A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
With the recurrence of spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to
the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for
Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the
transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every
village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew
people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way
for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant
acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that butterfly clique
sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity.
Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional
auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had
spent only part of his time in town after their boy was born. He was
extending his timber operations. What he did not put into words, but
what Stella sensed because she experienced the same thing herself, was
that town bored him to death,--such town existence as Vancouver
afforded. Their first winter had been different, because they had sought
places where there was manifold variety of life, color, amusement. She
was longing for the wide reach of Roaring Lake, the immense
amphitheater of the surrounding mountains, long before spring.
So she was quite as well pleased when a mild April saw them domiciled at
home again. In addition to Sam Foo and Feng Shu, there was a nurse for
Jack Junior. Stella did not suggest that; Fyfe insisted on it. He was
quite proud of his boy, but he did not want her chained to her baby.
"If the added expense doesn't count, of course a nurse will mean a lot
more personal freedom," Stella admitted. "You see, I haven't the least
idea of your resources, Jack. All I know about it is that you allow me
plenty of money for my individual expenses. And I notice we're acquiring
a more expensive mode of living all the time."
"That's so," Fyfe responded. "I never have gone into any details of my
business with you. No reason why you shouldn't know what limits there
are to our income. You never happened to express any curiosity before.
Operating as I did up till lately, the business netted anywhere from
twelve to fifteen thousand a year. I'll double that this season. In
fact, with the amount of standing timber I control, I could make it
fifty thousand a year by expanding and speeding things up. I guess you
needn't worry about an extra servant or two."
So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free
as of old to order her days as she pleased. Yet that small morsel of
humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the
maternal floodgates a part of that passionate longing to bestow love
where her heart willed. Sometimes she took issue with herself over that
wayward tendency. By all the rules of the game, she should have loved
her husband. He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and
generous. He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist
between a man and a woman. But she never fooled herself; she never had
so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned. She liked him, but that was all. He
was good to her, and she was grateful.
Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked
a capacity for tremendously passionate outbreak. If she had been
compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant
sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which
he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen
anything but the sunny side of him. He still puzzled her a little at
times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a
quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say. Even so,
granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew
lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost
resented him.
Why, she could not perhaps have put into words. It seemed too fantastic
for sober summing-up, when she tried. But lurking always in the
background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a
nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret. It could
never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing,
regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away.
She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential
adventuring of youth. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole
from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for
her guiding-star--theoretically--the twin concepts of morality and duty
as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, and
seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious. Marriage and
motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the
passionately eager fulfilling of her destiny. It had been thrust upon
her. She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of
resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.
She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was
bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth. As much as possible
she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings. Materially she had
everything. If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, God only
knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circumstances and Charlie
Benton's subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon
her. That was the reverse of her shield, but one that grew dimmer as
time passed. Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon
Jack Junior, a sturdy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew
steadily more adorable.
Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled
discontent got hold of her. Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to
sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills.
And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake
swell,--just dreaming, filled with a passive sort of regret. She could
not change things now, but she could not help wishing she could.
Fyfe warned her once about getting offshore in the canoe. Roaring Lake,
pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was
subject to squalls. Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length
like blasts from some monster funnel. Stella knew that; she had seen the
glassy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not
afraid of the lake nor the lake winds. She was hard and strong. The
open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her
up physically. She swam like a seal. Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro
she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a
cushion, and lose herself staring at the sky. She paid little heed to
Fyfe's warning beyond a smiling assurance that she had no intention of
courting a watery end.
So one day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in
his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the
north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to
dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake.
A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a
snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A
party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till
after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant
logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him.
She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical
relaxation. Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.
She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,--rain,
great pattering drops. Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of
the sun. The shore, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam. To the
north and between her and the land's rocky line was a darkening of the
lake's surface. Stella reached for her paddle. The black cloud let fall
long, gray streamers of rain. There was scarcely a stirring of the air,
but that did not deceive her. There was a growing chill, and there was
that broken line sweeping down the lake. Behind that was wind, a summer
gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.
She had to buck her way to shore through that. She drove hard on the
paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up
feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe
dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of
wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently,
and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.
Then it swept up to her, a ripple, a chop, and very close behind that
the short, steep, lake combers with a wind that blew off the tops as
each wave-head broke in white, bubbling froth. Immediately she began to
lose ground. She had expected that, and it did not alarm her. If she
could keep the canoe bow on, there was an even chance that the squall
would blow itself out in half an hour. But keeping the canoe bow on
proved a task for stout arms. The wind would catch all that forward
part which thrust clear as she topped a sea and twist it aside, tending
always to throw her broadside into the trough. Spray began to splash
aboard. The seas were so short and steep that the Peterboro would rise
over the crest of a tall one and dip its bow deep in the next, or leap
clear to strike with a slap that made Stella's heart jump. She had never
undergone quite that rough and tumble experience in a small craft. She
was being beaten farther out and down the lake, and her arms were
growing tired. Nor was there any slackening of the wind.
The combined rain and slaps of spray soaked her thoroughly. A puddle
gathered about her knees in the bilge, sloshing fore and aft as the
craft pitched, killing the natural buoyancy of the canoe so that she
dove harder. Stella took a chance, ceased paddling, and bailed with a
small can. She got a tossing that made her head swim while she lay in
the trough. And when she tried to head up into it again, one comber
bigger than its fellows reared up and slapped a barrel of water inboard.
The next wave swamped her.
Sunk to the clamps, Stella held fast to the topsides, crouching on her
knees, immersed to the hips in water that struck a chill through her
flesh. She had the wit to remember and act upon Jack Fyfe's coaching,
namely, to sit tight and hang on. No sea that ever ran can sink a canoe.
Wood is buoyant. So long as she could hold on, the submerged craft would
keep her head and shoulders above water. But it was numbing cold. Fed by
glacial streams, Roaring Lake is icy in hottest midsummer.
What with paddling and bailing and the excitement of the struggle,
Stella had wasted no time gazing about for other boats. She knew that if
any one at the camp saw her, rescue would be speedily effected. Now,
holding fast and sitting quiet, she looked eagerly about as the swamped
canoe rose loggily on each wave. Almost immediately she was heartened by
seeing distinctly some sort of craft plunging through the blow. She had
not long to wait after that, for the approaching launch was a lean-lined
speeder, powerfully engined, and she was being forced. Stella supposed
it was one of the Abbey runabouts. Even with her teeth chattering and
numbness fastening itself upon her, she shivered at the chances the man
was taking. It was no sea for a speed boat to smash into at thirty miles
an hour. She saw it shoot off the top of one wave and disappear in a
white burst of spray, slash through the next and bury itself deep again,
flinging a foamy cloud far to port and starboard. Stella cried futilely
to the man to slow down. She could hang on a long time yet, but her
voice carried no distance.
After that she had not long to wait. In four minutes the runabout was
within a hundred yards, open exhausts cracking like a machine gun. And
then the very thing she expected and dreaded came about. Every moment
she expected to see him drive bows under and go down. Here and there at
intervals uplifted a comber taller than its fellows, standing, just as
it broke, like a green wall. Into one such hoary-headed sea the white
boat now drove like a lance. Stella saw the spray leap like a cascade,
saw the solid green curl deep over the forward deck and engine hatch
and smash the low windshield. She heard the glass crack. Immediately the
roaring exhausts died. Amid the whistle of the wind and the murmur of
broken water, the launch staggered like a drunken man, lurched off into
the trough, deep down by the head with the weight of water she had
taken.
The man in her stood up with hands cupped over his mouth.
"Can you hang on a while longer?" he shouted. "Till I can get my boat
bailed?"
"I'm all right," she called back.
She saw him heave up the engine hatch. For a minute or two he bailed
rapidly. Then he spun the engine, without result. He straightened up at
last, stood irresolute a second, peeled off his coat.
The launch lay heavily in the trough. The canoe, rising and clinging on
the crest of each wave, was carried forward a few feet at a time, taking
the run of the sea faster than the disabled motorboat. So now only a
hundred-odd feet separated them, but they could come no nearer, for the
canoe was abeam and slowly drifting past.
Stella saw the man stoop and stand up with a coil of line in his hand.
Then she gasped, for he stepped on the coaming and plunged overboard in
a beautiful, arching dive. A second later his head showed glistening
above the gray water, and he swam toward her with a slow, overhand
stroke. It seemed an age--although the actual time was brief
enough--before he reached her. She saw then that there was method in
his madness, for the line strung out behind him, fast to a cleat on the
launch. He laid hold of the canoe and rested a few seconds, panting,
smiling broadly at her.
"Sorry that whopping wave put me out of commission," he said at last.
"I'd have had you ashore by now. Hang on for a minute."
He made the line fast to a thwart near the bow. Holding fast with one
hand, he drew the swamped canoe up to the launch. In that continuous
roll it was no easy task to get Stella aboard, but they managed it, and
presently she sat shivering in the cockpit, watching the man spill the
water out of the Peterboro till it rode buoyantly again. Then he went to
work at his engine methodically, wiping dry the ignition terminals, all
the various connections where moisture could effect a short circuit. At
the end of a few minutes, he turned the starting crank. The multiple
cylinders fired with a roar.
He moved back behind the wrecked windshield where the steering gear
stood.
"Well, Miss Ship-wrecked Mariner," said he lightly, "where do you wish
to be landed?"
"Over there, if you please." Stella pointed to where the red roof of the
bungalow stood out against the green. "I'm Mrs. Fyfe."
"Ah!" said he. An expression of veiled surprise flashed across his face.
"Another potential romance strangled at birth. You know, I hoped you
were some local maiden before whom I could pose as a heroic rescuer.
Such is life. Odd, too. Linda Abbey--I'm the Monohan tail to the Abbey
business kite, you see--impressed me as pilot for a spin this afternoon
and backed out at the last moment. I think she smelled this blow. So I
went out for a ride by myself. I was glowering at that new house through
a glass when I spied you out in the thick of it."
He had the clutch in now, and the launch was cleaving the seas, even at
half speed throwing out wide wings of spray. Some of this the wind
brought across the cockpit. "Come up into this seat," Monohan commanded.
"I don't suppose you can get any wetter, but if you put your feet
through this bulkhead door, the heat from the engine will warm you. By
Jove, you're fairly shivering."
"It's lucky for me you happened along," Stella remarked, when she was
ensconced behind the bulkhead. "I was getting so cold. I don't know how
much longer I could have stood it."
"Thank the good glasses that picked you out. You were only a speck on
the water, you know, when I sighted you first."
He kept silent after that. All his faculties were centered on the seas
ahead which rolled up before the sharp cutwater of the launch. He was
making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas. When a big one
lifted ahead, he slowed down. He kept one hand on the throttle control,
whistling under his breath disconnected snatches of song. Stella studied
his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing. He was almost as
big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller. The wet shirt
clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled
arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was
he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty,
yet his face was altogether boyish.
Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found
herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that
focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why
should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness
of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And
she wondered--wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever
since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her
emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,--and
she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,--then
some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief.
She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could
overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded,
foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only
pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected
cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he
might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.
While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly
these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the
launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the
float.
Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back
into the launch.
"You're as wet as I am," Stella said. "Won't you come up to the house
and get a change of clothes? I haven't even thanked you."
"Nothing to be thanked for," he smiled up at her. "Only please remember
not to get offshore in a canoe again. I mightn't be handy the next
time--and Roaring Lake's as fickle as your charming sex. All smiles one
minute, storming the next. No, I won't stay this time, thanks. A little
wet won't hurt me. I wasn't in the water long enough to get chilled, you
know. I'll be home in half an hour. Run along and get dressed, Mrs.
Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away. Good-by."
Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip.
Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a
greater peril to her peace of mind. The platitudes of soul-affinity, of
irresistible magnetic attraction, of love that leaped full-blown into
reality at the touch of a hand or the glance of an eye, she had always
viewed with distrust, holding them the weaknesses of weak, volatile
natures. But there was something about this man which had stirred her,
nothing that he said or did, merely some elusive, personal attribute.
She had never undergone any such experience, and she puzzled over it
now. A chance stranger, and his touch could make her pulse leap. It
filled her with astonished dismay.
Afterward, dry-clad and warm, sitting in her pet chair, Jack Junior
cooing at her from a nest among cushions on the floor, the natural
reaction set in, and she laughed at herself. When Fyfe came home, she
told him lightly of her rescue.
He said nothing at first, only sat drumming on his chair-arm, his eyes
steady on her.
"That might have cost you your life," he said at last. "Will you
remember not to drift offshore again?"
"I rather think I shall," she responded. "It wasn't a pleasant
experience."
"Monohan, eh?" he remarked after another interval. "So he's on Roaring
Lake again."
"Do you know him?" she asked.
"Yes," he replied briefly.
For a minute or so longer he sat there, his face wearing its habitual
impassiveness. Then he got up, kissed her with a queer sort of
intensity, and went put. Stella gazed after him, mildly surprised. It
wasn't quite in his usual manner.