There is a raised bench of two broad steps, covered with red cloth,
running, like a great circular dais, around the curious old ballroom
of the Oban Gathering. The effect of it is strikingly to enthrone the
matron and the dowager, who hold that bench from eleven until five
o'clock in the morning. Impressive, important women, gowned in rich
stuffs, and of varying ages, from that one coming in beauty to the
meridian of life, to that one arriving in wisdom at its close.
The very word bench, applied to this raised seat, is apt and suggestive.
The significance of the term presents itself in a sense large and
catholic. The judges of the King's Bench do not deal in any greater
measure with the problems of human destinies than do the judges of this
one. That dowager, old and wise, her chin resting on her hand, her
eyes following some youth whirling a débutante down the long ballroom,
weighing carefully his lineage, his income, his social station, will
presently deliver an opinion affecting, more desperately, life and lives
than any legal one pronounced by my lord upon his woolsack. Here on this
bench, while music clashes and winged feet dance, are destinies made
and unmade by women who have sounded life and got its measure; who are
misled by no illusions; who know accurately into what grim realities the
path of every mortal presently descends. There is no tribunal on this
earth surpassing in varied and practical knowledge of life these judges
of the Red Bench.
This ball is the chiefest function of the Oban Gathering. Here one finds
the dazzling splendor which this northern durbar in every other
feature strikingly lacks; gowns of Redfera, Worth, Monsieur Paquin; the
picturesque uniform of Highland regiments. Every Scottish chief in the
dress tartan of his clan, with his sporran, his bright buckles, his
kilt; with his stockings turned down over the calf of the leg and his
knees bare. All moving in one saturnalia of color; in whirling dances,
foursomes, eight-somes, reels, quick as jig steps, deliberate and
stately as minuets, to the music of pipers, stepping daintily like cats
on opposite sides of the hall; as though on some night of license
all the brigands of opera bouffe danced at Versailles with the court
beauties of Louis, and around this moving, twining, sometimes shouting,
fantastic masquerade, the Red Bench.
[Illustration: 0147]
And yet there is here no masquerade. This dress of the Highland chief,
to the stranger fancy and theatric, has been observed in distant
quarters of the world, to attend thus fancy and thus theatric upon
the bitterness of death, in slaughter pens at night, under the rush of
Zulus, in butchered squares, at midday, sweltering in the Soudan; and
of an antiquity anterior to legend--worn by his father's father when he
charged, screaming, against Caesar.
At two o'clock on this night Caroline Childers came up out of the
crowded ballroom for a moment's breathing, and sat down on the Bed
Bench. She was accompanied by the Duke of Dorset, one of the few men to
be seen anywhere in plain evening clothes, except Cyrus Childers, who
had but now taken the Marchesa Soderrelli in to supper. The Duke sat
on the step below the girl, at her feet. On either side this bench
stretched the red arc of its circle. Below it innumerable dancers
whirled. This girl, her dark hair clouding her face, her wide dark eyes
distinguishing the delicate outlines of her mouth and chin, resembled
some idealized figure of legend.
One from a distant country, coming at this moment to the entrance of
the hall, would have stopped there, wondering, with his shoulder resting
against the posts of the doorway. Suppose him to have come ashore on
this night, lost, after shipwreck and strange wanderings, after the sea
had been over him, uncertain that he lived yet, he would have seen here
that fairy sister of Arthur, dark haired, dreamy, wonderful, like this
girl. Her council, old, wise, magnificent, sitting on this Red Bench,
and below a fantastic dancing company. He would have believed himself
come upon this hall through the deeps of green water, into that vanished
kingdom, situate by legend, between the Land's End and the isles of
Scilly.
The Duke of Dorset, his broad back to the girl, his bronze face looking
down on the crowded ballroom, was speaking, slowly, distinctly, like one
pronouncing a conclusion.
"I understand now," he said, "why it has become the fashion to attend
these Gatherings. It is the only place in the world where gentlemen wear
the dress and do the dances of the aborigines."
The girl replied with a question, "You have traveled in many countries,
then?"
"In most Eastern countries," said the Duke, "and I have seen nowhere
anything like this. These fantastic steps, these striking costumes, this
weird music is splendidly, is impressively barbaric."
But the girl was thinking of another matter. "Have you ever visited any
Western countries?" she said.
"Not the continent of North America," replied the Duke.
"Then," she said, "you must come to visit me."
These words startled the Duke of Dorset. He had heard not a little of
American disregard of conventions, but he was in no sense prepared for
this abrupt, remarkable invitation.
"Then you will come to visit me!" spoken quietly, surely, like one in
authority, by a girl under twenty, apparently but yesterday from the
gardens of a convent. He could not imagine a girl of Italy, of France,
of Austria, speaking words like those. A girl on the continent of Europe
giving such an invitation would be mad, or something infinitely worse.
Evidently all standards known to the people of the old world were
unfitted to these people of the new.
The Marchesa Soderrelli was right when she thought him to have found
here in the bay of Oban something which he had not believed to exist. He
was wholly unable to place and classify this girl. She was strange, new,
unbelievable. He felt himself as perplexed and astonished as if, on the
border of the Sahara, he had come upon a panther like that one imagined
by Balzac; or by accident, in some remote jungle of Hindustan, a leopard
with wings. Instinctively he swung around his great shoulders and looked
up into her face. There was nothing in that face to indicate that these
words were other than ordinary. The girl sat straight as a pine, her
chin lifted, her face shadowed by her dark hair, illumined by her dark
eyes, imperious, as though these men in spangled coats, in bare knees,
as though these women in rich colors, danced before her as before a
Sheba. Instantly, as under the medium of this picture, the Duke of
Dorset got a new light flashed onto those jarring words. Persons
accustomed to be obeyed spoke sometimes like that. He sat a moment,
silent, looking at the girl before he opened his mouth to reply; in that
moment his opportunity departed.
The young girl arose. "The heat is oppressive," she said; "let us go
out." And he followed her, skirting the crowds of dancers.
The door from the ballroom led first into a long scantily furnished
antechamber, hung in yellow, and then into the street. This chamber,
now deserted, is, during the early hours of the ball, packed with women.
Here, by a local custom, they remain until partners for their entire
card have been selected. This room has been called facetiously "The
Market." Because, here, in open competition, the debutante must win her
place, and the veteran hold that which she has already won.
The two went through this room out into the street. The night, like
those of this north country in summer, was in no sense dark. The sky was
brightened, as in other countries it appears at dawn or twilight; one
standing in the street could easily read the lines of a newspaper. The
street was not deserted; others, oppressed by the heat and fatigue of
the ballroom, had come out into the cool night. The pair walked slowly
down toward the sea. They passed, now and then, a couple returning,
and here and there, some girl and a Highlander seated on the step of a
silent house; the man's kilt spread out to protect his companion's gown
from the stone.
They came presently upon a bench under the wall of a garden, and sat
down there, looking out on the sea. The hay below the town blinked with
lights; every yacht was illumined; some were hung from their masts with
many colored lamps, others were etched in outline by strings of light,
following their contour. The sea, meeting the horizon, was broken here
and there with flecks of white, increasing with the distance; as though
sirens sported--timid, modest sirens, flashing but an arm or the tip of
a white shoulder where any human eye could see it, but in the security
of distance tumbling their bodies in abandon.
Within the ballroom the Duke of Dorset had been able to regard this girl
in a certain detached aspect, but here, now, on this bench before
the sea, that sense of something intimate and personal assailed his
faculties and possessed them. And there came with it a subtle illusion
of the unreal creeping over the world, a faint insidious something, like
the first effects of opium that one strives to drive away by dashing
the face with water. And the source of this vague compelling dream, the
thing from which it issued, or the thing toward which, from far-off,
mysterious sources, it approached, was this woman--this woman seated
here beside him, this slender, exquisite girl.
This sudden, dominating impulse the man strongly resisted, but while
he held it thus, he feared it. It was like those bizarre impulses which
sometimes seize on the human mind and which, while we know them to
be wild and fantastic, we feel that if we remain we shall presently
accomplish them. He was glad when the girl spoke.
"I love the sea," she said. Her face was lifted, the breath of the water
seemed to move the cloudy mass of her hair gently, as though it wished
to caress it. "It makes me feel that all the things which we are taught
are only old wives' tales, nevertheless, after all, are somehow true.
Before the sea, I believe that the witches and the goblins live. I
believe the genii dwell in their copper pots. I believe that somewhere,
in the out-of-the-way places of the world, they all remain--these fairy
people."
She turned slowly toward her companion.
"Tell me," she said, "when you have traveled through the waste places of
the earth, have you never come on a trail of them? Have you never found
a magician walking in the desert? Or have you never looked into the
open door of a hut, in some endless forest, and seen a big yellow-haired
witch weaving at a loom; or in the bed of some dried-up river, a hideous
dwarf, squatting on a rock, boiling a pot of water?"
"I have never found them," said the man.
"No," said the girl, "you would never find them. One never does find
them, I suppose. But, did you never _nearly_ find them? Did you never,
in some big, lonely land at night, when everything was still, did you
never catch some faint, eerie murmur, some wisp of music, some vague
sound?"
"I have heard," replied the man, "far out in the Sahara, in that unknown
country beyond the Zar'ez, which is simply an ocean of huge motionless
billows of sand, at night in the endless valleys of this dry sea, I have
heard the beating of a drum. No one understands this tiny, fantastic
drumming. It is said to be the echo of innumerable grains of sand blown
against the hard blades of desert grasses, but no one knows. The Arabs
say it is the dead. I suppose it is a sort of sound mirage."
"Oh, no," replied the girl, "it is not the dead; I know what it is. It
is the little drums of the fairy people traveling in the desert, hunting
a land where they may not be disturbed. We have driven them out of the
forest, and away from the rivers and the hills. Poor little people, how
they must hate the hot yellow sand, when they remember the cool wood,
and the bright water, and the green hills! I am sure that if you had
crept out toward that sound you would have seen the tiny drummers, in
their quaint scarlet caps, beating their little drums to awake the
fairy camp, and you would have seen the moon lying on this camp, and
the cobweb tents, and all the little carts filled with their household
things."
The fresh salt air seemed to vitalize her face; her eyes, big, vague,
dreamy, looked out on the sea; her hands were in her lap; her body
unmoving. She was like a child absorbed in the wonder of a story.
"But the others," she said, "the magicians and the witches and the
wicked kings and the beautiful princesses, they would live in cities.
Have you not nearly found these cities? Have you not seen the turrets
and the spires and the domes of them mirrored in the shimmering heat of
some far-off waste horizon? Or have you not looked up suddenly in some
barren country of great rocks and beheld a walled town with fantastic
towers and then, when you advanced, found it only a trick of vision?
That would be one of their cities."
All at once the man recalled a memory. A memory that suddenly presented
itself, as though it were a fragment of some big luminous conception
that he could not quite get hold of. A memory that was like a familiar
landmark come upon in some unknown country where one was lost. He leaned
forward.
"On the coast of Brittany," he said, "there is a great dreary pool of
the sea like dead water, and one looking into it can see faintly far
down walls of ancient masonry, barely visible. The peasants say that
this is a submerged city. The king of it was old and wicked, and
God sent a saint to say that He would destroy the city. And the king
replied, 'Am not I, whom you can see, greater than God, whom you cannot
see?' And he was tenfold more wicked. And God wearied of his insolence;
and one night the saint appeared before the king and said, 'God's wrath
approaches.' And he took the king's daughter by the hand and went to the
highest tower of the palace. And a stranger, who had entered the city
on this day, arose up and followed them, not because he feared God, but
because he loved the king's daughter. And suddenly the sea entered and
filled the city. And the saint and the king's daughter escaped walking
on the water. And the stranger tried to follow and he did follow,
staggering and sinking in the water to his knees.
"Well, one summer night my uncle slept at the little house of a curé on
this coast of Brittany, and in the night he arose and went out of the
house, and the curé heard the latch of the door move, and he got up and
followed. When he came to this pool he saw my uncle walking in the sea
and he was lurching like a man whose feet sank in the sand. The curé was
alarmed and he shouted, and when he shouted, my uncle went suddenly down
as though he had stepped off a ledge into deep water, but he came up and
swam to the shore. The curé asked him why he had left his bed and come
down to this dead pool. My uncle was confused. He hesitated, excused
himself, and finally answered that the night was hot and he wished to
bathe in the sea."
"And your uncle," said the girl, "was he--was he young then?"
"Yes," replied the man, "he was young. He was as young as I am."
"And was he like you?"
"I am very like him," replied the man. "The servants used to say that he
got himself reborn."
"And the woman," said the girl, "what was she like?"
The man leaned over toward the motionless figure of the girl.
"The story says," he replied, "that her hair was like spun darkness and
her eyes like the violet core of the night.'"
Suddenly, from the almost invisible warship etched in lights, with the
jarring scream of a projectile, a rocket arose and fled hissing into the
sky.
The man and the girl sprang up. The tense moment was shattered as by a
blow. They remained without a word, looking down at the sea. A second
rocket arose, and another as the warship added its bit of glitter to the
gala night.
They returned slowly, walking side by side, without speaking, toward the
Gathering hall. The salt air had wilted the girl's gown. It clung to
her slim figure, giving it that appealing sweetness that the damp night
gives to the body of a woman. The street was now empty. The reel of
Tullough had drawn in the kilted soldier and his sweetheart.
Presently the man spoke, "How little," he said, "your brother is like
you."
"I have no brother," replied the girl.
The man stopped. "No brother?" he said. "Then--then who was that
man--that man whose picture is in the yacht there?"
He looked down at the girl standing there in the gray dawn in the empty
street; her hair loosened and threatening to tumble down; her slender
face alluring like a flower, and for background, the weird, eerie
morning of the North lying on a deserted city.
"I think," she said, "there is a forgotten portion of your legend. I
think that saint of God saved the princess from something more than
death."