Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find
uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the
civilization that surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was
slavery--but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like
Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life.
Success to Lise meant money. Although what some sentimental sociologists
might call a victim of our civilization, Lise would not have changed
it, since it produced not only Lise herself, but also those fabulous
financiers with yachts and motors and town and country houses she read
about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers. It contained her
purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a mere
temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she
strained, the dwelling-place of light. In short, her philosophy was that
of the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized
Sunday school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by
the censors of the movies. The peculiar kind of abstinence once
euphemistically known as “virtue,” particularly if it were combined
with beauty, never failed of its reward. Lise, in this sense, was indeed
virtuous, and her mirror told her she was beautiful. Almost anything
could happen to such a lady: any day she might be carried up into heaven
by that modern chariot of fire, the motor car, driven by a celestial
chauffeur.
One man's meat being another's poison, Lise absorbed from the movies
an element by which her sister Janet was repelled. A popular production
known as “Leila of Hawtrey's” contained her creed,--Hawtrey's being a
glittering metropolitan restaurant where men of the world are wont to
gather and discuss the stock market, and Leila a beautiful, blonde and
orphaned waitress upon whom several of the fashionable frequenters had
exercised seductive powers in vain. They lay in wait for her at the
side entrance, followed her, while one dissipated and desperate person,
married, and said to move in the most exclusive circles, sent her an
offer of a yearly income in five figures, the note being reproduced on
the screen, and Leila pictured reading it in her frigid hall-bedroom.
There are complications; she is in debt, and the proprietor of Hawtrey's
has threatened to discharge her and in order that the magnitude of the
temptation may be most effectively realized the vision appears of
Leila herself, wrapped in furs, stepping out of a limousine and into an
elevator lifting her to an apartment containing silk curtains, a Canet
bed, a French maid, and a Pomeranian. Virtue totters, but triumphs,
being reinforced by two more visions the first of these portrays Leila,
prematurely old, dragging herself along pavements under the metallic
Broadway lights accosting gentlemen in evening dress; and the second
reveals her in the country, kneeling beside a dying mother's bed, giving
her promise to remain true to the Christian teachings of her childhood.
And virtue is rewarded, lavishly, as virtue should be, in dollars and
cents, in stocks and bonds, in pearls and diamonds. Popular fancy takes
kindly to rough but honest westerners who have begun life in flannel
shirts, who have struck gold and come to New York with a fortune
but despising effeteness; such a one, tanned by the mountain sun,
embarrassed in raiment supplied by a Fifth Avenue tailor, takes a table
one evening at Hawtrey's and of course falls desperately in love. He
means marriage from the first, and his faith in Leila is great enough
to survive what appears to be an almost total eclipse of her virtue.
Through the machinations of the influential villain, and lured by the
false pretence that one of her girl friends is ill, she is enticed into
a mysterious house of a sinister elegance, and apparently irretrievably
compromised. The westerner follows, forces his way through the portals,
engages the villain, and vanquishes him. Leila becomes a Bride. We
behold her, at the end, mistress of one of those magnificent stone
mansions with grilled vestibules and negro butlers into whose sacred
precincts we are occasionally, in the movies, somewhat breathlessly
ushered--a long way from Hawtrey's restaurant and a hall-bedroom. A long
way, too, from the Bagatelle and Fillmore Street--but to Lise a way not
impossible, nor even improbable.
This work of art, conveying the moral that virtue is an economic asset,
made a great impression on Lise. Good Old Testament doctrine, set forth
in the Book of Job itself. And Leila, pictured as holding out for a
higher price and getting it, encouraged Lise to hold out also. Mr.
Wiley, in whose company she had seen this play, and whose likeness
filled the plush and silver-plated frame on her bureau, remained
ironically ignorant of the fact that he had paid out his money to make
definite an ambition, an ideal hitherto nebulous in the mind of the lady
whom he adored. Nor did Lise enlighten him, being gifted with a certain
inscrutableness. As a matter of fact it had never been her intention
to accept him, but now that she was able concretely to visualize her
Lochinvar of the future, Mr. Whey's lack of qualifications became the
more apparent. In the first place, he had been born in Lowell and had
never been west of Worcester; in the second, his salary was sixteen
dollars a week: it is true she had once fancied the Scottish terrier
style of hair-cut abruptly ending in the rounded line of the shaven
neck, but Lochinvar had been close-cropped. Mr. Wiley, close-cropped,
would have resembled a convict.
Mr. Wiley was in love, there could be no doubt about that, and if he had
not always meant marriage, he meant it now, having reached a state where
no folly seems preposterous. The manner of their meeting had had just
the adventurous and romantic touch that Lise liked, one of her favourite
amusements in the intervals between “steadies” being to walk up and down
Faber Street of an evening after supper, arm in arm with two or three
other young ladies, all chewing gum, wheeling into store windows and
wheeling out again, pretending the utmost indifference to melting
glances cast in their direction. An exciting sport, though
incomprehensible to masculine intelligence. It was a principle with
Lise to pay no attention to any young man who was not “presented,”
those venturing to approach her with the ready formula “Haven't we met
before?” being instantly congealed. She was strict as to etiquette. But
Mr. Wiley, it seemed, could claim acquaintance with Miss Schuler, one
of the ladies to whose arm Lise's was linked, and he had the further
advantage of appearing in a large and seductive touring car, painted
green, with an eagle poised above the hood and its name, Wizard, in a
handwriting rounded and bold, written in nickel across the radiator. He
greeted Miss Schuler effusively, but his eye was on Lise from the first,
and it was she he took with, him in the front seat, indifferent to the
giggling behind. Ever since then Lise had had a motor at her disposal,
and on Sundays they took long “joy rides” beyond the borders of the
state. But it must not be imagined that Mr. Whey was the proprietor of
the vehicle; nor was he a chauffeur,--her American pride would not have
permitted her to keep company with a chauffeur: he was the demonstrator
for the Wizard, something of a wizard himself, as Lise had to admit
when they whizzed over the tarvia of the Riverside Boulevard at fifty or
sixty miles an hour with the miner cut out--a favourite diversion of
Mr. Whey's, who did not feel he was going unless he was accompanied by
a noise like that of a mitrailleuse in action. Lise, experiencing a
ravishing terror, hung on to her hat with one hand and to Mr. Wiley with
the other, her code permitting this; permitting him also, occasionally,
when they found themselves in tenebrous portions of Slattery's Riverside
Park, to put his arm around her waist and kiss her. So much did Lise's
virtue allow, and no more, the result being that he existed in a
tantalizing state of hope and excitement most detrimental to the nerves.
He never lost, however,--in public at least, or before Lise's
family,--the fine careless, jaunty air of the demonstrator, of
the free-lance for whom seventy miles an hour has no terrors; the
automobile, apparently, like the ship, sets a stamp upon its votaries.
No Elizabethan buccaneer swooping down on defenceless coasts ever
exceeded in audacity Mr. Wiley's invasion of quiet Fillmore Street. He
would draw up with an ear-splitting screaming of brakes in front of
the clay-yellow house, and sometimes the muffler, as though unable to
repress its approval of the performance, would let out a belated pop
that never failed to jar the innermost being of Auermann, who had been
shot at, or rather shot past, by an Italian, and knew what it was. He
hated automobiles, he hated Mr. Wiley.
“Vat you do?” he would demand, glaring.
And Mr. Wiley would laugh insolently.
“You think I done it, do you, Dutchie--huh!”
He would saunter past, up the stairs, and into the Bumpus dining-room,
often before the family had finished their evening meal. Lise alone made
him welcome, albeit demurely; but Mr. Wiley, not having sensibilities,
was proof against Hannah's coldness and Janet's hostility. With unerring
instinct he singled out Edward as his victim.
“How's Mr. Bumpus this evening?” he would genially inquire.
Edward invariably assured Mr. Wiley that he was well, invariably took a
drink of coffee to emphasize the fact, as though the act of lifting his
cup had in it some magic to ward off the contempt of his wife and elder
daughter.
“Well, I've got it pretty straight that the Arundel's going to run
nights, starting next week,” Lise's suitor would continue.
And to save his soul Edward could not refrain from answering, “You don't
say so!” He feigned interest in the information that the Hampton Ball
Team, owing to an unsatisfactory season, was to change managers next
year. Mr. Wiley possessed the gift of gathering recondite bits of news,
he had confidence in his topics and in his manner of dealing with them;
and Edward, pretending to be entertained, went so far in his politeness
as to ask Mr. Wiley if he had had supper.
“I don't care if I sample one of Mis' Bumpus's doughnuts,” Mr. Wiley
would reply politely, reaching out a large hand that gave evidence, in
spite of Sapolio, of an intimacy with grease cups and splash pans. “I
guess there's nobody in this burg can make doughnuts to beat yours, Miss
Bumpus.”
If she had only known which doughnut he would take; Hannah sometimes
thought she might have been capable of putting arsenic in it. Her icy
silence did not detract from the delights of his gestation.
Occasionally, somewhat to Edward's alarm, Hannah demanded: “Where are
you taking Lise this evening?”
Mr. Wiley's wisdom led him to be vague.
“Oh, just for a little spin up the boulevard. Maybe we'll pick up Ella
Schuler and one or two other young ladies.”
Hannah and Janet knew very well he had no intention of doing this, and
Hannah did not attempt to conceal her incredulity. As a matter of fact,
Lise sometimes did insist on a “party.”
“I want you should bring her back by ten o'clock. That's late enough for
a girl who works to be out. It's late enough for any girl.”
“Sure, Mis' Bumpus,” Wiley would respond easily.
Hannah chafed because she had no power to enforce this, because Mr.
Wiley and Lise understood she had no power. Lise went to put on her
hat; if she skimped her toilet in the morning, she made up for it in
the evening when she came home from the store, and was often late for
supper. In the meantime, while Lise was in the bedroom adding these last
touches, Edward would contemptibly continue the conversation, fingering
the Evening Banner as it lay in his lap, while Mr. Wiley helped himself
boldly to another doughnut, taking--as Janet observed--elaborate
precautions to spill none of the crumbs on a brown suit, supposed to be
the last creation in male attire. Behind a plate glass window in Faber
Street, belonging to a firm of “custom” tailors whose stores had invaded
every important city in the country, and who made clothes for “college”
men, only the week before Mr. Wiley had seen this same suit artistically
folded, combined with a coloured shirt, brown socks, and tie and
“torture” collar--lures for the discriminating. Owing to certain
expenses connected with Lise, he had been unable to acquire the shirt
and the tie, but he had bought the suit in the hope and belief that she
would find him irresistible therein. It pleased him, too, to be taken
for a “college” man, and on beholding in the mirror his broadened
shoulders and diminished waist he was quite convinced his money had
not been spent in vain; that strange young ladies--to whom, despite
his infatuation for the younger Miss Bumpus, he was not wholly
indifferent--would mistake him for an undergraduate of Harvard,--an
imposition concerning which he had no scruples. But Lise, though shaken,
had not capitulated.....
When she returned to the dining-room, arrayed in her own finery, demure,
triumphant, and had carried off Mr. Whey there would ensue an interval
of silence broken only by the clattering together of the dishes Hannah
snatched up.
“I guess he's the kind of son-in-law would suit you,” she threw over her
shoulder once to Edward.
“Why?” he inquired, letting down his newspaper nervously.
“Well, you seem to favour him, to make things as pleasant for him as you
can.”
Edward would grow warm with a sense of injustice, the inference being
that he was to blame for Mr. Wiley; if he had been a different kind of
father another sort of suitor would be courting Lise.
“I have to be civil,” he protested. He pronounced that, word “civil”
exquisitely, giving equal value to both syllables.
“Civil!” Hannah scoffed, as she left the room; and to Janet, who had
followed her into the kitchen, she added: “That's the trouble with your
father, he's always be'n a little too civil. Edward Bumpus is just as
simple as a child, he's afraid of offending folks' feelings.... Think
of being polite to that Whey!” In those two words Hannah announced
eloquently her utter condemnation of the demonstrator of the Wizard. It
was characteristic of her, however, when she went back for another load
of dishes and perceived that Edward was only pretending to read his
Banner, to attempt to ease her husband's feelings. She thought it queer
because she was still fond of Edward Bumpus, after all he had “brought
on her.”
“It's Lise,” she said, as though speaking to Janet, “she attracts 'em.
Sometimes I just can't get used to it that she's my daughter. I don't
know who she takes after. She's not like any of my kin, nor any of the
Bumpuses.”
“What can you do?” asked Edward. “You can't order him out of the house.
It's better for him to come here. And you can't stop Lise from going
with him--she's earning her own money....”
They had talked over the predicament before, and always came to the same
impasse. In the privacy of the kitchen Hannah paused suddenly in
her energetic rubbing of a plate and with supreme courage uttered a
question.
“Janet, do you calculate he means anything wrong?”
“I don't know what he means,” Janet replied, unwilling to give Mr. Wiley
credit for anything, “but I know this, that Lise is too smart to let him
take advantage of her.”
Hannah ruminated. Cleverness as the modern substitute for feminine
virtue did not appeal to her, but she let it pass. She was in no mood to
quarrel with any quality that would ward off disgrace.
“I don't know what to make of Lise--she don't appear to have any
principles....”
If the Wiley affair lasted longer than those preceding it, this was
because former suitors had not commanded automobiles. When Mr. Wiley
lost his automobile he lost his luck--if it may be called such. One
April evening, after a stroll with Eda, Janet reached home about nine
o'clock to find Lise already in their room, to remark upon the absence
of Mr. Wiley's picture from the frame.
“I'm through with him,” Lise declared briefly, tugging at her hair.
“Through with him?” Janet repeated.
Lise paused in her labours and looked at her sister steadily. “I handed
him the mit--do you get me?”
“But why?”
“Why? I was sick of him--ain't that enough? And then he got mixed up
with a Glendale trolley and smashed his radiator, and the Wizard people
sacked him. I always told him he was too fly. It's lucky for him I
wasn't in the car.”
“It's lucky for you,” said Janet. Presently she inquired curiously:
“Aren't you sorry?”
“Nix.” Lise shook her head, which was now bowed, her face hidden
by hair. “Didn't I tell you I was sick of him? But he sure was some
spender,” she added, as though in justice bound to give him his due.
Janet was shocked by the ruthlessness of it, for Lise appeared
relieved, almost gay. She handed Janet a box containing five peppermint
creams--all that remained of Mr. Wiley's last gift.
One morning in the late spring Janet crossed the Warren Street bridge,
the upper of the two spider-like structures to be seen from her office
window, spanning the river beside the great Hampton dam. The day,
dedicated to the memory of heroes fallen in the Civil War, the thirtieth
of May, was a legal holiday. Gradually Janet had acquired a dread of
holidays as opportunities never realized, as intervals that should
have been filled with unmitigated joys, and yet were invariably wasted,
usually in walks with Eda Rawle. To-day, feeling an irresistible longing
for freedom, for beauty, for adventure, for quest and discovery of she
knew not what, she avoided Eda, and after gazing awhile at the sunlight
dancing in the white mist below the falls, she walked on, southward,
until she had left behind her the last straggling houses of the city and
found herself on a wide, tarvia road that led, ultimately, to Boston. So
read the sign.
Great maples, heavy with leaves, stood out against the soft blue of the
sky, and the sunlight poured over everything, bathing the stone walls,
the thatches of the farmhouses, extracting from the copses of stunted
pine a pungent, reviving perfume. Sometimes she stopped to rest on the
pine needles, and walked on again, aimlessly, following the road because
it was the easiest way. There were spring flowers in the farmhouse
yards, masses of lilacs whose purple she drank in eagerly; the air,
which had just a tang of New England sharpness, was filled with tender
sounds, the clucking of hens, snatches of the songs of birds, the
rustling of maple leaves in the fitful breeze. A chipmunk ran down an
elm and stood staring at her with beady, inquisitive eyes, motionless
save for his quivering tail, and she put forth her hand, shyly,
beseechingly, as though he held the secret of life she craved. But he
darted away.
She looked around her unceasingly, at the sky, at the trees, at the
flowers and ferns and fields, at the vireos and thrushes, the robins and
tanagers gashing in and out amidst the foliage, and she was filled with
a strange yearning to expand and expand until she should become a part
of all nature, be absorbed into it, cease to be herself. Never before
had she known just that feeling, that degree of ecstasy mingled
with divine discontent.... Occasionally, intruding faintly upon the
countryside peace, she was aware of a distant humming sound that grew
louder and louder until there shot roaring past her an automobile filled
with noisy folk, leaving behind it a suffocating cloud of dust. Even
these intrusions, reminders of the city she had left, were powerless to
destroy her mood, and she began to skip, like a schoolgirl, pausing once
in a while to look around her fearfully, lest she was observed; and it
pleased her to think that she had escaped forever, that she would never
go back: she cried aloud, as she skipped, “I won't go back, I won't go
back,” keeping time with her feet until she was out of breath and almost
intoxicated, delirious, casting herself down, her heart beating wildly,
on a bank of ferns, burying her face in them. She had really stopped
because a pebble had got into her shoe, and as she took it out she
looked at her bare heel and remarked ruefully:--“Those twenty-five cent
stockings aren't worth buying!”
Economic problems, however, were powerless to worry her to-day, when the
sun shone and the wind blew and the ferns, washed by the rill running
through the culvert under the road, gave forth a delicious moist odour
reminding her of the flower store where her sister Lise had once
been employed. But at length she arose, and after an hour or more of
sauntering the farming landscape was left behind, the crumbling stone
fences were replaced by a well-kept retaining wall capped by a privet
hedge, through which, between stone pillars, a driveway entered and
mounted the shaded slope, turning and twisting until lost to view. But
afar, standing on the distant crest, through the tree trunks and foliage
Janet saw one end of the mansion to which it led, and ventured timidly
but eagerly in among the trees in the hope of satisfying her new-born
curiosity. Try as she would, she never could get any but disappointing
and partial glimpses of a house which, because of the mystery of its
setting, fired her imagination, started her to wondering why it was that
some were permitted to live in the midst of such beauty while she was
condemned to spend her days in Fillmore Street and the prison of the
mill. She was not even allowed to look at it! The thought was like a
cloud across the sun.
However, when she had regained the tarvia road and walked a little way
the shadow suddenly passed, and she stood surprised. The sight of a long
common with its ancient trees in the fullness of glory, dense maples,
sturdy oaks, strong, graceful elms that cast flickering, lacy shadows
across the road filled her with satisfaction, with a sense of peace
deepened by the awareness, in the background, ranged along the common
on either side, of stately, dignified buildings, each in an appropriate
frame of foliage. With the essence rather than the detail of all this
her consciousness became steeped; she was naturally ignorant of the
great good fortune of Silliston Academy of having been spared with one
or two exceptions--donations during those artistically lean years of the
nineteenth century when American architecture affected the Gothic, the
Mansard, and the subsequent hybrid. She knew this must be Silliston, the
seat of that famous academy of which she had heard.
The older school buildings and instructors' houses, most of them white
or creamy yellow, were native Colonial, with tall, graceful chimneys and
classic pillars and delicate balustrades, eloquent at once of the racial
inheritance of the Republic and of a bygone individuality, dignity, and
pride. And the modern architect, of whose work there was an abundance,
had graciously and intuitively held this earlier note and developed it.
He was an American, but an American who had been trained. The result was
harmony, life as it should proceed, the new growing out of the old. And
no greater tribute can be paid to Janet Bumpus than that it pleased her,
struck and set exquisitely vibrating within her responsive chords. For
the first time in her adult life she stood in the presence of tradition,
of a tradition inherently if unconsciously the innermost reality of her
being a tradition that miraculously was not dead, since after all the
years it had begun to put forth these vigorous shoots....
What Janet chiefly realized was the delicious, contented sense of having
come, visually at least, to the home for which she had longed. But her
humour was that of a child who has strayed, to find its true dwelling
place in a region of beauty hitherto unexplored and unexperienced,
tinged, therefore, with unreality, with mystery,--an effect enhanced
by the chance stillness and emptiness of the place. She wandered up and
down the Common, whose vivid green was starred with golden dandelions;
and then, spying the arched and shady vista of a lane, entered it,
bent on new discoveries. It led past one of the newer buildings, the
library--as she read in a carved inscription over the door--plunged
into shade again presently to emerge at a square farmhouse, ancient and
weathered, with a great square chimney thrust out of the very middle of
the ridge-pole,--a landmark left by one of the earliest of Silliston's
settlers. Presiding over it, embracing and protecting it, was a splendid
tree. The place was evidently in process of reconstruction and repair,
the roof had been newly shingled, new frames, with old-fashioned, tiny
panes had been put in the windows; a little garden was being laid out
under the sheltering branches of the tree, and between the lane and the
garden, half finished, was a fence of an original and pleasing design,
consisting of pillars placed at intervals with upright pickets between,
the pickets sawed in curves, making a line that drooped in the middle.
Janet did not perceive the workman engaged in building this fence until
the sound of his hammer attracted her attention. His back was bent, he
was absorbed in his task.
“Are there any stores near here?” she inquired.
He straightened up. “Why yes,” he replied, “come to think of it, I have
seen stores, I'm sure I have.”
Janet laughed; his expression, his manner of speech were so delightfully
whimsical, so in keeping with the spirit of her day, and he seemed to
accept her sudden appearance in the precise make-believe humour she
could have wished. And yet she stood a little struck with timidity,
puzzled by the contradictions he presented of youth and age, of
shrewdness, experience and candour, of gentility and manual toil. He
must have been about thirty-five; he was hatless, and his hair, uncombed
but not unkempt, was greying at the temples; his eyes--which she noticed
particularly--were keen yet kindly, the irises delicately stencilled
in a remarkable blue; his speech was colloquial yet cultivated, his
workman's clothes belied his bearing.
“Yes, there are stores, in the village,” he went on, “but isn't it a
holiday, or Sunday--perhaps--or something of the kind?”
“It's Decoration Day,” she reminded him, with deepening surprise.
“So it is! And all the storekeepers have gone on picnics in their
automobiles, or else they're playing golf. Nobody's working today.”
“But you--aren't you working?” she inquired.
“Working?” he repeated. “I suppose some people would call it work. I--I
hadn't thought of it in that way.”
“You mean--you like it,” Janet was inspired to say.
“Well, yes,” he confessed. “I suppose I do.”
Her cheeks dimpled. If her wonder had increased, her embarrassment had
flown, and he seemed suddenly an old acquaintance. She had, however,
profound doubts now of his being a carpenter.
“Were you thinking of going shopping?” he asked, and at the very
ludicrousness of the notion she laughed again. She discovered a keen
relish for this kind of humour, but it was new to her experience, and
she could not cope with it.
“Only to buy some crackers, or a sandwich,” she replied, and blushed.
“Oh,” he said. “Down in the village, on the corner where the cars stop,
is a restaurant. It's not as good as the Parker House in Boston, I
believe, but they do have sandwiches, yes, and coffee. At least they
call it coffee.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said.
“You'd better wait till you try it,” he warned her.
“Oh, I don't mind, I don't want much.” And she was impelled to add:
“It's such a beautiful day.”
“It's absurd to get hungry on such a day--absurd,” he agreed.
“Yes, it is,” she laughed. “I'm not really hungry, but I haven't time
to get back to Hampton for dinner.” Suddenly she grew hot at the thought
that he might suspect her of hinting. “You see, I live in Hampton,” she
went on hurriedly, “I'm a stenographer there, in the Chippering Mill,
and I was just out for a walk, and--I came farther than I intended.” She
had made it worse.
But he said, “Oh, you came from Hampton!” with an intonation of
surprise, of incredulity even, that soothed and even amused while it
did not deceive her. Not that the superior intelligence of which she had
begun to suspect him had been put to any real test by the discovery of
her home, and she was quite sure her modest suit of blue serge and her
$2.99 pongee blouse proclaimed her as a working girl of the mill
city. “I've been to Hampton,” he declared, just as though it were four
thousand miles away instead of four.
“But I've never been here before, to Silliston,” she responded in the
same spirit: and she added wistfully, “it must be nice to live in such a
beautiful place as this!”
“Yes, it is nice,” he agreed. “We have our troubles, too,--but it's
nice.”
She ventured a second, appraising glance. His head, which he carried a
little flung back, his voice, his easy and confident bearing--all these
contradicted the saw and the hammer, the flannel shirt, open at the
neck, the khaki trousers still bearing the price tag. And curiosity
beginning to get the better of her, she was emboldened to pay a
compliment to the fence. If one had to work, it must be a pleasure to
work on things pleasing to the eye--such was her inference.
“Why, I'm glad you like it,” he said heartily. “I was just hoping some
one would come along here and admire it. Now--what colour would you
paint it?”
“Are you a painter, too?”
“After a fashion. I'm a sort of man of all work--I thought of painting
it white, with the pillars green.”
“I think that would be pretty,” she answered, judicially, after a
moment's thought. “What else can you do?”
He appeared to be pondering his accomplishments.
“Well, I can doctor trees,” he said, pointing an efficient finger at the
magnificent maple sheltering, like a guardian deity, the old farmhouse.
“I put in those patches.”
“They're cement,” she exclaimed. “I never heard of putting cement in
trees.”
“They don't seem to mind.”
“Are the holes very deep?”
“Pretty deep.”
“But I should think the tree would be dead.”
“Well, you see the life of a tree is right under the bark. If you can
keep the outer covering intact, the tree will live.”
“Why did you let the holes get so deep?”
“I've just come here. The house was like the tree the shingles all
rotten, but the beams were sound. Those beams were hewn out of the
forest two hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Gracious!” said Janet. “And how old is the tree?”
“I should say about a hundred. I suppose it wouldn't care to admit it.”
“How do you know?” she inquired.
“Oh, I'm very intimate with trees. I find out their secrets.”
“It's your house!” she exclaimed, somewhat appalled by the discovery.
“Yes--yes it is,” he answered, looking around at it and then in an
indescribably comical manner down at his clothes. His gesture, his
expression implied that her mistake was a most natural one.
“Excuse me, I thought--” she began, blushing hotly, yet wanting to laugh
again.
“I don't blame you--why shouldn't you?” he interrupted her. “I haven't
got used to it yet, and there is something amusing about--my owning a
house. When the parlour's finished I'll have to wear a stiff collar, I
suppose, in order to live up to it.”
Her laughter broke forth, and she tried to imagine him in a stiff
collar.... But she was more perplexed than ever. She stood balancing on
one foot, poised for departure.
“I ought to be going,” she said, as though she had been paying him a
formal visit.
“Don't hurry,” he protested cordially. “Why hurry back to Hampton?”
“I never want to go back!” she cried with a vehemence that caused him to
contemplate her anew, suddenly revealing the intense, passionate quality
which had so disturbed Mr. Ditmar. She stood transformed. “I hate it!”
she declared. “It's so ugly, I never want to see it again.”
“Yes, it is ugly,” he confessed. “Since you admit it, I don't mind
saying so. But it's interesting, in a way.” Though his humorous moods
had delighted her, she felt subtly flattered because he had grown more
serious.
“It is interesting,” she agreed. She was almost impelled to tell him
why, in her excursions to the various quarters, she had found Hampton
interesting, but a shyness born of respect for the store of knowledge
she divined in him restrained her. She was curious to know what this
man saw in Hampton. His opinion would be worth something. Unlike her
neighbours in Fillmore Street, he was not what her sister Lise
would call “nutty”; he had an air of fine sanity, of freedom, of
detachment,--though the word did not occur to her; he betrayed no bitter
sense of injustice, and his beliefs were uncoloured by the obsession of
a single panacea. “Why do you think it's interesting?” she demanded.
“Well, I'm always expecting to hear that it's blown up. It reminds me of
nitro-glycerine,” he added, smiling.
She repeated the word.
“An explosive, you know--they put it in dynamite. They say a man once
made it by accident, and locked up his laboratory and ran home--and
never went back.”
“I know what you mean!” she cried, her eyes alight with excitement. “All
those foreigners! I've felt it that something would happen, some day,
it frightened me, and yet I wished that something would happen. Only, I
never would have thought of--nitro-glycerine.”
She was unaware of the added interest in his regard. But he answered
lightly enough:--“Oh, not only the foreigners. Human chemicals--you
can't play with human chemicals any more than you can play with real
ones--you've got to know something about chemistry.”
This remark was beyond her depth.
“Who is playing with them?” she asked.
“Everybody--no one in particular. Nobody seems to know much about them,
yet,” he replied, and seemed disinclined to pursue the subject. A
robin with a worm in its bill was hopping across the grass; he whistled
softly, the bird stopped, cocking its head and regarding them. Suddenly,
in conflict with her desire to remain indefinitely talking with this
strange man, Janet felt an intense impulse to leave. She could bear
the conversation no longer, she might burst into tears--such was the
extraordinary effect he had produced on her.
“I must go,--I'm ever so much obliged to you,” she said.
“Drop in again,” he said, as he took her trembling hand.... When she had
walked a little way she looked back over her shoulder to see him leaning
idly against the post, gazing after her, and waving his hammer in
friendly fashion.
For a while her feet fairly flew, and her heart beat tumultuously,
keeping time with her racing thoughts. She walked about the Common,
seeing nothing, paying no attention to the passers-by, who glanced at
her curiously. But at length as she grew calmer the needs of a youthful
and vigorous body became imperative, and realizing suddenly that she was
tired and hungry, sought and found the little restaurant in the village
below. She journeyed back to Hampton pondering what this man had said to
her; speculating, rather breathlessly, whether he had been impelled to
conversation by a natural kindness and courtesy, or whether he really
had discovered something in her worthy of addressing, as he implied.
Resentment burned in her breast, she became suddenly blinded by tears:
she might never see him again, and if only she were “educated” she
might know him, become his friend. Even in this desire she was not
conventional, and in the few moments of their contact he had developed
rather than transformed what she meant by “education.” She thought of it
not as knowledge reeking of books and schools, but as the acquirement of
the freemasonry which he so evidently possessed, existence on terms of
understanding, confidence, and freedom with nature; as having the world
open up to one like a flower filled with colour and life. She thought of
the robin, of the tree whose secrets he had learned, of a mental range
including even that medley of human beings amongst whom she lived. And
the fact that something of his meaning had eluded her grasp made her
rebel all the more bitterly against the lack of a greater knowledge....
Often during the weeks that followed he dwelt in her mind as she sat at
her desk and stared out across the river, and several times that summer
she started to walk to Silliston. But always she turned back. Perhaps
she feared to break the charm of that memory....