IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME
From that day on Stella found in her hands the reins over a smooth,
frictionless, well-ordered existence. Sam Foo proved himself such a
domestic treasure as only the trained Oriental can be. When the labor of
an eight-room dwelling proved a little too much for him, he urbanely
said so. Thereupon, at Fyfe's suggestion, he imported a fellow
countryman, another bland, silent-footed model of efficiency in personal
service. Thereafter Stella's task of supervision proved a sinecure.
A week or so after their return, in sorting over some of her belongings,
she came across the check Charlie had given her: that two hundred and
seventy dollars which represented the only money she had ever earned in
her life. She studied it a minute, then went out to where her husband
sat perched on the verandah rail.
"You might cash this, Jack," she suggested.
He glanced at the slip.
"Better have it framed as a memento," he said, smiling. "You'll never
earn two hundred odd dollars so hard again, I hope. No, I'd keep it, if
I were you. If ever you should need it, it'll always be good--unless
Charlie goes broke."
There never had been any question of money between them. From the day
of their marriage Fyfe had made her a definite monthly allowance, a
greater sum than she needed or spent.
"As a matter of fact," he went on, "I'm going to open an account in your
name at the Royal Bank, so you can negotiate your own paper and pay your
own bills by check."
She went in and put away the check. It was hers, earned, all too
literally, in the sweat of her brow. For all that it represented she had
given service threefold. If ever there came a time when that hunger for
independence which had been fanned to a flame in her brother's kitchen
should demand appeasement--she pulled herself up short when she found
her mind running upon such an eventuality. Her future was ordered. She
was married--to be a mother. Here lay her home. All about her ties were
in process of formation, ties that with time would grow stronger than
any shackles of steel, constraining her to walk in certain ways,--ways
that were pleasant enough, certain of ease if not of definite purpose.
Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in
which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now,
faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand
against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more
than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his
children. She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been
the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal
charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still
deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of
living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural
evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big
thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too
incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway.
Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was
driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream. Always she
encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded,
robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, passionate
drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who
experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become
one.
Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because
invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told
herself--sometimes wistfully--could never be realized. She had shut the
door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know
that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid,
and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen
what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to
abide steadfast by her choice.
Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had
never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his
loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford
ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started
on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for
he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert,
bubbling over with good spirits.
"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising
glance.
"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton
retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm
putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small
fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got
class, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it,
eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak
floors."
"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put
in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might
put it."
"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and
by, if the timber business holds up."
Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:
"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort.
You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a
thoroughbred."
"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety
of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.
He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what
they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He
stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making
the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.
"It's a touch of civilization that looks good to me," he declared. "You
can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack. I'm
going to use it often. All you need to make this a social center is a
good-looking girl or two--unmarried ones. You watch. When the summer
flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular."
That observation verified Benton's shrewdness. The Fyfe bungalow did
become popular. Two weeks after Charlie's visit, a lean, white cruiser,
all brass and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two
women came at a dignified pace along the path to the house. Stella had
met Linda Abbey once, reluctantly, under the circumstances, but it was
different now--with the difference that money makes. She could play
hostess against an effective background, and she did so graciously. Nor
was her graciousness wholly assumed. After all, they were her kind of
people: Linda, fair-haired, perfectly gowned, perfectly mannered,
sweetly pretty; Mrs. Abbey, forty-odd and looking thirty-five, with that
calm self-assurance which wealth and position confer upon those who hold
it securely. Stella found them altogether to her liking. It pleased her,
too, that Jack happened in to meet them. He was not a scintillating
talker, yet she had noticed that when he had anything to say, he never
failed to attract and hold attention. His quiet, impersonal manner never
suggested stolidness. And she was too keen an observer to overlook the
fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an
impression always, particularly on women. Throughout that winter it had
not disturbed her. It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda
Abbey's gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes
that were so like Fyfe's own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with
no corresponding play of features.
"We'll expect to see a good deal of you this summer," Mrs. Abbey said
cordially at leave-taking. "We have a few people up from town now and
then to vary the monotony of feasting our souls on scenery. Sometimes we
are quite a jolly crowd. Don't be formal. Drop in when you feel the
inclination."
When Stella reminded Jack of this some time later, in a moment of
boredom, he put the _Panther_ at her disposal for the afternoon. But he
would not go himself. He had opened up a new outlying camp, and he had
directions to issue, work to lay out.
"You hold up the social end of the game," he laughed. "I'll hustle
logs."
So Stella invaded the Abbey-Monohan precincts by herself and enjoyed
it--for she met a houseful of young people from the coast, and in that
light-hearted company she forgot for the time being that she was married
and the responsible mistress of a house. Paul Abbey was there, but he
had apparently forgotten or forgiven the blow she had once dealt his
vanity. Paul, she reflected, was not the sort to mourn a lost love long.
She had the amused experience too of beholding Charlie Benton appear an
hour or so before she departed and straightway monopolize Linda Abbey in
his characteristically impetuous fashion. Charlie was no diplomat. He
believed in driving straight to any goal he selected.
"So _that's_ the reason for the outward metamorphosis," Stella
reflected. "Well?"
Altogether she enjoyed the afternoon hugely. The only fly in her
ointment was a greasy smudge bestowed upon her dress--a garment she
prized highly--by some cordage coiled on the _Panther's_ deck. The black
tender had carried too many cargoes of loggers and logging supplies to
be a fit conveyance for persons in party attire. She exhibited the
soiled gown to Fyfe with due vexation.
"I hope you'll have somebody scrub down the _Panther_ the next time I
want to go anywhere in a decent dress," she said ruefully. "That'll
never come out. And it's the prettiest thing I've got too."
"Ah, what's the odds?" Fyfe slipped one arm around her waist. "You can
buy more dresses. Did you have a good time? That's the thing!"
That ruined gown, however, subsequently produced an able, forty-foot,
cruising launch, powerfully engined, easy in a sea, and comfortably,
even luxuriously fitted as to cabin. With that for their private use,
the _Panther_ was left to her appointed service, and in the new boat
Fyfe and Stella spent many a day abroad on Roaring Lake. They fished
together, explored nooks and bays up and down its forty miles of length,
climbed hills together like the bear of the ancient rhyme, to see what
they could see. And the _Waterbug_ served to put them on intimate terms
with their neighbors, particularly the Abbey crowd. The Abbeys took to
them wholeheartedly. Fyfe himself was highly esteemed by the elder
Abbey, largely, Stella suspected, for his power on Roaring Lake. Abbey
_père_ had built up a big fortune out of timber. He respected any man
who could follow the same path to success. Therefore he gave Fyfe double
credit,--for making good, and for a personality that could not be
overlooked. He told Stella that once; that is to say, he told her
confidentially that her husband was a very "able" young man. Abbey
senior was short and double-chinned and inclined to profuse perspiration
if he moved in haste over any extended time. Paul promised to be like
him, in that respect.
Summer slipped by. There were dances, informal little hops at the Abbey
domicile, return engagements at the Fyfe bungalow, laughter and music
and Japanese lanterns strung across the lawn. There was tea and tennis
and murmuring rivers of small talk. And amid this Stella Fyfe flitted
graciously, esteeming it her world, a fair measure of what the future
might be. Viewed in that light, it seemed passable enough.
Later, when summer was on the wane, she withdrew from much of this
activity, spending those days when she did not sit buried in a book out
on the water with her husband. When October ushered in the first of the
fall rains, they went to Vancouver and took apartments. In December her
son was born.