V
It was late when they returned from the farm. Gordon left the buggy at the Courthouse. The thought of his dwelling, with Lattice’s importunate fancies and complaints, was distasteful to him. A long-drawn-out evening in the monotonous sitting room, with the grim form of Mrs. Caley in the background, was insupportable. There was no light in the office of theBugle, but there was a pale yellow blur in the lower windows of Peterman’s hotel. It might be that a drummer had arrived, and was entertaining a local circle with the pungent wit of the road; and Gordon made his way toward the hotel.
It was a painted, wooden structure, two stories in height, with a wing that ran back from the road. The rooms in the latter section were reached from an outside, uncovered gallery, gained by a flight of steps at the back. Contrary to his expectation no one was in the office; a lamp shone on an empty array of chairs. But some one was on the gallery above; he could see a white skirt through the railing, make out the dark blot of a head upon the night. The illumination from within shone on his face.
The form above him leaned forward over the railing. “Mr. Makimmon,” a woman’s voice said, “if you want Mr. Peterman, I’ll call him. He’s at the back of the house.”
Gordon was totally unaware of her identity.
“No,” he replied, hesitatingly, “I wasn’t after him in particular—”
“You don’t know me,” she challenged, laughing; “it’s Meta Beggs; I teach the school, you know.”
Instantly the memory returned to him of a woman’s round, gleaming shoulders slipping into a web of soft white; he recalled the school-teacher’s bitter arraignment of her life, her prospects. “I didn’t know you,” he admitted, “and that’s the fact; it was the dark.” He hesitated once more, conscious of the awkwardness of his position, talking upward to an indistinguishable shape. “I heard you were back,” he continued impotently.
“Yes,” she assented, “there was nothing else open.... Won’t you come up and smoke a cigarette? It’s pleasant here on the gallery.”
He mounted the steps, making his way over the narrow, hollow-sounding passage to her side. She was seated overlooking the rift of the valley. “I’ll get you a chair,” she said, rising. At her side a door opened into a dim room. “No, no,” he protested, “let me—in here?”
He entered the room. It was, he divined, hers. His foot struck against a chair, and his hand caught the back. A thin, clinging under-garment rested on it, which he deposited on a vague bed. It stuck to his fingers like a cobweb. There was just room on the balcony to arrange the chairs side by side.
VI
The spring night was potent, warm and damp; it was filled with intangible influences which troubled the mind and stirred the memory to vain, melancholy groping. Meta Beggs was so close to Gordon that their shoulders touched. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, resting his arms upon the railing. Her face was white in the gloom; not white as Lettice’s had been, like a flower, but sharply cut like marble; her nose was finely modelled, her lips were delicately curved, but thin, compressed. He could distinguish over her the paramount air of dissatisfaction.
She aroused in him unbidden thoughts; without the slightest freedom of gesture or words she gave the impression of careless license. He grew instinctively, at once, familiar, confidential, in his attitude toward her. And she responded in the same manner; she did not draw back when their arms accidentally met.
An interest, a vivacity of manner, such as Gordon had not experienced for weeks stirred in him. Meta Beggs called back into being the old freedom of stage-driving days, of the younger years. Her manner flattered his sex vanity. They progressed famously.
“You don’t like the children any better than you did?”
“They get more like rats every year.”
“I thought about you, held against your will.”
“Don’t tell lies; I went right out of your mind.”
“Not as quick as I went out of yours. I did think about you, though—” he stopped, but she insisted upon his finishing the remark. “Well, I remembered what you said about your shoulders, and I saw you that night at your window....”
“Men, somehow, are always curious about me,” she remarked indifferently; “they have bothered me ever since I was a girl. I make them mad. I never worry about such things myself—from the way women talk, and men go on, there must be something left out of me ... it just seems silly to get all red in the face—”
He almost constructed her words into a challenge. Five years ago, he continued, or only two, he would have changed her conception of living, he would have broken down her indifference, but now—His mental deliberations ended abruptly, for, even in his mind, he avoided all reference to Lettice; they studiously omitted her name in their conversation.
“Are you going to the camp meeting on South Fork next week?” she demanded. “I have never seen one. Buckley Simmons says all sorts of things happen. He’s going to take me on Saturday. I wish—” she broke off pointedly.
“What?”
“I was going to say that I wish, well—I wish I were going with somebody else than Buckley; he bothers me all the time.”
“I’d like a lot to take you. It’s not fit for you to go, though. The best people in Greenstream don’t. They get crazy with religion, and with rum; often as not there’s shooting.”
“Oh! I had no idea. I don’t know as I will go. I wish you would be there. If I go will you be there to look out for me?”
“I hadn’t thought of it. Still, if you’re there, and want me around, I guess that’s where I will be.”
“I feel better right away; I’ll see you then; it’s a sort of engagement between you and me. Buckley Simmons needn’t know. Perhaps we can slip away from him for a while.”
Voices rose from below them, and they drew back instinctively. Gordon found in this desire to avoid observation an additional bond with Meta Beggs; the aspect of secrecy gave a flavor to their communion. They remained silent, with their shoulders pressed together, until the voices, the footfalls, faded into the distance.
He rose to leave, and she held out her hand. At its touch he recalled how pointed the fingers were; it was incredibly cool and smooth, yet it seemed to instil a subtle fire in his palm. She stood framed in her doorway, bathed in the intimate, disturbing aroma of her person. Gordon recalled the cobwebby garment on the bed. He made an involuntary step toward her, and she drew back into the room ... the night was breathlessly still. If he took another step forward, he wondered, would she still retreat? Somewhere in the dark interior he would come close to her.
“Good night.” Her level, impersonal voice was like a breath of cold air upon his face.
“Good night,” he returned hastily. “I got turned right around.” His departure over the gallery was not unlike a flight.
VII
The memory of Meta Beggs was woven like a bright thread through the monotonous texture of the days which immediately followed. She was never entirely out of his thoughts; she stirred him out of all proportion to any assignable cause; she irritated him. He remembered that she said she made men “mad.” He recalled how ridiculous he had felt as he had said, “Good night.” He wished to repay her for that injury to his self-esteem.
At the same time, curiously, he was more patient with Lettice, he had a more ready sympathy for her intangible fancies. Perhaps for the first time he enjoyed sitting quietly on the porch of his house with her and General Jackson. He sat answering her endless queries, fears, assenting half-absently to her projections, with the thought of Meta Beggs at the back of his mind. He wanted to be as nice as possible to Lettice. Suddenly she seemed a little removed from him, from the world in general, the world of the emotions and ideas that centered about the school-teacher.
Lettice was—superior; he recognized it pridefully. Behind her temporary, rational vagaries there was a quality of steadfastness. It was clear to him now from its contrast to his own devious mind. But he found a sharp pleasure in the mental image of the Beggs woman. He recalled the burning sensation that had lingered in his palm from the touch of her hand, the pressure of her shoulder against his as they had drawn back from the vision of those below.
He went early to the camp meeting on the Saturday appointed.
VIII
He drove over the road that lay at the base of the western range away from his dwelling and Greenstream village. The mature spring day had almost the appearance of summer; the valley was flooded with sparkling sunlight; but the young leaves were still red, the greenery still translucent, the trees black with risen sap. The buggy rolled through the shallow, rocky fords, the horse’s hoofs flinging up the water in shining drops. The road rose slightly, turning to the right, where an intermediate valley lay diagonally through the range. Save for small, scattered farms the bottomland was uncultivated, the tangled brush impenetrable.
Gordon passed other vehicles, bound toward the camp meeting, usually a single seat crowded with three, or even four, adult forms. He passed flat wagons with their bottoms filled with straw, on which women sat with stiffly-extended legs. The young women wore gay colors, their eyes sparkled in hardy faces, their hands, broad and red and capable, awkwardly disposed. The older women, with shawls folded about their stooped shoulders, were close-lipped, somber. The men were sparely built, with high, prominent cheek bones, long, hollow cheeks and shaven mouths touched with sardonic humor, under undented, black felt hats. There were an appreciable number of invalids and leaden-faced idiots.
The way grew wilder, the natural forms shrunk, the valley became a small plain of broken, rocky hillocks matted with thorny bushes, surrounded by marshes of rank grass, flags, half-grown osiers. The vehicles, drawn into a single way, crowded together, progressed slowly. Gordon saw in the back of the buggy before him two whiskey jugs. Some one far ahead began to sing a revival hymn, and it ran along the line of carriages like a trail of ignited powder. A deep bass caught it behind Gordon Makimmon, then the piercing soprano of a woman farther back.
The camp meeting spread over a small, irregular plateau surrounded by swamp and sluggish streams. Gordon turned off the road, and drove over a rough, short descent to a ledge of solid ground by a stream and fringe of willows. The spring torrents had subsided, leaving the grass, the willows, covered with a grey, crackling coat of mud; the air had a damp, fetid smell; beyond, the swamp bubbled gaseously. The close line of hitched teams disappeared about an elbow of the thicket; groups of men gathered in the noisome shadows, bottles were passed, heads thrown back and arms bent aloft.
Above, a great, sagging tent was staked to the obdurate ground. To the left a wooden floor had been temporarily laid about a four-square, open counter, now bare, with a locked shed for storage. Before Gordon was the sleeping tent for women. The sun seemed unable to dispel the miasma of the swamp, the surrounding aspect of mean desolation. The scene was petty, depressing. It was surcharged by a curious air of tension, of suspense, a brooding, treacherous hysteria, an ugly, raw, emotional menace. A service was in progress; a sustained, convulsive murmur came from within, a wordless, fluctuating lament. Suddenly it was pierced by a shrill, high scream, a voice tormented out of all semblance to reason. The sound grew deeper and louder; it swung into a rhythm which formed into words, lines, a primitive chant that filled the plateau, swelled out over the swamp. It continued for an incredible length of time, rising to an unbearable pitch, then it died away in a great gasp.
A thin, sinister echo rose from among the willows—emotional, shrill curses, a brief, raving outburst of passion, sharply punctuated with double shots, and falling abruptly to heavy silence. Gordon saw men obscurely running below.
The curtained entrance to the tent was pushed aside, and a woman walked stiffly out, her hands clenched, and her glassy eyes set in a fixed stare. Her hat was gone, and her grey hair lay upon one shoulder. She progressed, stumbling blindly over the inequalities of the ground, until she tripped on a stone. She lay where she had fallen, with her muscles jerking and shuddering, until a man appeared from behind the counter, and dragged her unceremoniously to the women’s shelter.
Gordon entered the tent where the service was in progress. A subdued light filtered through the canvas upon a horde that filled every foot of space; they sat pressed together on long, rough boards nailed together in the semblance of benches. On a platform at the farther side a row of men and women sat against the canvas wall; to their left a folding organ had been erected, and was presided over by a man with a blurred, greyish countenance; while, standing at the forefront of the platform, a large, heavy man in a black frock coat was addressing the assemblage. He had a round, pallid, smooth face with long, black hair brushed back upon his coat collar, and great, soft, white hands.
“... it’s rising,” he proclaimed, in a loud, sing-song voice, “the flood is rising; now it’s about your pockets—praise God! now it’s above your waists. It’s rising! it’s rising! Hallelujah! the sea of redemption is rising,” his voice rose with the figurative flood. “At last it’s about your hearts, your hearts are immersed in the Sacred Tide.”
A man beside Gordon groaned and dropped upon his knees. A woman cried, “God! God! God!” A spindling, overgrown boy rose fumbling at his throat. “I can’t breathe,” he choked, “I can’t—” His face grew purplish, congested. The tumult swelled, directed, dominated, by the voice of the revivalist. He dropped upon his knees, and, amid the sobbing silence, pled with an invisible Judge hovering, apparently, over a decision to destroy at one bloody blow the recalcitrant peoples of the earth, the peoples of His making.
“Spare us,” he implored; “spare us, the sheep of hell; lead us to Thy shining pasture ... still water; lead us from the great fire of the eternal pit, from the boiling bodies of the unsaved....”
Gordon Makimmon indifferently regarded the clamor. The process of “getting religion” was familiar, commonplace. He saw Tol’able sitting on a back bench; with a mutual gesture the two men rose and left the tent.
“I had to bring m’wife,” Tol’able explained; “did you see her sitting on the platform? She’s one of the main grievers. I got some good licker in the wagon—better have a comforter.”
They walked down to a dusty, two-seated surrey, where, from under a horse blanket, Tol’able produced a small jug. He wiped the mouth on his sleeve and passed it to Gordon; then held the gurgling vessel to his open throat. “There was some hell raised last night,” he proceeded; “a man from up back had his head busted with a stone, and a drunken looney shot through the women’s tent: an old girl hollered out they had Goddy right in there among ’em.”
“They were shooting a while back,” Gordon observed indifferently. “Have you seen Buck Simmons here?”
“No, I hain’t. He wouldn’t be here noways.”
Gordon preserved a discreet silence in regard to his source of assurance of Buckley’s presence at the camp meeting.
“Have another drink, Gord.”
The services were temporarily suspended, and the throng emptied from the tent. A renewed sanity clothed them—girls drew into squares of giggling defense against the verbal sallies of robustly-witted young men. Women collected their offspring, gathering in circles about opened boxes of lunch: a multitude of papers and box lids littered the ground. A hot, steaming odor, analogous to coffee, rose from the crowded counter. A prodigious amount of raw whiskey was consumed among the vehicles by the stream and mud-coated willows.
Gordon slowly made his way through the throng, in search of Meta Beggs; perhaps, after all, she had decided not to come; he might easily miss her in that mob. It was not clear in his mind what he would do if he saw her. She would be with Buckley Simmons, and there was a well recognized course of propriety for such occasions: he would be expected merely to greet in passing a girl accompanying another man. Any other proceeding would be met with instant resentment. And Buckley Simmons, Gordon knew, must still nurse a secret antagonism toward him. However, he had disposed of Buckley in the past ... if necessary he could do so again.
At the entrance to the service tent the organist, his countenance still livid in the sunlight, blew a throaty summons on a cornet, and the crowd slowly trailed back within. In the thinning groups Gordon saw the school-teacher, clad in a bright blue skirt and a hat with a stiff, blue feather. She was at Buckley’s side, consuming a slice of cake with delicate, precise motions of her hand, and greeting with patent abstraction his solicitous attentions.
IX
Meta Beggs saw Gordon at the same moment; and, without observation on the part of her escort, beckoned him to her. She said promptly:
“Mr. Makimmon, please take care of me while Buckley goes down by those carriages, where we saw you a little while ago, and gets his share of the refreshment there. I’m certain that dusty road made him as dry as possible.”
Buckley grinned; such frank feminine acknowledgment and solicitude for the masculine palate was rare in Greenstream. “Why, no, Miss Beggs,” he rejoined; “I’m in good shape for a while yet. I got a flask under the seat of the buggy—”
“I insist on your tending to it at once. I know just how it is with men—they have got to have that little refreshment ... don’t you call it ’life preserver’? I’ll be right by the counter; if Mr. Makimmon will be so kind—”
“Well,” Buckley agreed, “a drink don’t go bad any time; the road was kind of dusty. If you insist, Miss Beggs.”
“I do! I do!” He turned and left them, striding toward the lower level. Then:
“The fool!” she exclaimed viciously; “my arm is all black and blue where he pinched it. My skin is not like the hides on these mountain girls, it tears and bruises dreadfully easy, it’s so fine. Let’s go back there,” she pointed to where, behind the platform and counter, a path was trampled through brush higher than their heads. Gordon glanced swiftly in the direction in which Buckley Simmons had vanished. “He won’t be back,” she added contemptuously, “for a half hour. He’ll stay down there and drink rotten whiskey and sputter over rotten stories.” Without further parley she proceeded in the direction indicated; and, following her, Gordon dismissed Buckley from his thoughts.
Meta Beggs wore a shirtwaist perforated like a sieve; through it he saw flimsy lace, a faded blue ribband, her gleaming shoulders. In an obscure turn of the path she stopped and faced him. “Just look,” she proclaimed, unfastening a bone button that held her cuff. She rolled her sleeve back over her arm. High up, near the soft under-turning, were visible the bluish prints of fingers. “You see,” she added; “and there are others ... where I can’t show you.”
“Buck’s pretty vigorous with the girls,” he admitted; “I once dropped him down a spell for it.”
He was fascinated by her naked, shapely arm; it was slender at the wrist, and surprisingly round above, at a soft, brown shadow. He was seized by a desire to touch it, and he held her pointed elbow while he examined the bruises more minutely. “That’s bad,” he pronounced; “on that pretty skin, too.” He was confused by the close proximity of her bare flesh, the pulse in his neck beat visibly.
For a moment she stood motionless; then, with her eyes half closed, sulky, she drew away from him and rearranged her sleeve.
The brush ended on a slope where pine trees had covered the ground with a glossy mat of bronzed needles; and his companion sank to a sitting position with her back against a trunk. They were outside the influence of the camp meeting, beyond its unnatural excitation. The pine trees were black against the brilliant day; they might have been cast in iron, there was no suggestion of growth in the dun covering below; it was as seasonless where they sat as the sea; the air, faintly spiced and still, seemed to have lain unchanged through countless ages.
Meta Beggs sat motionless, with a look of inexpressible boredom on her pale countenance. Her hands, Gordon thought, were like folded buds of the mountain magnolia.
She said, unexpectedly, “You’re rich now, aren’t you, one of the richest men in the county?”
“Why I—I got some money; that is, my wife has.”
She dismissed, with an impatient gesture, the distinction. “Money is life,” she continued, with a perceptible, envious longing, “it’s freedom, all the things worth having. It makes women—it’s their leather boxes full of rings and pins and necklaces, their dresses of all-over lace, their silk and hand scalloped and embroidered underclothes; it’s their fascination and chance and power—”
“I would like to see you in some of those lace things,” he returned.
“Well, get them for me,” she answered hardily.
Utterly unprepared for this direct attack he was thoroughly disconcerted. “Why, certainly!” he replied, laboriously polite, “the next time—I’ll do it!—when I’m in Stenton again I’ll bring you a pair of silk stockings.”
“Black,” she said practically, “and size eight and a half. You will like me in black silk stockings,” she added enigmatically.
“I’ll bet,” he replied with enthusiasm. “I won’t wait to go, but send for them. You would make the dollars dance. You are different from—” he was going to say Lettice, but, instinctively, he changed it to, “the women around here. You’ve got an awful lot of ginger to you.”
“I know what I want, and I’m not afraid to pay for it. Almost everybody wants the same thing—plenty and pleasure, but they’re afraid of the price; they are afraid of it alive and when they will be dead. Women set such a store on what they call their virtue, and men tend so much to the opinion of others, that they don’t get anywhere.”
“Don’t you set anything on your—your virtue?”
“I’d make it serve me; I wouldn’t be a silly slave to it all my life. If I can get things with it that’s what I’m going to do.”
Gordon Makimmon found these potent words from such a pleasing woman as Meta Beggs. Any philosophy underlying them, any ruthless strength, escaped him entirely. They appealed solely to him as “gay,” highly suggestive. They stirred his blood into warm, heady tides of feeling. He moved over the smooth covering of pine needles, closer to her. But with an expression of petulance she rose.
“I suppose we must look for Buckley,” she observed. Gordon had completely forgotten Buckley Simmons’ presence at the camp meeting. The school-teacher, swaying slimly, led the way over the path to the plateau.
They saw Buckley Simmons at once: he was talking in an excited, angry manner to a small group of men. A gesture was made toward Gordon and his companion; Buckley turned, and his face flushed darkly, Gordon, stood still, Meta Beggs fell behind, as the former made his way toward them. Buckley spoke loudly when he was still an appreciable distance away:
“You were mighty considerate about my dusty throat,” he began with heavy sarcasm; “I ought to have seen at the time that you had it made up between you. This is the second time that you have broken in on me, Makimmon. I’m not a boy any longer. You can’t tread on me. It’s going to stop ... now.”
“There’s nothing for you to get excited about, Buck. Miss Beggs and I took a little stroll while you were away.”
“A ‘little stroll.’” Buckley produced a heavy gold watch, the highly chased cover of which he snapped back. “Over half an hour,” he proclaimed; “you stayed too long this time.”
Gordon was aware of a form at his back. He turned, and saw Tol’able.
“What’s the trouble, Gord?” the latter asked. Two or three others were compactly grouped behind him.
“Why, Buckley’s hot because I walked with Miss Beggs while he took a drink.”
The men about Buckley Simmons closed up. “Don’t let Gordon crowd you down,” they advised their principal; “put it up against him.”
“Haven’t you got enough at home,” Buckley demanded, “without playing around here?”
Anger swiftly rose to Gordon Makimmon’s head. His hand fell and remained close by his side. “Keep your tongue off my home,” he commanded harshly, “or you will get more than a horsewhipping.”
“By God,” Buckley articulated. His face changed from dark to pale, his mouth opened, his eyes were staring. He fumbled desperately in his pocket. Gordon’s hand closed smoothly, instantly, about the handle of his revolver. But, before he could level it, an arm shot out from behind him, and a stone the size of two fists sped like a bullet, striking Buckley Simmons where his hair and forehead joined. Gordon, in a species of shocked curiosity and surprise, clearly saw the stone hit the other. There was a sound like that made by a heel breaking a scum of ice on a frozen road.
Buckley said, “Ah,” half turned, and dropped like a piece of carpet.
The belligerent attitude instantly evaporated from the group behind the stricken man. “Gracious,” some one muttered foolishly. They all joined in a stooping circle about the prostrate figure. It was seen immediately that the skull was broken—a white splinter of bone stood up from a matted surface of blood and hair and dirt. Buckley’s eyelids winked continuously and with great rapidity.
A mingled concern and deep relief swept through Gordon Makimmon. He knew that, had the stone not been thrown, he would have killed Buckley Simmons. He wondered if Tol’able had done him that act of loyalty. It had, probably, fatally wounded its object. He turned with a swift, silent look of inquiry to Tol’able. The other, unmoved, dexterously shifted a mouthful of tobacco. “Whoever did that,” he observed, “could sure throw a rock.”
A crowd gathered swiftly, cautious and murmuring. Simmons was lifted on a horse blanket to the flooring by the counter. There was an outcry for a doctor, but none was present, and it was agreed that the wounded man must be hurried into Greenstream. “He won’t get there alive,” it was freely predicted; “the top of his head is crumbled right off.”
X
Gordon found Meta Beggs on the outskirt of the throng; she was pale but otherwise unshaken. “I was sure you were going to shoot Buckley,” she told him.
“So was I,” he returned grimly.
“Will he die?”
“It looks bad—his head’s cracked. You didn’t see anybody throw that stone!” His voice had more the accent of a command than an inquiry.
“I really didn’t; the men were standing so closely ... nobody saw.”
“That’s good. You’ll drive home with me, for certain.”
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him,” she confided to Gordon in the buggy. She was sitting very close to him. “It would have—upset things.”
“I don’t believe you were a scrap frightened,” he asserted admiringly.
“I wasn’t. I thought how foolish you would be to spoil everything for yourself.”
“I would have gone into the mountains,” he explained; “a hundred men would have kept the law off me. I was a year and a half there, when—when I was younger,” he ended lamely.
“I like that,” she replied, “I understand it. I’ve wanted to murder; but it would have been silly, I would have had to pay too dearly for a passing rage.” There was a menace in her even voice, a cold echo like that from a closed, empty room, that oppressed Gordon unpleasantly.
“I guess you’re not as dangerous as that,” he responded, more lightly. He wondered, unable to decide, if she were consciously pressing her body against him, or if it were merely the jolting of the buggy? They were passing through the valley that led into Greenstream; the sun was lowering behind them, the shadows creeping out. They dropped from the rough, minor forms into the bigger sweep—it was like a great, green bed half filled with a gold flood. Gordon’s horse walked, and, in their slow progress, the stream of light flowing between the ranges changed to a stream of shadow. A miraculous pink rose opened in the east and scattered its glowing petals across the sky. The buggy wound, like an infinitesimal toy, over the darkening road.
He passed his dwelling, a long, irregular roof against the veiled surface of the stream; a light shone from the kitchen window. The streets of the village, folded in warm dusk, were empty; the white columns of the Courthouse glimmered behind the shafts of the trees on the lawn. Supper was in progress at Peterman’s hotel; as Gordon and Meta Beggs left the buggy they heard the rattle of dishes within. She walked a few steps, then stopped, was about to speak, but she saw that Gordon had followed her, and turned and led the way to the steps giving to the gallery above.
Gordon Makimmon followed her without reason, without plan, almost subconsciously. He walked close behind her to where she opened the door to her room: it was grey within, a dim curtain swelled faintly with an unfelt air.
“Black,” he repeated stupidly, “size eight and a half.”
She stepped into the room, and faced him; her lips were parted over a glimmer of teeth. He took her roughly in his arms, and she turned up her face.
“For the stockings,” she said, as he kissed her.
He kissed her again, and she murmured, faintly, “Two pairs.”
It enraged him that she was so collected; her body, pressed against him from knee to shoulder, was without a tremor, her breast was tranquil. She might have been, from her unstudied, total detachment, a fine, flexible statue in his straining embrace, under his eager lips. Suddenly, with no apparent effort, she released herself.
She removed the hat with the blue feather, calmly laid it on the indistinct bed, and moved to the mirror of a small bureau, where her hands glided over her smooth hair.
“Men are so—elementary,” she observed, “and all alike. I wish I could feel what you do,” she turned to Gordon, “just once.”
“What are you made of?” he demanded tensely; “stone?”
“I often wonder.”
She crossed the room to the gallery, where she glanced swiftly about. “You must leave, and I’ll go down to supper. Next Sunday I am going to walk ... in the morning.”
“If you go out by the priest’s,” he suggested, “and turn to the right, you will find a pretty stream; further down there’s an old mill.”
She drew back, waiting for him to descend to the ground below.
Simmons’ clerk was standing on the platform before the store, and Gordon drew up. “How’s Buckley?” he inquired.
“Bad,” the other answered laconically. “They sent to Stenton for help. His head’s cracked. It’s funny,” he commented, “with a hundred people around nobody saw that stone thrown ’tall.”
“It don’t do sometimes to see this and that,” Gordon explained, tightening the reins.
He unhitched the horse in his shedlike stable by the aid of a hand lantern. He was reluctant to go into the house, and he prolonged the unbuckling of the familiar straps, the measuring of feed, beyond all necessity. Outside, he thought he heard General Jackson by the stream, and he stood whistling softly, but only the first notes of the whippoorwills responded. “The night’s just come down all at once,” he said. Finally, with a rigid assumption of indifference covering an uneasy heart, he went in.
Lettice was asleep by the lamp in the sitting room. She looked younger than ever, but there were shadows under her eyes, her mouth was a little drawn as if by the memory of pain. A shawl, he saw, had slipped from her shoulders, and he walked clumsily on the tips of his shoes and rearranged it. Then he sat down and waited for her to wake.
The flame of the lamp was like a section of an orange; it cast a warm, low radiance through the room. His gaze rested on the photograph of Lettice’s mother in her coffin. He imagined that paper effigy of inanimate clay moved, turned its dull head to regard him. “I’m getting old,” he told himself contemptuously, repressing an involuntary start of surprise. His heart rested like a lump of lead in his breast; it oppressed him so that his breathing grew labored. His mind returned to Meta Beggs: coldness like hers was not natural, it was not right. He thought again, as men have vainly of such women since the dawning of consciousness, that it would be stirring to fire her indifference, to ignite a passion in response to his own desire. The memory of her slender, full body, her cool lips, tormented him.
Lettice woke abruptly.
“Gordon!” she cried, in an odd, muffled voice; “you’re always late; your supper is always spoiled.”
“I had my supper,” he hurriedly fabricated, “at Peterman’s. It’s nice in here, Lettice, with you and all the things around. It has a comfortable look. You’re right pretty, Lettice, too.”
The unexpected compliment brought a flush to her cheeks. “I’m not pretty now,” she replied; “I’m all pulled out.” General Jackson ambled into the room, sat between them. “Let’s hear the General sing,” she proposed.
Gordon wound the phonograph, and the distant, metallic voice repeated the undeniable fact that Rip Van Winkle had been unaware of the select pleasures of Coney Island. The dog whimpered, then raised his head in a despairing bay.
A time might come in a man’s life, Gordon Makimmon realized, when this peaceful interior would spell complete happiness.
XI
On Sunday he strolled soon after breakfast in the direction of the priest’s. Merlier was standing at the door to his house. Gordon noted that the other was growing heavier, folds dropped from the corners of his shaven lips, his eyes had retreated in fatty pouches. His gaze was still searchingly keen, but the priest was wearing out. Gordon stopped in response to his silent nod.
“You ought to let up on yourself a little,” he advised.
“Why?” the other briefly queried.
“‘Why?’, so’s you will last longer.”
To this the priest made no reply. A short, awkward silence followed during which Gordon grew restive. “If I looked so glum about Greenstream,” he continued, “I’d move out.” It was as though he had not spoken. “I’d go back where I came from,” he persisted sharply. The priest’s lips moved, formed words:
“‘Che discese da Fiesole ab antico.’”
His imperturbable manner offered Gordon not the slightest opening; and he continued uncomfortably on his way. There was a quality about that thick, black-clad figure which cast a shadow over the cloudless day, it blunted the anticipated pleasure of his meeting with Meta Beggs. There was about Merlier a smell of death like the smell of sooty smoke.
The stream lay shining along its wooded course; the range greenly aflame with new foliage rose into radiant space; flickers hammered on resonant, dead wood. Gordon banished the somber memory of the priest. He was conscious of a sudden excitement, a keenness of response to living like a renewal of youth. He wished that Meta Beggs would appear; his direction to her had been vague; she might easily go astray and miss him. But he saw her, after what seemed an interminable period, leaving the road and crossing the strip of sod that bordered the stream. She had on a white dress that clung to her figure, and a broad, flapping straw hat wound with white. She saw him and waved. The brush rose thickly along the water, but there was a footway at its edge, with occasional, broader reaches of rough sod. In one of the latter she stooped, made a swift movement with the hem of her skirt.
“See,” she smiled; “I said you would like me in them.”
He attempted to catch her in his arms, but she eluded him. “Please,” she protested coolly, “don’t be tiresome.... We must talk.”
He followed her by the devious edge of the stream to the ruined mill. He could see the blurring impress of the black silk stockings through the web of her dress; the dress had shrunk from repeated washing, and drew tightly across her shoulders. She walked lightly and well, and sat with a graceful sweep on a fallen, moldering beam. Beyond them the broad expanse of the mill pond was paved with still shadows; a dust of minute insects swept above the clouded surface. The water ran slowly over the dam, everywhere cushioned with deep moss, and fell with an eternal splatter on the rocks below.
Gordon rolled a cigarette from the muslin bag of Green Goose. “Why do you still smoke that grass?” she demanded curiously. “You could get the best cigars from Cuba.” He explained, and she regarded him impatiently. “Can’t you realize what possibilities you have!”
“I might, with assistance.”
“If you once saw the world! I’ve been reading about Paris, the avenues and cafés and theaters. Why, in the cafés there they drink only champagne and dance all night. The women come with their lovers in little closed carriages, and go back to little closed rooms hung in brocade. They never wear anything but evening clothes, for they are never out but at night—satin gowns with trains and bare shoulders.”
He endeavored to picture himself in such a city, amid such a life, with Meta Beggs. He felt that she would be entirely in place in the little carriages, drinking champagne. “That’s where they eat frogs,” he remarked inanely. In the tensity of her feeling, the bitterness of her longing, her envy, she cursed him for a dull fool. Then, recovering her composure with a struggle:
“I would make a man drunk with pleasure in a place like that. He would be proud of me, and all the other men would hate him; they would all want me.”
“Some would come pretty near getting you, too,” he replied with a flash of penetration; “those with the fastest horses or longest pockets.”
“I would be true to whoever took me there,” she declared; “out of gratitude.”
He drew a deep breath. “What would you say,” he inquired, leaning toward her, “to a trip to—to Richmond? We could be gone the best part of a week.”
She laughed scornfully. “Do you think I am as cheap as that—to be bought over Sunday?” She rose, and stood before him, sharply outlined against the foliage, the water, the momentary, flittering insects, taunting, provocative, sensual.
“Five years ago,” he told her, “if you had tried this foolery, I would have choked you, and thrown what was left in the dam.”
“And now—” she jeered fearlessly.
“It’s different,” he admitted moodily.
It was. Somewhere the lash had been lost from the whip of his desire. He was still eager, tormented by the wish to feel her disdainful mouth against his. The recrudescence of spring burned in his veins; but, at the same time, there was a new reluctance upon his flesh. The inanimate, obese mask of the priest, Lettice’s sleeping countenance faintly stamped with pain, hovered in his consciousness. “It’s different,” he repeated.
“You are losing your hold on pleasure,” she observed critically aloof.
He leaned forward, and grasped her wrist, and, with a slight motion, forced her upon her knees. “If you are pleasure I’m not,” he challenged.
“You are hurting my arm,” she said coldly. His grip tightened, and a small grimace crossed her lips. “Let go,” she demanded; and then a swift passion shrilled her voice. “Let go, you are crushing my wrist. Damn you to hell! if you spoil my wrist I’ll kill you.”
For a moment, as he held her, she reminded Gordon of a venomous snake; he had never seen such a lithe, wicked hatred in any other human being. “You are a gentle object,” he satirized her, loosening his hold.
She rose slowly and stood fingering her wrist. The emotion died from her countenance. “You see,” she explained, “my body is all I have to take me out of this,” she motioned to the slumbering water, the towering range, “and I can’t afford to have it spoiled. You wouldn’t like me if I were lame or crooked. Men don’t. The religious squashes can say all they like about the soul, but a woman’s body is the only really important thing to her. No one bothers about your soul, but they judge your figure across the street.”
“Yours hasn’t done you much good.”
“It will,” she returned somberly, “it must—real lace and wine and ease.” She came very close to him; he could feel the faint jarring of her heart, the moisture of her breath. “And you could get them for me. I would make you mad with sensation.”
He kissed her again and again, crushing her to him. She abandoned herself to his arms, but she was as untouched, as impersonal, as a stuffed woman of cool satin. In the end he voluntarily released her.
“You wouldn’t take fire from a pine knot,” he said unsteadily.
Her deft hands rearranged her hat. “Some day a man will murder me,” she replied in level tones; “perhaps I’ll get a thrill from that.” Her voice grew as cutting as a surgeon’s polished knife. “Please don’t think I’m the kind of woman men take out in the woods and kiss. You may have discovered that I don’t like kissing. I’m going to be honester still—last year, when you were mending the minister’s ice house, and hadn’t a dollar, I wasn’t the smallest bit interested in you; and this year I am.—Not on account of the money itself,” she was careful to add, “but because of you and the money together. Don’t you see—it changed you; it’s perfectly right that it should, and that I should recognize it.”
“That sounds fair enough,” he agreed. “Now the question is, what are we going to do together, you and me and the money?”
“Would you do what I wanted?” she asked at his shoulder.
“Would you?”
“Yes.”
“We might try Richmond.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” she returned hardily; “I know all about those trial trips. Any man I go with has got to go far: I don’t intend to be left at some pokey little way station with everything gone and nothing accomplished.”
“But,” he objected, “a man who went with you could never come back.”
“Back to this wilderness,” she scoffed; “any one should thank God for being taken out of it.”
“I’ve always lived here, my father too, and his before him; and back of that we came from mountains. We’re mountain blood; I don’t know if we could get used to anything else, live down yonder.”
“I’d civilize you,” she promised him.
“Perhaps—” he assented slowly.
Suddenly from beyond the ruin came the stir of a horse moving in harness, the sound stopped and the voices of men grew audible. Instinctively Gordon and Meta Beggs drew behind a standing fragment of wall. Gordon could see, through the displaced, rotting boards, a buggy and two men standing at the side of the road. One, he recognized, was Valentine Simmons; he easily made out the small, alert figure. The other, with his back to the mill, held outspread a sheet of paper. There was something familiar about the carriage of the head, a glimpse of beard, a cigar from which were expelled copious volumes of smoke. Gordon vainly racked his memory for a clue to the latter, elusive personality. He heard Simmons say:
“... by the South Fork entrance ... through the valley.”
The stranger partially turned, and Gordon instantly recalled where he had seen him before—it was the man he had driven from Stenton with the surprising foreknowledge of the County, who had been met by Pompey Hollidew. He replied to Simmons, “Exactly ... timber sidings at the principal depots.”
They were, evidently, discussing a projected road. Gordon subconsciously exclaimed, half aloud, “Railroad!” A swift illumination bathed in complete comprehension the whole affair—the connection, of Simmons, old Pompey’s options and the stranger. This railroad, the coming of which would increase enormously the timber values of Greenstream County, had been the covert reason for Simmons’ desire to purchase the options held by the Hollidew estate; it had been, during Pompey Hollidew’s life, the reason for the acquisition of such extended timber interests. Hollidew, Simmons and Company had joined in a conspiracy to purchase them throughout the county at a nominal sum and reap the benefits of the large enhancement. The death of the former had interrupted that satisfactory scheme; now Valentine Simmons had conceived the plan of gathering all the profit to himself. And, Gordon admitted, he had nearly succeeded ... nearly. A slow smile crossed Gordon Makimmon’s features as he realized what a pleasant conversation he would have with Simmons at the latter’s expense. He had never conceived the possibility of getting the astute storekeeper into such a satisfactory, retaliatory position. He would extract the last penny of profit and enjoyment from the other’s surprise.
The men beyond re-entered the buggy and drove toward the village.
“What is it?” Meta Beggs asked; “you look pleased.”
“Oh, I fell on a little scheme,” he replied evasively; “a trifle ... worth a hundred thousand or more to me.”
Her eyes widened with avidity. “I didn’t know the whole, God forsaken place was worth a thousand,” she remarked. “A hundred thousand,” the mere repetition of that sum brought a new shine into her gaze, instinctively drew her closer to Gordon’s side.
“Just that alone would be enough—” she said, and paused.
He ignored this opening in the anticipated pleasure of his coming interview with Valentine Simmons.
A palpable annoyance took possession of her at Gordon’s absorption. “It must be near dinner at Peterman’s,” she remarked; “on Sunday you’ve got to be on time.”
In response to her suggestion he turned toward the road. They walked back silently until they were opposite the priest’s. “I’d better go on alone,” she decided. Her hands clung to his shoulders and she sought his lips. “Soon again,” she murmured. “Don’t desert me; I am entirely alone except for you.”
She left him and swiftly crossed the green to the road.