talk to. That was what
she wanted. Some one to talk to....
Some one to talk to. She stood there, in the middle of her lamp-lighted
living room, and she held out her hands in silent appeal. Some one to
talk to. In her mind she went over the list of those whose lives had
touched hers in the last few crowded years. Fenger, Fascinating Facts,
Ella Monahan, Nathan Haynes; all the gay, careless men and women she had
met from time to time through Fenger and Fascinating Facts. Not one of
them could she turn to now.
Clarence Heyl. She breathed a sigh of relief. Clarence Heyl. He had
helped her once, to-day. And now, for the second time, something that
he had said long before came from its hiding place in her subconscious
mind. She had said:
“Some days I feel I've got to walk out of the office, and down the
street, without a hat, and on and on, walking and walking, and running
and running till I come to the horizon.”
And Heyl had answered, in his quiet, reassuring way: “Some day that
feeling will get too strong for you. When that time comes get on a train
marked Denver. From there take another to Estes Park. That's the Rocky
Mountains, where the horizon lives and has its being. Ask for Heyl's
place. They'll hand you from one to the other. I may be there, but more
likely I shan't. The key's in the mail box, tied to a string. You'll
find a fire laid with fat pine knots. My books are there. The bedding's
in the cedar chest. And the mountains will make you clean and whole
again; and the pines...”
Fanny went to the telephone. Trains for Denver. She found the road she
wanted, and asked for information. She was on her own ground here. All
her life she had had to find her own trains, check her own trunks, plan
her journeys. Sometimes she had envied the cotton-wool women who had had
all these things done for them, always.
One-half of her mind was working clearly and coolly. The other half was
numb. There were things to be done. They would take a day. More than
a day, but she would neglect most of them. She must notify the office.
There were tickets to be got. Reservations. Money at the bank. Packing.
When the maid came in at eleven Fanny had suitcases and bags out, and
her bedroom was strewn with shoes, skirts, coats.
Late Monday afternoon Fenger telephoned. She did not answer. There came
a note from him, then a telegram. She did not read them. Tuesday found
her on a train bound for Colorado. She remembered little of the first
half of her journey. She had brought with her books and magazines, and
she must have read hem, but her mind had evidently retained nothing of
what she had read. She must have spent hours looking out of the window,
for she remembered, long afterward, the endlessness and the monotony of
the Kansas prairies. They soothed her. She was glad there were no bits
of autumnal woodland, no tantalizing vistas, nothing to break the flat
and boundless immensity of it. Here was something big, and bountiful,
and real, and primal. Good Kansas dirt. Miles of it. Miles of it. She
felt she would like to get out and tramp on it, hard.
“Pretty cold up there in Estes Park,” the conductor had said. “Been
snowing up in the mountains.”
She had arranged to stop in Denver only long enough to change trains.
A puffy little branch line was to take her from Denver to Loveland, and
there, she had been told, one of the big mountain-road steam automobiles
would take her up the mountains to her destination. For one as mentally
alert as she normally was, the exact location of that destination was
very hazy in her mind. Heyl's place. That was all. Ordinarily she would
have found the thought ridiculous. But she concentrated on it now; clung
to it.
At the first glimpse of the foot-hills Fanny's listless gaze became
interested. If you have ever traveled on the jerky, cleanly, meandering
little road that runs between Denver and the Park you know that it
winds, and curves, so that the mountains seem to leap about, friskily,
first confronting you on one side of the car window, then disappearing
and seeming to taunt you from the windows of the opposite side. Fanny
laughed aloud. The mountain steam-car was waiting at Loveland. There
were few passengers at this time of year. The driver was a great tanned
giant, pongee colored from his hair to his puttees and boots. Fanny was
to learn, later, that in Estes Park the male tourist was likely to
be puny, pallid, and unattractive when compared to the tall, slim,
straight, khaki-clad youth, browned by the sun, and the wind, and the
dust, who drives his steamer up and down the perilous mountain roads
with more dexterity than the charioteering gods ever displayed on
Olympus.
Fanny got the seat beside this glorious person. The steamer was a huge
vehicle, boasting five rows of seats, and looking very much like a small
edition of the sightseeing cars one finds in tourist-infested cities.
“Heyl's place,” said Fanny. Suppose it failed to work!
Said the blond god, “Stopping at the Inn overnight, I s'pose.”
“Why--I don't know,” faltered Fanny. “Can't I go right on to--to--Heyl's
place?”
“Can.” Mountain steamer men are not loquacious. “Sure. Better not. You
won't get to the Inn till dark. Better stay there over night, and go on
up to Heyl's place in the morning.”
Then he leaned forward, clawed about expertly among what appeared to
Fanny's eyes to be a maze of handles, brakes, valves; and the great car
glided smoothly off, without a bump, without a jar. Fanny took a long
breath.
There is no describing a mountain. One uses words, and they are futile.
And the Colorado Rockies, in October, when the aspens are turning! Well,
aspens turn gold in October. People who have seen an aspen grove in
October believe in fairies. And such people need no clumsy descriptive
passages to aid their fancies. You others who have not seen it?
There shall be no poor weaving together of words. There shall be no
description of orange and mauve and flame-colored sunsets, no juggling
with mists and clouds, and sunrises and purple mountains. Mountain
dwellers and mountain lovers are a laconic tribe. They know the futility
of words.
But the effect of the mountains on Fanny Brandeis. That is within our
province. In the first place, they made her hungry. That was the crisp,
heady air. The mountain road, to one who has never traveled it, is a
thing of delicious thrills and near-terror. A narrow, perilous ribbon
of road, cut in the side of the rock itself; a road all horseshoe curves
and hairpin twists. Fanny found herself gasping. But that passed after
a time. Big Thompson canyon leaves no room for petty terror. And the
pongee person was so competent, so quietly sure, so angularly graceful
among his brakes and levers. Fanny stole a side glance at him now and
then. He looked straight ahead. When you drive a mountain steamer you do
look straight ahead. A glance to the right or left is so likely to mean
death, or at best a sousing in the Thompson that foams and rushes below.
Fanny ventured a question. “Do you know Mr. Heyl?”
“Heyl? Took him down day before yesterday.”
“Down?”
“To the village. He's gone back east.”
Fanny was not quite sure whether the pang she felt was relief or
consternation.
At Estes village the blond god handed her over to a twin charioteer who
would drive her up the mountain road to the Inn that nestled in a valley
nine thousand feet up the mountain. It was a drive Fanny never forgot.
Fenger, Ted, Haynes-Cooper, her work, her plans, her ambitions, seemed
to dwindle to puny insignificance beside the vast grandeur that unfolded
before her at every fresh turn in the road. Up they went, and up, and
up, and the air was cold, but without a sting in it. It was dark when
the lights of the Inn twinkled out at them. The door was thrown open
as they swung up the curve to the porch. A great log fire glowed in the
fireplace. The dining room held only a dozen people, or thereabouts--a
dozen weary, healthy people, in corduroys and sweaters and boots, whose
cleanly talk was all about climbing and fishing, and horseback rides and
trails. And it was fried chicken night at the Inn. Fanny thought she was
too utterly tired to eat, until she began to eat, and then she thought
she was too hungry ever to stop. After dinner she sat, for a moment,
before the log fire in the low-ceilinged room, with its log walls, its
rustic benches, and its soft-toned green and brown cushions. She forgot
to be unhappy. She forgot to be anything but deliciously drowsy.
And presently she climbed the winding stair whose newel post was a
fire-marked tree trunk, richly colored, and curiously twisted. And so
to her lamp-lighted room, very small, very clean, very quiet. She opened
her window and looked out at the towering mass that was Long's Peak, and
at the stars, and she heard the busy little brook that scurries through
the Inn yard on its way from the mountain to the valley. She undressed
quickly, and crept into bed, meaning to be very, very miserable indeed.
And the next thing she knew it was morning. A blue and gold October
morning. And the mountains!--but there is no describing a mountain.
One uses words, and they are futile. Fanny viewed them again, from her
window, between pauses in dressing. And she meant, privately, to be
miserable again. But she could only think, somehow, of bacon and eggs,
and coffee, and muffins.