Promptly at six Linder drew his automobile up in front of the Transley summer home with Grant and Murdoch on board. Wilson had been watching, and rushed down upon them, but before he could clamber up on Grant a great teddy-bear was thrust into his arms and sent him, wild with delight, to his mother.
“Look, mother! Look what The-Man-on-the-Hill brought! See! He has fire in his eyes!”
Transley and Y.D. met the guests at the gate. “How do, Grant? Glad to see you, old man,” said Transley, shaking his hand cordially. “The wife has had so many good words for you I am almost jealous. What ho, Linder! By all that’s wonderful! You old prairie dog, why did you never look me up? I was beginning to think the Boche had got you.”
Grant introduced Murdoch, and Y.D. received them as cordially as had Transley. “Glad to see you fellows back,” he exclaimed. “I al’us said the Western men ‘ud put a crimp in the Kaiser, spite o’ hell an’ high water!”
“One thing the war has taught us,” said Grant, modestly, “is that men are pretty much alike, whether they come from west or east or north or south. No race has a monopoly of heroism.”
“Well, come on in,” Transley beckoned, leading the way. “Dinner will be ready sharp on time twenty minutes late. Not being a married man, Grant, you will not understand that reckoning. You’ll have to excuse Mrs. Transley a few minutes; she’s holding down the accelerator in the kitchen. Come in; I want you to meet Squiggs.”
Squiggs proved to be a round man with huge round tortoise-shell glasses and round red face to match. He shook hands with a manner that suggested that in doing so he was making rather a good fellow of himself.
“We must have a little lubrication, for Y.D.‘s sake,” said Transley, producing a bottle and glasses. “I suppose it was the dust on the plains that gave these old cow punchers a thirst which never can be slaked. These be evil days for the old-timers. Grant?”
“Not any, thanks.”
“No? Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. Squiggs?”
“I’m a lawyer,” said Squiggs, “and as booze is now ultra vires I do my best to keep it down,” and Mr. Squiggs beamed genially upon his pleasantry and the full glass in his hand.
“I take a snort when I want it and I don’t care who knows it,” said Y.D. “I al’us did, and I reckon I’ll keep on to the finish. It didn’t snuff me out in my youth and innocence, anyway. Just the same, I’m admittin’ it’s bad medicine in onskilful hands. Here’s ho!”
The glasses had just been drained when Mrs. Transley entered the room, flushed but radiant from a strenuous half hour in the kitchen.
“Well, here you are!” she exclaimed. “So glad you could come, Mr. Grant. Why, Mr. Linder! Of all people—This IS a pleasure. And Mr.—?”
“Mr. Murdoch,” Transley supplied.
“My chief of staff; the man who persists in keeping me rich,” Grant elaborated.
“I mustn’t keep you waiting longer. Dinner is ready. Dad, you are to carve.”
“Hanged if I will! I’m a guest here, and I stand on my rights,” Y.D. exploded.
“Then you must do it, Frank.”
“I suppose so,” said Transley, “although all I get out of a meal when I have to carve is splashing and profanity. You know, Squiggs, I’ve figured it out that this practice of requiring the nominal head of the house to carve has come down from the days when there wasn’t usually enough to go ‘round, and the carver had to make some fine decisions and, perhaps, maintain them by force. It has no place under modern civilization.”
“Except that someone must do it, and it’s about the only household responsibility man has not been able to evade,” said Mrs. Transley.
As they entered the dining-room Zen’s mother, whiter and it seemed even more distinguished by the years, joined them, accompanied by Mrs. Squiggs, a thin woman much concerned about social status, and the party was complete.
Transley managed the carving more skilfully than his protest might have suggested, and there was a lull in the conversation while the first demands of appetite were being satisfied.
“Tell us about your settlement scheme, Mr. Grant,” Mrs. Transley urged when it seemed necessary to find a topic. “Mr. Grant has quite a wonderful plan.”
“Yes, wise us up, old man,” said Transley. “I’ve heard something of it, but never could see through it.”
“It’s all very simple,” Grant explained. “I am providing the capital to start a few families on farms. Instead of lending the money directly to them I am financing a company in which each farmer must subscribe for stock to the value of the land he is to occupy. His stock he will pay for with a part of the proceeds of each year’s crop, until it is paid in full, when he becomes a paid-up shareholder, subject to no further call except a levy which may be made for running expenses.”
“And then your advances are returned to you with interest,” Squiggs suggested. “A very creditable plan of benefaction; very creditable, indeed.”
“No, that is not the idea. In the first place, I am accepting no interest on my advances, and in the second place the money, when repaid by the shareholders, will not be returned to me, but will be used to establish another colony on the same basis, and so on—the movement will be extended from group to group.”
Mr. Squiggs readjusted his large round tortoise-shell glasses.
“Do I understand that you are charging no interest?”
“Not a cent.”
“Then where do YOU come in?”
“I had hoped to make it clear that I am not seeking to ‘come in.’ You see, the money I am doing this with is not really mine at all.”
“Not yours?” cried a chorus of voices.
“No. Mr. Squiggs, you are a lawyer, and therefore a man of perspicuity and accurate definitions. What is money?”
“You flatter me. I should say that money is a medium for the exchange of value.”
“Very well. Therefore, if a man accepts money without giving value for it in exchange he is violating the fundamental principle underlying the use of money. He is, in short, an economic outlaw.”
“I am afraid I don’t follow you.”
“Let me illustrate by my own experience, and that of my family. My father was possessed of a piece of land which at one time had little or no value. Eventually it became of great value, not through anything he had done, but as a result of the natural law that births exceed deaths. Yet he, although he had done nothing to create this value, was able, through a faulty economic system, to pocket the proceeds. Then, as a result of the advantages which his wealth gave him, he was able to extract from society throughout all the remainder of his life value out of all proportion to any return he made for it. Finally it came down to me. Holding my peculiar belief, which my right and left bower consider sinful and silly respectively, I found money forced upon me, regardless of the fact that I had given absolutely no value in exchange. Now if money is a medium for the exchange of value and I receive money without giving value for it, it is plain that someone else must have parted with money without receiving value in return. The thing is basically immoral.”
“Your father couldn’t take it with him.”
“But why shouldIhave it? I never contributed a finger-weight of service for it. From society the money came and to society it should return.”
“You should worry,” said Transley. “Society isn’t worrying over you. Some more of the roast beef?”
“No, thank you. But to come down to date. It seems that I cannot get away from this wealth which dogs me at every turn. Before enlisting I had been margining certain steel stocks, purely in the ordinary course of affairs. With the demands made by the war on the steel industry my stocks went up in price and my good friend Murdoch was able to report that it had made a fortune for me while I was overseas.... And we call ourselves an intelligent people!”
“And so we are,” said Mr. Squiggs. “We stick to a system we know to be sound. It has weathered all the gales of the past, and promises to weather those of the future. I tell you, Grant, communism won’t work. You can’t get away from the principle of individual reward for individual effort.”
“My dear fellow, that’s exactly what I’m pleading for. I have no patience with any claim that all men are equal, or capable of rendering equal service to society, and I want payment to be made according to service rendered, not according to the freaks of a haphazard system such as I have been trying to describe.”
“But how are you going to bring that golden age about?” Murdoch inquired.
“By education. The first thing is to accept the principle that wealth cannot be accepted except in exchange for full-measure service. You, Mrs. Transley—you teach your little boy that he must not steal. As he grows older simply widen your definition of theft to include receiving value without giving value in exchange. When all the mothers begin teaching that principle the golden age which Mr. Murdoch inquires about will be in sight.”
“How would you drive it home?” said Y.D. “We have too many laws already.”
“Let us agree on that. The acceptance of this principle will make half the laws now cluttering our statute books unnecessary. I merely urge that we should treat the CAUSE of our economic malady rather than the symptoms.”
“Theoretically your idea has much to commend it, but it is quite impracticable,” Mr. Squiggs announced with some finality. “It could never be brought into effect.”
“If a corporation can determine the value of the service rendered by each of its hundred thousand employees, why cannot a nation determine the value of the service rendered by each of its hundred million citizens?”
“THERE’S something for you to chew on, Squiggs,” said Transley. “You argue your case well, Grant; I believe you have our legal light rather feazed—that’s the word, isn’t it, Mr. Murdoch?—for once. I confess a good deal of sympathy with your point of view, but I’m afraid you can’t change human nature.”
“I am not trying to do that. All that needs changing is the popular idea of what is right and what is wrong. And that idea is changing with a rapidity which is startling. Before the war the man who made money, by almost any means, was set up on a pedestal called Success. Moralists pointed to him as one to be emulated; Sunday school papers printed articles to show that any boy might follow in his footsteps and become great and respected. To-day, for following precisely the same practices, the nation demands that he be thrown into prison; the Press heaps contumely upon him; he has become an object of suspicion in the popular eye. This change, world wide and quite unforeseen, has come about in five years.”
“Is that due to a new sense of right and wrong, or to just old-fashioned envy of the rich which now feels strong enough to threaten where it used to fawn?” Y.D.‘s wife asked, and Grant was spared a hard answer by the rancher’s interruption, “Hit the profiteer as hard as you like. He’s got no friends.”
“That depends upon who is the profiteer—a point which no one seems to have settled. In the cities you may even hear prosperous ranchers included in that class—absurd as that must seem to you,” Grant added, with a smile to Y.D. “Require every man to give service according to his returns and you automatically eliminate all profiteers, large and small.”
“But you will admit,” said Mrs. Squiggs, “that we must have some well-off people to foster culture and give tone to society generally?”
“I agree that the boy who is brought up in a home with a bath tub, and all that that stands for, is likely to be a better citizen than the boy who doesn’t have that advantage. That’s why I want every home to have a bath tub.”
Mrs. Squiggs subsided rather heavily. In youth her Saturday night ablutions had been taken in the middle of the kitchen floor.
“I have a good deal of sympathy,” said Transley, “with any movement which has for its purpose the betterment of human conditions. Any successful man of to-day will admit, if he is frank about it, that he owes his success as much to good luck as to good judgment. If you could find a way, Grant, to take the element of luck out of life, perhaps you would be doing a service which would justify you in keeping those millions which worry you so. But I can’t see that it makes any difference to the prosperity of a country who owns the wealth in it, so long as the wealth is there and is usefully employed. Money doesn’t grow unless it works, and if it works it serves Society just the same as muscle does. You could put all your wealth in a strong-box and bury it under your house up there on the hill, and it wouldn’t increase a nickel in a thousand years, but if you put it to work it makes money for you and money for other people as well. I’m a little nervous about new-fangled notions. It’s easier to wreck the ship than to build a new one, which may not sail any better. What the world needs to-day is the gospel of hard work, and everybody, rich and poor, on the job for all that’s in him. That’s the only way out.”
“We seem to have much in common,” Grant returned. “Hard work is the only way out, and the best way to encourage hard work is to find a system by which every man will be rewarded according to the service rendered.”
At this point Mrs. Transley arose, and the men moved out into the living-room to chat on less contentious subjects. After a time the women joined them, and Grant presently found himself absorbed in conversation with the old rancher’s wife. Zen seemed to pay but little attention to him, and for the first time he began to realize what consummate actresses women are. Had Transley been the most suspicious of husbands—and in reality his domestic vision was as guileless as that of a boy—he could have caught no glint of any smoldering spark of the long ago. Grant found himself thinking of this dissembling quality as one of nature’s provisions designed for the protection of women, much as the sombre plumage of the prairie chicken protects her from the eye of the sportsman. For after all the hunting instinct runs through all men, be the game what it may.
Before they realized how the time had flown Linder was protesting that he must be on his way. At the gate Transley put a hand on Grant’s shoulder.
“I’m prepared to admit,” he said, “that there’s a whole lot in this old world that needs correcting, but I’m not sure that it can be corrected. You have a right to try out your experiments, but take a tip and keep a comfortable cache against the day when you’ll want to settle down and take things as they are. It is true and always has been true that a man who is worth his salt, when he wants a thing, takes it—or goes down in the attempt. The loser may squeal, but that seems to be the path of progress. You can’t beat it.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Grant, laughing. “Sometimes two men, each worth his salt, collide.”
“As in the meadow of the South Y.D.,” said Transley, with a smile. “You remember that, Y.D.—when our friend here upset the haying operations?”
“Sure, I remember, but I’m not holdin’ it agin him now. A dead horse is a dead horse, an’ I don’t go sniffin’ it.”
“Perhaps I ought to say, though,” Grant returned, “that I really do not know how the iron pegs got into that meadow.”
“And I don’t know how your haystacks got afire, but I can guess. Remember Drazk? A little locoed, an’ just the crittur to pull off a fool stunt like that. When the fire swept up the valley, instead of down, he made his get-away and has never been seen since. I reckon likely there was someone in Landson’s gang capable o’ drivin’ pegs without consultin’ the boss.”
The little group were standing in the shadow and Grant had no opportunity to notice the sudden blanching of Zen’s face at the mention of Drazk.
“You’re wrong about his not having been seen again, Y.D.,” said Grant. “He managed to locate me somewhere in France. That reminds me, he had a message for you, Mrs. Transley. I’m afraid Drazk is as irresponsible as ever, provided he hasn’t passed out, which is more than likely.”
Grant shook hands cordially with Y.D. and his wife, with Squiggs and Mrs. Squiggs, with Transley and Mrs. Transley. Any inclination he may have felt to linger over Zen’s hand was checked by her quick withdrawal of it, and there was something in her manner quite beyond his understanding. He could have sworn that the self-possessed Zen Transley was actually trembling.
The next day Wilson paid his usual visit to the field where Grant was plowing, and again was he the bearer of a message. With much difficulty he managed to extricate the envelope from a pocket.
“Dear Mr. Grant,” it read, “I am so excited over a remark you dropped last night I must see you again as soon as possible. Can you drop in to-night, say at eight. Yours,—ZEN.”
Grant read the message a second time, wondering what remark of his could have occasioned it. As he recalled the evening’s conversation it had been most about his experiment, and he had a sense that he had occupied a little more of the stage than strictly good form would have suggested. However, it was HIS scheme that had been under discussion, and he did not propose to let it suffer for lack of a champion. But what had he said that could be of more than general interest to Zen Transley? For a moment he wondered if she had created a pretext upon which to bring him to the house by the river, and then instantly dismissed that thought as unworthy of him. At any rate it was evident that his addressing her by her Christian name in the last message had given no offence. This time she had not called him “The Man-on-the-Hill,” and there was no suggestion of playfulness in the note. Then the signature, “Yours, Zen”; that might mean everything, or it might mean nothing. Either it was purely formal or it implied a very great deal indeed. Grant reflected that it could hardly be interpreted anywhere between those two extremes, and was it reasonable to suppose that Zen would use it in an ENTIRELY formal sense? If it had been “yours truly,” or “yours sincerely,” or any such stereotyped conclusion, it would not have called for a second thought, but the simple word “yours”—
“If only she were,” thought Grant, and felt the color creeping to his face at the thought. It was the first time he had dared that much. He had not bothered to wonder much where or how this affair must end. Through all the years that had passed since that night when she had fallen asleep on his shoulder, and he had watched the ribbons of fire rising and falling in the valley, and the smell of grass-smoke had been strong in his nostrils, through all those years Zen had been to him a sweet, evasive memory to be dreamed over and idealized, a wild, daring, irresponsible incarnation of the spirit of the hills. Even in these last few days he had followed the path simply because it lay before him. He had not sought her out in all that great West; he had been content with his dream of the Zen of years gone by; if Fate had brought him once more within the orbit of his star surely Fate had a purpose in all its doings. One who has learned to believe that no bullet will find him unless “his name and number are on it” has little difficulty in excusing his own indiscretions by fatalistic reasoning.
He wrote on the back of the note, “Look for me at eight,” and then, observing that the boy had not brought teddy along, he inquired solicitously for the health of the little pet.
“He’s all right, but mother wouldn’t let me bring him. Said I might lose him.” The tone in which the last words were spoken implied just how impossible such a thing was. Lose teddy! No one but a mother could think such an absurdity.
“But I got a knife!” Wilson exclaimed, his mind darting to a happier subject. “Daddy gave it to me. Will you sharpen it? It is as dull as a pig.”
Grant was to learn during the day that all the boy’s figures of speech were now hung on the family pig. The knife was as dull as a pig; the plow was as rough as a pig; the horses, when they capered at a corner, were as wild as a pig; even Grant himself, while he held the little chap firmly on his knee, received the doubtful compliment of being as strong as a pig. He went through the form of sharpening the knife on the leather lines of the harness, and was pleased to discover that Wilson, with childish dexterity of imagination, now pronounced it as sharp as a pig.
The boy did not return to the field in the afternoon, and Grant spent the time in a strange admixture of happiness over the pleasant companionship he had found in this little son of the prairies and anticipation of his meeting with Zen that night. All his reflection had failed to suggest the subject so interesting to her as to bring forth her unconventional note, but it was enough for him that his presence was desired. As to the future—he would deal with that when he came to it. As evening approached the horses began their usual procedure of turning their heads homeward at the end of each furrow. Beginning about five o’clock, they had a habit of assuming that each furrow was obviously the last one for the day, and when the firm hand on the lines brought them sharply back to position they trudged on with an apologetic air which seemed to say that of course they were quite willing to work another hour or two but they supposed their master would want to be on his way home. Today, however, he surprised them, and the first time they turned their heads he unhitched, and, throwing himself lightly across Prince’s ample back, drove them to their stables.
Grant prepared his supper of bacon and eggs and fried potatoes, bread and jam and black tea, and ate it from the kitchen table as was his habit except on state occasions. Sometimes a touch of the absurdity of his behavior would tickle his imagination—he, who might dine in the midst of wealth and splendor, with soft lights beating down upon him, soft music swelling through arching corridors, soft-handed waiters moving about on deep, silent carpetings, perhaps round white shoulders across the table and the faint smell of delicate perfumes—that he should prefer to eat from the white oilcloth of his kitchen table was a riddle far beyond any ordinary intellect. And yet he was happy in this life; happy in his escape from the tragic routine of being decently civilized; happier, he knew, than he ever could be among all the artificial pleasures that wealth could buy him. Sometimes, as a concession to this absurdity, he would set his table in the dining-room with his best dishes, and eat his silent meal very grandly, until the ridiculousness of it all would overcome him and he would jump up with a boyish whoop and sweep everything into the kitchen.
But to-night he had no time for make-belief. Supper ended, he put a basin of water on the stove and went out to give his horses their evening attention, after which he had a wash and a careful shave and dressed himself in a light grey suit appropriate to an autumn evening. And then he noticed that he had just time to walk to Transley’s house before eight o’clock.
Zen received him at the door; the maid had gone to a neighbor’s, she said, and Wilson was in bed. It was still bright outside, but the sheltered living-room, to which she showed him, was wrapped in a soft twilight.
“Shall we have a lamp, or the fireplace?” she asked, then inferentially answered by saying that a cool wind was blowing down from the mountains. “I had the maid build the fire,” she continued, and he could see the outline of her form bending over the grate. She struck a match; its glow lit up her cheeks and hair; in a moment the dry wood was crackling and ribbons of blue smoke were curling into the chimney.
“I have been so anxious to see you—again,” she said, drawing a chair not far from his. “A chance remark of yours last night brought to memory many things—things I have been trying to forget.” Then, abruptly, “Did you ever kill a man?”
“You know I was in the war,” he returned, evading her question.
“Yes, and you do not care to dwell on that phase of it. I should not have asked you, but you will be the better able to understand. For years I have lived under the cloud of having killed a man.”
“You!”
“Yes. The day of the fire—you remember?”
Grant had started from his chair. “I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed. “There must have been justification!”
“YOU had justification at the Front, but it doesn’t make the memory pleasant. I had justification, but it has haunted me night and day. And then, last night you said he was still alive, and my soul seemed to rise up again and say, ‘I am free!’”
“Who?”
“Drazk.”
“DRAZK!”
“Yes. I thought I had killed him that day of the fire. It is rather an unpleasant story, and you will excuse me repeating the details, I know. He attacked me—we were both on horseback, in the river—I suppose he was crazed with his wild deed, and less responsible than usual. He dragged me from my horse and I fought with him in the water, but he was much too strong. I had concluded that to drown myself, and perhaps him, was the only way out, when I saw a leather thong floating in the water from the saddle. By a ruse I managed to flip it around his neck, and the next moment he was at my mercy. I had no mercy then. I understand how it might be possible to kill prisoners. I pulled it tight, tight—pulled till I saw his face blacken and his eyes stand out. He went down, but still I pulled. And then after a little I found myself on shore.
“I suppose it was the excitement of the fire that carried me on through the day, but at night—you remember?—there came a reaction, and I couldn’t keep awake. I suddenly seemed to feel that I was safe, and I could sleep.”
Grant had resumed his seat. He was deeply moved by this strange confidence; he bent his eyes intently upon her face, now shining in the ruddy light from the fire-place. Her frank reference to the event that night seemed to create a new bond between them; he knew now, if ever he had doubted it, that Zen Transley had treasured that incident in her heart even as he had treasured it.
“I was so embarrassed after the—the accident, you know,” she continued. “I knew you must know I had been in the water. For days and weeks I expected every hour to hear of the finding of the body. I expected to hear the remark dropped casually by every new visitor at the ranch, ‘Drazk’s body was found to-day in the river. The Mounted Police are investigating.’ But time went on and nothing was heard of it. It would almost have been a relief to me if it had been discovered. If I had reported the affair at once, as I should have done, all would have been different, but having kept my secret for a while I found it impossible to confess it later. It was the first time I ever felt my self-reliance severely shaken.... But what was his message, and why did you not tell me before?”
“Because I attached no value to it; because I was, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. I learned something of his weaknesses at the Front. According to Drazk’s statement of it he won the war, and could as easily win another, if occasion presented itself, so when he said, ‘If ever you see Y.D.‘s daughter tell her I’m well; she’ll be glad to hear it,’ I put it down to his usual boasting and thought no more about it. I thought he was trying to impress me with the idea that you were interested in him, which was a very absurd supposition, as I saw it.”
“Well, now you know,” she said, with a little laugh. “I’m glad it’s off my mind.”
“Of course your husband knows?”
“No. That made it harder. I never told Frank.”
She arose and walked to the fire-place, pretending to stir the logs. When she had seated herself again she continued.
“It has not been easy for me to tell all things to Frank. Don’t misunderstand me; he has been a model husband, according to my standards.”
“According to your standards?”
“According to my standards—when I married him. If standards were permanent I suppose happy matings would be less unusual. A young couple must have something in common in order to respond at all to each other’s attractions, but as they grow older they set up different standards, and they drift apart.”
She paused, and Grant sat in silence, watching the glow of the firelight upon her cheek.
“Why don’t you smoke?” she exclaimed, suddenly springing up. “Let me find you some of Frank’s cigars.”
Grant protested that he smoked too much. She produced a box of cigars and extended them to him. Then she held a match while he got his light.
“Your standards have changed?” said Grant, taking up the thread when she had sat down again.
“They have. They have changed more than Frank’s, which makes me feel rather at fault in the matter. How could he know that I would change my ideal of what a husband should be?”
“Why shouldn’t he know? That is the course of development. Without changing ideals there would be stagnation.”
“Perhaps,” she returned, and he thought he caught a note of weariness in her voice. “But I don’t blame Frank—now. I rather blame him then. He swept me off my feet; stampeded me. My parents helped him, and I was only half disposed to resist. You see, I had this other matter on my mind, and for the first time in my life I felt the need of protection. Besides, I took a matter-of-fact view of marriage. I thought that sentiment—love, if you like—was a thing of books, an invention of poets and fiction writers. Practical people would be practical in their marriages, as in their other undertakings. To marry Frank seemed a very practical course. My father assured me that Frank had in him qualities of large success. He would make money; he would be a prominent man in circles of those who do things. These predictions he has fulfilled. Frank has been all I expected—then.”
“But you have changed your opinion of marriage—of the essentials of marriage?”
“Do YOU need to ask that? I was beginning to see the light—beginning to know myself—even before I married him, but I didn’t stop to analyze. I plunged ahead, as I have always done, trusting not to get into any position from which I could not find a way out. But there are some positions from which there is no way out.”
Grant reflected that possibly his experience had been somewhat like hers in that respect. He, too, had been following a path, unconcerned about its end.... Possibly for him, too, there would be no way out.
“Frank has been all I expected of him,” she repeated, as though anxious to do her husband justice. “He has made money. He spends it generously. If I live here modestly, with but one maid, it is because of a preference which I have developed for simplicity. I might have a dozen if I asked it, and I think Frank is somewhat surprised, and, it may be, disappointed, that I don’t ask it. Although not a man for display himself, he likes to see me make display. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, that a husband should wish his wife to be admired by other men?”
“Some are successful in that,” Grant remarked.
“Some are more successful than they intend to be.”
“Frank, for instance?” he queried, pointedly.
“I have not sought any man’s admiration,” she went on, with her astonishing frankness. “I am too independent for that. What do I care for their admiration? But every woman wants love.”
Grant had changed his position, and sat with his elbows upon his knees, his chin resting upon his hands. “You know, Zen,” he said, using her Christian name deliberately, “the picture I drew that day by the river? That is the picture I have carried in my mind ever since—shall carry to the end. Perhaps it has led me to be imprudent—”
“Imprudent?”
“Has brought me here to-night, for example.”
“You had my invitation.”
“True. But why develop another situation which, as you say, has no way out?”
“Do you want to go?”
“No, Zen, no! I want to stay—with you—always! But organized society must respect its own conventions.”
She arose and stood by his chair, letting her hand fall beside his cheek.
“You silly boy!” she said. “You didn’t organize society, nor subscribe to its conventions. Still, I suppose there must be a code of some kind, and we shall respect it. You had your chance, Denny, and you passed it up.”
“Had my chance?”
“Yes. I refused you in words, I know, but actions speak louder—”
“But when you told me you were engaged what could I honorably do?”
“More—very much more—than you can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed to handle, that situation.”
“What would your super-practical husband do now if he were in my position?” he said, drawing her hands into his.
“I don’t know.”
“You do! He says that any man worth his salt takes what he wants in this world. Am I worth my salt?”
“There are different standards of value.... Goodness! how late it is! You must go now, and don’t come back before, let us say, Wednesday.”
Whatever may have been Grant’s philosophy about the unwisdom of creating a situation which had no way out he found himself looking forward impatiently to Wednesday evening. An hour or two at Zen’s fireside provided the social atmosphere which his bachelor life lacked, and as Transley seemed unappreciative of his domestic privileges, remaining in town unless his business brought him out to the summer home, it seemed only a just arrangement that they should be shared by one who valued them at their worth.
The Wednesday evening conversation developed further the understanding that was gradually evolving between them, but it afforded no solution of the problem which confronted them. Zen made no secret of the error she had made in the selection of her husband, but had no suggestions to offer as to what should be done about it. She seemed quite satisfied to enjoy Grant’s conversation and company, and let it go at that—an impossible situation, as the young man assured himself. She dismissed him again at a quite respectable hour with some reference to Saturday evening, which Grant interpreted as an invitation to call again at that time.
When he entered Saturday night it was evident that she had been expecting him. A cool wind was again blowing down from the mountains, laden with the soft smell of melting snow, and the fire in the grate was built ready for the match.
“I am my own maid to-night,” she said, as she stooped to light it. “Sarah usually goes to town Saturday evening. Now we shall see if someone is in good humor.”
The fire curled up pleasantly about the wood. “There!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. “All is well. You see how economical I am; if we must spend on fires we save on light. I love a wood fire; I suppose it is something which reaches back to the original savage in all of us.”
“To the days when our great ancestors roasted their victims while they danced about the coals,” said Grant, completing the picture. “And yet they say that human nature doesn’t change.”
“Does it? I think our methods change with our environments, but that is all. Wasn’t it you who propounded a theory about an age when men took what they wanted by force giving way to an age in which they took what they wanted by subtlety? Now, I believe, you want society to restrain the man of clever wits just as it has learned to restrain the man of big biceps. And when that is done will not man discover some other means of taking what he wants?”
She had seated herself beside him on a divanette and the joy of her nearness fired Grant with a very happy intoxication. It recalled that night on the hillside when, as she had since said, she felt safe in his protection.
“I am really very interested,” she continued. “I followed the argument at the table on Sunday with as much concern as if it had been my pet hobby, not yours, that was under discussion. If I said little it was because I did not wish to appear too interested.”
Her amazing frankness brought Grant, figuratively, to his feet at every turn. She seemed to have no desire to conceal her interest in him, her attachment for him. Hers was such candor as might well be born of the vast hillsides, the great valleys, the brooding silences of her girlhood. Yet it seemed obvious that she must be less candid with Transley....
“I am glad you were interested,” he answered. “I was afraid I was rather boring the company, but it was MY scheme and I had to stand up for it. I fear I made few converts.”
“You were dealing with practical men,” she returned, “and practical men are never converted to a new idea. That is one of the things I have learned in my years of married life, Dennison. Practical men find many ways of turning an old idea to advantage, but they never evolve new ones. New ideas come from dreamers—theoretical fellows like you.”
“The dreamer is always a lap ahead of the rest of civilization, and the funny thing is that the rest always thinks itself much more sane than the dreamer, out there blazing the way.”
“That’s not remarkable,” she replied. “That’s logical. The dreamer blazes the way—proves the possibilities of his dream—and the practical man follows it up and makes money out of it. To a practical man there is nothing more practical than making money.”
“Did I convert you?” he pursued.
“I was not in need of conversion. I have been a follower of the new faith—an imperfect and limping follower, it is true—ever since you first announced it.”
“I believe you are laughing at me.”
“Certainly not! I have been brought up in an environment where there is no standard higher than the money standard. Not that my father or husband are dishonest; they are rigidly honest according to their ideas of honesty. But to say that a man must give actual service for every dollar he gets or it isn’t his—that is a conception of honesty so far beyond them as to be an absurdity. But I have wanted to ask you how you are going to enforce this new idealism.”
“Idealism is not enforced. We aspire to it; we may not attain to it. Christianity itself is idealism—the idealism of unselfishness. That ideal has never been attained by any considerable number of people, and yet it has drawn all humanity on to somewhat higher levels as surely as the moon draws the tide. Superficial persons in these days are drawing pictures of the failure of Christianity, which has failed in part; but they could find a much more depressing subject by painting a world from which all Christian idealism had been removed.”
“But surely you have some plan for putting your theories to the test—some plan which will force those to whom idealism appeals in vain. We do not trust to a man’s idealism to keep him from stealing; we put him in jail.”
“All that will come in time, but the question for the seeker after truth is not ‘Will it work?’ but ‘Is it true?’ I fancy I can see the practical men of Moses’ time leaning over his shoulder as he inscribed the Ten Commandments and remarking ‘No use of putting that down, Moses; you can never enforce it.’ But Moses put it down and left the enforcement to natural law and the growing intelligence of the generations which have followed him. We are too much disposed to think it possible to evade a law; to violate it, and escape punishment; but if a law is true, punishment follows violation as implacably as the stars follow their courses. And if society has failed to recognize the law that service, and service only, should be able to command service in return, society must suffer the penalty. We have only to look about us to see that society is paying in full for its violations.
“Yes, I have plans, and I think they would work, but the first thing is the ideal—the new moral sense—that value must not be accepted without giving equal value in return. Society, of course, will have to set up the standards of value. That is a matter of detail—a matter for the practical men who come in the wake of the idealist. But of this I am certain—and I hark back to my old theme—that just as society has found a means of preventing the man who is physically superior from taking wealth without giving service in return, so must society find a means to prevent men who are mentally superior from taking wealth without giving service in return. The superior person, mark you, will still have an advantage, in that his superiority will enable him to EARN more; we shall merely stop him taking what he does not earn. That must come. I think it will come soon. It is the next step in the social evolution of the race.”
She had drunk in his argument as one who hangs on every word, and her wrapt face turned toward his seemed to glow and thrill him in return with a sense of their spiritual oneness. She did not need to tell him that Transley never talked to her like this. Transley loved her, if he loved her at all, for the glory she reflected upon him; he was proud of her beauty, of her daring, of her physical charm and self-reliance. The deeper side of her mental life was to Transley a field unexplored; a field of the very existence of which he was probably unaware. Grant looked into her eyes, now close and responsive, and found within their depths something which sent him to his feet.
“Zen!” he exclaimed. “The mystery of life is too much for me. Surely there must be an answer somewhere! Surely the puzzle has a system to it—a key which may some day be found! Or can it be just chaos—just blind, driveling, senseless chaos? In our own lives, why should we be stranded, helpless, wrecked, with the happiness which might have been ours hung just beyond our reach? Is there no answer to this?”
“I suppose we disobeyed the law, back in those old days. We heard it clearly enough, and we disobeyed. I allowed myself to be guided by motives which were not the highest; you seemed to lack the enterprise which would have won you its own reward. And as you have said, those who violate the law must suffer for it. I have suffered.”
She drew up her chin; he could see the firm muscles set beneath the pink bloom of her flesh.... He had not thought of Zen suffering; all his thought of her had been very grateful to his vanity, but he had not thought of her suffering. He extended his hands and took hers within them.
“I have sometimes wondered,” he said, “why there is no second chance; why one cannot wipe the slate clear of everything that has been and start anew. What a world this might be!”
“Would it be any better? Or would we go on making our mistakes over again? That seems to be the only way we learn.”
“But a second chance; the idea seems so fair, so plausible. Suppose you are shooting on the ranges, for instance; you are allowed a shot or two to find your nerve, to get your distance, to settle yourself to the business in hand. But in this business of life you fire, and if some distraction, some momentary influence or folly sends your aim wild, the shot is gone and you are left with all the years that follow to think about it. You can do nothing but think about it—the most profitless of all occupations.”
“For you there is a second chance,” she reminded him. “You must have thought of that.”
“No—no second chance.”
She drew herself up slightly and away from him. “I have been very frank with you, Dennison,” she said. “Suppose you try being frank with me?”
In her eyes was still the fire of Zen of the Y.D., a woman unconquered and unconquerable. She gave the impression that she accepted the buffetings of life, but no one forced them upon her. She had erred; she would suffer. That was fair; she accepted that. But as Grant gazed on her face, tilted still in some of its old-time recklessness and defiance, he knew that the day would come when she would say that her cup was full, and, throwing it to the winds, would start life over, if there can be such a thing as starting life over. And something in her manner told him that day was very, very near.
“All right,” he said, “I will be frank. Fate HAS brought within my orbit a second chance, or what would have been a second chance had my heart not been so full of you. She was a girl well worth thinking about. When an employee introduces herself to you with a declaration of independence you may know that you have met with someone out of the ordinary. I am not speaking of these days of labor scarcity; it takes no great moral quality to be independent when you have the whip-hand. But in the days before the war, with two applicants for every position, a girl who valued her freedom of spirit more than her job—more than even a very good job—was a girl to think about.”
“And you thought about her?”
“I did. I was sick of the cringing and fawning of which my wealth made me the object; I loathed the deference paid me, because I knew it was paid, not to me, but to my money—I was homesick to hear someone tell me to go to hell. I wanted to brush up against that spirit which says it is as good as anybody else—against the manliness which stands its ground and hits back. I found that spirit in Phyllis Bruce.”
“Phyllis Bruce—rather a nice name. But are the men and women of the East so—so servile as you suggest?”
“No! That is where I was mistaken. Generations of environment had merely trained them into docility of habit. Underneath they are red-blooded through and through. The war showed us that. Zen—the proudest moment of my life—except one—was when a kid in the office who couldn’t come into my room without trembling jumped up and said ‘We WILL win!’—and called me Grant! Think of that! Poor chap.... What was I saying? Oh, yes; Phyllis. I grew to like her—very much—but I couldn’t marry her. You know why.”
Zen was looking into the fire with unseeing eyes. “I am not sure that I know why,” she said at length. “You couldn’t marry me. It was your second chance. You should have taken it.”
“Would that be playing the game fairly—with her?”
She rested her fingers lightly on the back of his hand, extending them gently down until they fell between his own.
“Denny, you big, big boy!” she murmured. “Do you suppose every man marries his first choice?”
“It has always seemed to me that a second choice is a makeshift. It doesn’t seem quite square—”
“No. I fancy some second choices are really first choices. Wisdom comes with experience, you know.”
“Not always. At any rate I couldn’t marry her while my heart was yours.”
“I suppose not,” she answered, and again he noted a touch of weariness in her voice. “I know something of what divided affection—if one can even say it is divided—means. Denny, I will make a confession. I knew you would come back; I always was sure you would come back. ‘Then,’ I said to myself, ‘I will see this man Grant as he is, and the reality will clear my brain of all this idealism which I have woven about him.’ Perhaps you know what I mean. We sometimes meet people who impress us greatly at the time, but a second meeting, perhaps years later, has a very different effect. It sweeps all the idealism away, and we wonder what it was that could have charmed us so. Well—I hoped—I really hoped for some experience like that with you. If only I could meet you again and find that, after all, you were just like other men; self-centred, arrogant, kind, perhaps, but quite superior—if I could only find THAT to be true then the mirage in which I have lived for all these years would be swept away and my old philosophy that after all it doesn’t matter much whom one marries so long as he is respectable and gives her a good living would be vindicated. And so I have encouraged you to come here; I have been most unconventional, I know, but I was always that—I have cultivated your acquaintance, and, Denny, I am SO disappointed!”
“Disappointed? Then the mirage HAS cleared away?”
“On the contrary, it grows more distorted every day. I see you towering above all your fellow humans; reaching up into a heaven so far above them that they don’t even know of its existence. I see you as really The Man-On-the-Hill, with a vision which lays all this selfish, commonplace world at your feet. The idealism which I thought must fade away is justified—heightened—by the reality.”
She had turned her face to him, and Grant, little as he understood the ways of women, knew that she had made her great confession. For a moment he held himself in check.... then from somewhere in his subconsciousness came ringing the phrase, “Every man worth his salt.... takes what he wants.” That was Transley’s morality; Transley, the Usurper, who had bullied himself into possession of this heart which he had never won and could never hold; Transley, the fool, frittering his days and nights with money! He seized her in his arms, crushing down her weak resistance; he drew her to him until, as in that day by a foothill river somewhere in the sunny past, her lips met his and returned their caress. He cared now for nothing—nothing in the whole world but this quivering womanhood within his arms....
“You must go,” she whispered at length. “It is late, and Frank’s habits are somewhat erratic.”
He held her at arm’s length, his hands upon her shoulders. “Do you suppose that fear—of anything—can make me surrender you now?”
“Not fear, perhaps—I know it could not be fear—but good sense may do it. It was not fear that made me send you home early from your previous calls. It was discretion.”
“Oh!” he said, a new light dawning, and he marvelled again at her consummate artistry.
“But I must tell you,” she resumed, “Frank leaves on a business trip to-morrow night. He will be gone for some time, and I shall motor into town to see him off. I am wondering about Wilson,” she hurried on, as though not daring to weigh her words; “Sarah will be away—I am letting her have a little holiday—and I can’t take Wilson into town with me because it will be so late.” Then, with a burst of confession she spoke more deliberately. “That isn’t exactly the reason, Dennison; Frank doesn’t know I have let Sarah go, and I—I can’t explain.”
Her face shone pink and warm in the glow of the firelight, and as the significance of her words sank in upon him Grant marvelled at that wizardry of the gods which could bring such homage to the foot of man. A tenderness such as he had never known suffused him; her very presence was holy.
“Bring the boy over and let him spend the night with me. We are great chums and we shall get along splendidly.”