When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away in agreat clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they returned no more.
At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .
Cecily in the twilight pressed her face against the window pane. The gaunt branch of a tree waved and pointed across the snow, but the little frozen stream was hidden away.
The child thought that when the boy returned he would still be wonderful.
Randolph Edgar.
The sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from his plate.
“F sharp,” he remarked. “Same pitch as the bell in my shop.”
“How extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!” exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.
“All in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “No, thank you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. I never paint the lily, as father used to say. . . . I’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world with a ‘come again’ always behind me if I hadn’t had something of an ear, would I, now?”
“But accurate to such a degree! I thought one tuned by chords and melodies and—and that sort of thing.”
“Chords! Melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “Of course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. The octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”
“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”
“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “Iwish I’d known. There was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with him about his music.”
“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”
“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor Cartwright!”
“Cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.
“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he began his tale.
What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me thinking about Cartwright.I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . . but I’d better begin at the beginning.
It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.
“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.
When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were, and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.
The Silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to look about as much as we liked.
“There’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “It’s got asthma or something. If you can cure it, I’ll gladly foot the bill. I’m a church-going man when I’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke, “but that organ puts me clean off religion.”
Well, I made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were for it, too. Then I went up to the British commissioner’s, where I was told there was a piano needing attention. Davidson, the commissioner, was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument put into shape. The missionary ladies had suggested that Molly and I stay with them while the Silvershell was in port, so I could put in a tidy bit of work in a day. But there were only twenty white families in the place, and I’d about gone through the work when one afternoon Davidson stopped me as I was going back to the mission, and asked me to step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.
The friend was Cartwright. I shall never forget that first sight of him, not to my dying day. He was standing in the big music room where I’d been working for Davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he turned and gave us such a look!
“Oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come in the door. And then, as Davidson introduced us, he nodded in an offhand sort of way. He was the only man I’ve ever called beautiful. Beautiful was the only word to describe him. “Golden lads,”—I once heard anactor spout about them at a play, and now, when I remember that expression, I think of Cartwright. He was a golden lad, for all his haunted, unhappy face.
“I’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a moment. “Rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me in the morning I’ll make it worth your while.”
“If it isn’t too far away,” I said. “I’m only stopping here while the Silvershell is in port.”
“Not so far,” says Cartwright. “I could have you back here in three or four days. And I’ll make it worth your while.” In spite of his off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.
Of course I said I’d go, and then Cartwright nodded and said something about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.
“But he never told me what was needed for the piano,” I said to Davidson.
“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been touched in ten years.”
“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”
“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone. He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and Charlotte had been singing together.”
“Was Charlotte his wife?”
“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know. They are expected back from England almost any day now.”
Davidson’s face had gone quite red at themention of the girl’s name, and all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright, too, was preparing.
“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then. She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”
As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and went back to tell Molly about my new job.
I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore,cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.
He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.
Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.
“Wonderful pitch!” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.
“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.
About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a groveof breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.
“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early start this morning.”
I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.
“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.
Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.
“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.
“Just a parrot,” Cartwright said. “You’ve upset her nest, you see. Be careful when you lift the lid. There may be centipedes inside.”
“If you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, I’ll see to the inside,” I said. “I should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to nest in, sir.
“It seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little. “I wish I could explain—”
He caught himself up, and I answered never a word, but began examining the piano. It was a Broadwood grand, but the state it was in! I’d hard work not to give him a further piece of my mind.
For three days I worked at the poor thing. Hammers eaten off by the white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing really in shape but the sounding board. And all the time I was working the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the point, and I kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much I’d have to tell Molly when I got back.
Now and again Cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. He stopped quite a time the third morning. I was busy tuning and hadn’t much to say, but gradually he came nearer.
“How’s it coming on?” he asked.
“All in shape but one string,” I said. “Try the tone of it, sir.”
“I mustn’t touch it, I mustn’t touch it,” he saysto himself, but all the time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. He put out his hand and struck B flat octave.
“The upper B is mute!” he cries.
I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to putting another in.
“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”
I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.
“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”
He spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.
That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and Cartwright had been great friends.
“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”
“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”
“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”
I waited, and after a little he went on.
“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.
“Then I came out to Taku, and I met Lulukuila. She was beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. She made other women look clumsy beside her. She stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. Those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. I can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. And so I married her.”
Cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. After a while he switched off on another tack.
“Her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. Those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and I thought I’d found happiness at last. I liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. She would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. I sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. I thought I’d teach her the songs Charlotte and I used to sing together.
“But she hated the piano,” Cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “I suppose I was rather a fool over it at first. I was so hungry for familiar music. Lulukuila couldn’t bear the music I’d grown up with. It brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. Octaves, those she’d listen to. Once when I filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. I remember yet how she looked.
“‘You are drawn by the many voices,’ she said. ‘There should, be only one for you.’
“She went off to the pavilion then, and when I went to find her she was singing, following that sound the surf made on the reefs. The perfection of her pitch made me shiver. I began to hate it then. I saw that Lulukuila was going to destroy my pleasure in the music I had loved. She was robbing me—”
I don’t believe Cartwright was talking to any one in particular by this time. His voice dropped, and I missed a lot till I heard him mention his cousin. He stopped then, and looked at me for the first time.
“My uncle threw me over when I married Lulukuila,” he said, “but when my cousin Charlotte came out from England she made her father come over with her. She brought Davidson too—good sort, Davidson.
“I must have been homesick, for the sight of them seemed to wake me from a nightmare. I remember we were very jolly at dinner. Afterward Charlotte and I sang. I was thinking how good it was to hear the music of home again, when I caught sight of Lulukuila’s face in a shaft of light that reached out to where the rest weresitting. Her face was white, and her teeth were biting her lip.
“Charlotte stopped playing just then, and asked me why I had broken into the octave. The chord, she said, was so much prettier. I couldn’t tell her that it was Lulukuila’s interval haunting me. I hadn’t even known I was singing an octave,” Cartwright added with a sudden laugh. Then he went on.
“We didn’t sing any more, but went out to join the others. Lulukuila wasn’t there. I was just asking Davidson where she had gone, when I heard a splash down by the lagoon. All in a flash I remembered how her face had looked in the lamplight, and I started off down the path. . . . I got there too late.”
After a while he began muttering in a disconnected sort of way. “She had her way. I’ve never touched the piano since. Surely I have the right now, though, now Charlotte’s coming back—a little happiness.”
“That’s the thing to think of now, sir,” I says, wondering if I should call his man or leave him to talk himself out. “You weren’t to blame for what happened. Think of your cousin now.”
“My cousin, yes,” Cartwright murmured. He pulled himself up with a sharp breath.
“I’m afraid I’ve been talking an uncommon lot,” he said in his ordinary tone. “It’s late. You must be wanting to turn in.”
We commented on the sultriness of the night as we parted. The stars were hidden in a sort of murk, and the air had grown so still that the beetles bumping against the banana leaves overhead startled one like the crack of artillery.
Inside I found Simmons, Cartwright’s servant, tapping the barometer.
“It’s fallen uncommonly fast,” Simmons said to me. “Just as it did before the hurricane five years ago.
“The hurricane!” I said. “Did it do much damage?”
“Not to speak of,” Simmons said. “Some of the native huts were swept away when the water backed up into the lagoon, but the people had time to get up here. There’s no saying what might have happened if the water had come up two feet higher.”
“I hope there isn’t going to be a hurricane this time,” I said, thinking of Molly.
“I hope so, I’m sure,” says Simmons, in an undertaker’s voice.
It took more than a falling barometer to put me off sleep those days, and I was off sounder than usual that night. I waked at last in a bedlam of sound, wailing of wind, cracking of branches, and the thunder of surf from the barrier reef.
“It’s the hurricane that owl Simmons was wishing on us,” I thought. I struck a match to find my clothes, but a gust of wind puffed it out. I was just trying for the third time, when Simmons came in, carrying one of the two ship’s lanterns Cartwright kept by the outer door.
“Do you know where Mr. Cartwright is?” Simmons says.
“I? No. Isn’t he in bed?”
Simmons shook his head. “I’m afraid he’s gone down to the pavilion. He began to worry about the piano. I see the other lantern’s gone. I must go after him.”
“I’ll come with you, then,” I said. “Just hold the light while I find my clothes.”
Ordinarily that Yorkshire face of Simmons had no more expression than a granite slab, but he looked human enough now. If he cared for any earthly creature it was Cartwright. I’d not been in the house three days without finding that out.
I had a start as we passed through the big room, for the floor was covered with figures stretched out like corpses on the mats. “From the huts on the beach,” Simmons explained. “That’s what makes me think it’s going to be a bad storm.”
He braced himself to hold the door open for me, and added in a sudden shout as the roar of the storm came about us: “A little harder than last time, and the pavilion would go.”
The path to the pavilion ran just above the coral shingle along the foot of the ridge. Ordinarily it was ten feet above high tide, but as we struggled on, hugging the bank to keep from being blown flat by the wind, I could catch a glimpse of creaming, sullen-looking water not two yards away. Slipping up quietly it was, and the soundlessness of its rising was more uncanny than all the bustle and roar on the reefs outside.
We had a struggle to get on, and Simmons hung on to me to keep me from being blown into the lagoon. I began to wish I hadn’t come, and I thought of the peaceful mission house in Taku and of Molly.
“Mr. Cartwright’s there,” Simmons says suddenly in my ear. “I see his light. Hang tight. The wind’s worse out here.”
And it was. An awful clap came, driving us to our knees. I saw a huge bulk crash down between us and the pavilion. The light disappeared.
“The breadfruit tree,” said Simmons, in a hoarse voice. He clawed his way over the fallen branches and I managed to follow, shivering to think of what a misstep would do for me. At last we made out Cartwright struggling in the wreckage brought down by the fallen tree.
“You, Simmons?” he cried. “Quick! Give a hand with this piano. We must get it to higher ground.”
His voice sounded sane enough, but it was the speech of a crazy man. The only path up the ridge was a mere goat trail, fully exposed to the wind. And Cartwright was suggesting our carrying the piano up that! Simmons jerked his lantern up to Cartwright’s face. There was wildness with a vengeance. But my word! How beautiful he looked with his fair, tossed hair, and his eyes purple black with excitement.
“It’s you we’ve come for, sir,” Simmons says to him. “The water’s backing up fast. There’s no time to lose.”
“We must save the piano first,” Cartwright says insistently. A lull had fallen, and his voice sounded very clear. Simmons made a desperate gesture.
“It’s gathering for worse,” he muttered. I took a hand.
“If that wind comes up again we’ll have to scramble to save our skins,” I shouted. “It isn’t humanly possible for us to move the piano. Come, sir, while there’s time!”
“And desert it again?” he asks with a strange little smile. “You’re asking too much of me, old chap. What about Charlotte?”
“She won’t care a hang about the piano!” I could have stamped my foot at him. “It’s youshe’ll be worrying about. Don’t be an ass.” That shows how beyond myself I was, that I could speak to him that way. A long, ominous roll shook the silence.
“It’s the surf coming over the reefs,” Simmons says in a hushed voice.
“By Jove, you’re right!” Cartwright exclaims, throwing back his head. His voice was boyish and energetic. “Come on, we must make a dash for it.” And jerking up the lantern he fairly herded us through the tangle to the cliff.
There the gale broke loose on us again. We lay flat on our faces, clinging for dear life to the stems of the stout little pandanus palms. It was like a beast, that wind. It sucked the breath from our mouths, it pounded us and shrieked at us and mocked us till we were half dead from the sheer, cruel force of it. We could scarcely think. Once I had a vision of those huddled figures on the mats, and wondered if the house was still standing, and once I thought of Molly, and hoped she was saying a prayer for me. Then all thought was wiped out as, with a shaking of the very cliff, the surf came racing into the lagoon, sending the spray up fifty feet, and drenching us where we lay.
“The piano!” Cartwright shouted, struggling to get up. Simmons hauled him down, crying to him that it was no use to think of the piano. Cartwright staved quiet a moment till another of those uncanny silences fell.
“Now we can go down,” Cartwright said pleadingly. “I can’t lose my chance of happiness again. The piano—”
The words died on his lips. Through the thunder of the surf came a single long-drawn note, clear and unearthly sweet.
“B flat,” I said, scarcely knowing that I spoke. Cartwright gave a wild laugh.
“You hear it? The voice from the reefs. Why doesn’t Lulukuila answer?”
Well, I can only tell you what happened next, and you may believe it or not. From below us there came another note, making a perfect octave. Never before or since have I heard anything so exquisite or so horrible. Then there was a hideous discord—and silence.
“Lulukuila!” Cartwright cried. “She is taking it from me—my only chance of happiness—”
And before we could stop him he was gone.
We tried to follow him, but the wind caught us again at the edge of the ridge. I’d have been over and lost if it hadn’t been for Simmons. I think I must have fainted from the shock of it. There’s a blank about there, though the rest of the night seemed centuries long.
The wind stopped at sunrise, and we made our way home along the ridge, looking down on a beach swept clean of every human mark, pavilion, grove, native huts and all. The house was still standing, but in a wreck of fallen branches and torn lianas. Scared servants and ashen-faced women and children came out to meet us, and began asking for their master. Simmons, granite faced as ever, did not answer them, but pushed on down to the beach.
Cartwright had come home ahead of us. He was lying on the shore, unscarred except for a faint streak of blue across one temple. He looked beautiful as some sleeping creature of the sea. The wreck of the piano was just above him. Simmons’ composure gave way when he saw that.
“You’ve broken the thing he loved, and you’vekilled him, too. I hope you’re satisfied at last!” he snarled, shaking his fist at the lagoon. I wondered if he was talking to Lulukuila. It was a terrifying outburst—from a man like Simmons.
Next morning they came over from Taku to look for us. The sea was smiling as ever, and the little launch came dancing over the rose and amethyst water as if there never had been a storm to ruffle it. I caught sight of Molly first, then I noticed another woman, sitting between her and Davidson. As she leaned forward to search the shore I was startled with the likeness of her face to Cartwright’s. Yet there was a difference. Her beauty was gracious and human, and—well, comfortable is the only word I can think of for it.
As they came near the beach she saw just Simmons and me and the staring natives. She cried out sharply and swayed a little. I saw Davidson put his arm out as if he would shield her from a blow. Faithful fellow, Davidson, and he got his reward at last.
It was Cartwright’s Charlotte, and Cartwright was not there to meet her. Lulukuila had seen to that.
Margaret Adelaide Wilson.
It was the Feast of the Assumption, and the archbishop, as he left his palace and stepped into the summer sunlight, breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for the brilliance that glowed about him. For, during the mass which was about to be celebrated in the great cathedral, the passion of his life, one of the most impressive moments occurred when the sun shot its rays with pure and dazzling radiance for the first time into the middle of the apse. With exact calculation the architect had arranged that this took place on the fête day of St. Remi, the patron saint of Rheims, and when the day was overcast or rain obscured the sun it seemed to the archbishop that the Almighty was expressing His displeasure of some negligence or wrongful act on the part of the guardian of this, to him, most precious and wonderful trust in the world.
But today the sun’s effulgence surpassed in warmth and splendor that of any August fifteenth in the archbishop’s memory, and brought into his heart an intense calm and peace which even the knowledge that German guns were despoiling Belgium, not many leagues away, could not entirely dispel. Nevertheless, the remembrance cast a shadow over the spirituality of his broad brow, and his lips moved in silent supplication for the suffering inhabitants, and that the onward march of the invaders would be stayed before their presence desecrated the sacred soil of France.
In rapt contemplation he stood, kindliness and benevolence radiating from his mild face, crowned with its silver halo of hair. His large, gentle eyes wandered over the massive pile raising its lofty steeples in eloquent testimony to the omnipotence of God; its slender spires, pointed portals, and lancet windows indicating the heights to which the thoughts and lives of men must reach before perfection can be attained.
When the archbishop emerged from the sacristy at the end of the long procession of choir, acolytes and coped priests, and entered the cathedral, the voice of the mighty organ was rolling through the edifice in rushing waves of melody, which ebbed and flowed in and out among the great columns in a wealth of harmonics, whose exquisite beauty, as they broke around him, caused a band to tighten about the old man’s throat.
The crossing was filled with a throng of devout worshippers whose faces wore a look of expectancy, for France, la belle France, was threatened by a danger greater than even the oldest among them could recall. War had always been a horror, but today it transcended, in the vague reports that reached them from stricken Belgium, the worst the most imaginative of them could conceive, and the thought haunted them, in spite of their faith that the Blessed Virgin would not permit such a calamity to befall France, that notwithstanding their entreaties, the hand of the Hun might descend on her as it had on her equally innocent and unprovoking neighbor.
The procession wound slowly to its place in the choir, and the organ broke into the great, swelling chords of Gounod’s mass, Mors et Vita. Themusic, inspired by the sublime grandeur of the sanctuary where it had partly been composed, proclaimed an unshakable faith in the majesty and power of the Almighty, whose protecting arm stands between His children and harm. Gradually the tense look of alarm on the faces of the congregation changed to the serenity of souls in the presence of God.
The organ’s voice subsided to a breath, wafted in and out among the incense-filled recesses of the cathedral like the rustling of angels’ wings, and the deep-toned peal of the great cathedral bell rang through the tense stillness. All at once a shaft of pure radiance shot into the center of the apse from the Angel’s Spire. Straight as a dart it descended until it found the jeweled arms of the cross. Here it rested, throwing out myriad rays of effulgence, as if through them the Spirit of the Founder of their faith was renewing His promises of salvation to His flock.
A breathless hush rested on the congregation until, in an ecstasy of triumph, the organ burst once more into a pæan of praise. The procession receded into the remote spaces of the cathedral, and the worshippers passed out into the sunlit square. As they walked by the statue of Joan of Arc, who sits on her charger before the cathedral, many paused and spoke in low, reverent tones of the sacrifice she had made for France, and wondered if the same spirit of loyalty would spring into life if the land of their adoration stood in need of defense.
Through the great western rose window of the cathedral the sun was casting quivering masses of rubies, topazes, emeralds, sapphires and amethyststo the floor below, where they lay in gorgeous profusion, melting one into the other in extravagant richness of beauty.
An old man stood in contemplation of the splendor of that mighty work of the ages which for a century and a half had been the especial care of his forefathers, and to which end, with reverent preparation, each succeeding generation of his family had been trained. To the oldvitrierthe windows in the sacred structure were not only a holy trust, but a prized heritage, each separate particle to be watched and studied, as a mother guards its offspring from possible injury, and passed on to posterity in as perfect a condition as it was received.
So deep was his absorption in the magnificence of the spectacle before him that he did not notice the approaching step of the archbishop. The ecclesiastic laid his hand on Monneuze’s shoulder.
“Exquisite, is it not,mon vieux?” he asked in his resonant voice. “I have never seen the colors more superb than they are this afternoon.”
The old glass-maker started, and turned toward him. The expression of ecstatic wonder still lingered on his lined face, from which, behind his heavy glasses, peered eyes round and childlike in their unquestioning trust.
“The beauty of it passes belief, Monseigneur,” he murmured fervently. “Oh, that I knew the art of reproducing those marvelous colors! It is the sorrow of my life that, try as I may, I can never duplicate the depth, the richness—” he shook his head dejectedly, and fixed his eyes once more on the flaming window.
“Ah, Jean,” answered the archbishop a littlesadly. “So it is with all of us; no matter how hard we strive, we never reach the goal to which we are pressing. Our attainments are ever a disappointment to us. We can only labor on, and live in the hope that on the Last Day, when we see our endeavors through the eyes of the Blessed Redeemer, we may find that His estimate of them, graded on the knowledge of our limitations, will be higher than ours. It may be that our efforts and the sincerity of our motives will be judged instead of the results we were able to achieve. We must remember that no man can do bigger things than his capacity allows.”
Thevitrierdid not reply. His eyes wavered from the magnificence above him to the spiritualized countenance at his side. It surprised him that the archbishop, renowned alike for his piety and good works, should speak so slightingly of his life.
The ecclesiastic had turned and was gazing at the representation of the Almighty on the great rose window of the south transept. Something of the sublimity of the conception and execution of the masterpiece was reflected on his face, over which still hovered an expression of humility. His eyes left the window and swept up the vast stretches of the cathedral, over mighty pillars, great misty aisles, glorious choir, its beauty half shrouded in the encroaching shadows, until they reached the very penetralia of the Lady Chapel.
“Ah, Jean,” he went on in a deep, vibrant voice, “great is God’s goodness that He has seen fit to confide this marvelous structure to our keeping. May we so live that, when we are called to give an accounting of our stewardship, we may hear the wondrous words: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’”
The lips of the agedvitriermoved in a murmured “Amen,” and they watched in silence the sun, as it threw its dying rays through the window to their feet. They fell in a great splash of red, like blood, on the pavement, and a shudder shook the archbishop’s frame. He passed his hand over his forehead, and the shadow that had clouded his face in the morning settled once more on it. Bidding the old glass-painter good night, he moved up the dusky nave.
Days and weeks slipped by, and the gray waves of the invaders rolled nearer to Rheims. Notwithstanding the heroic, almost superhuman, efforts of her sons, the vandals swept across her borders into France, ravishing, desecrating, destroying in a frenzy of frightfulness so terrible that the world, shocked beyond belief, stood aghast and incredulous at the reports that reached it.
The archbishop of Rheims, with others who believed that there was good in the worst of men, at first resolutely declined to credit the rumors that reached him. But when, at last, driven before the attacking force, the refugees, with terror-stricken faces, came breathlessly into the city, the mothers clutching their babies to their breasts, with little tots scarce able to toddle clinging to their skirts and, throwing themselves on his mercy, recounted with white lips, in a dull monotone, the horrors that had befallen them and theirs, the hopeful trust in the old priest’s face turned into a crushed look of sadness as the knowledge came home to him that his faith in man was an illusion of which, at the end of his life, he was to be bereaved.
He lent such aid as lay in his power to the stricken peasants, and when the wounded, friendand foe, were brought in and, overflowing hospital and private dwelling, still clamored for succor, he threw open the great sanctuary to the Germans with the thought that here they would at least be safe from the shells that were beginning to fall on the outlying districts of the city.
Then one night, when the foreboding chill of autumn had replaced summer’s golden warmth, the archbishop was awakened by a noise, apparently in his bedroom, which shook the house to its foundations. He rose hurriedly and, going to the window, saw that the east was ablaze with light. Although the dawn was approaching, he realized that the refulgence that flared across the horizon was man-made, for the rumble of mighty guns which, when he had retired the night before, had been louder and more resonant than before, had risen to a threatening roar that forced a sickening sense of impotence upon him.
Startled by the sudden proximity of the enemy, the archbishop dressed hurriedly and made his way to the Square, already half filled with people. An old woman approached him and, with blanched face, asked whether he thought the city would be shelled and destroyed, as were the Belgian towns. He shook his head despairingly, and his lips framed the words:
“God forbid!”
As she turned away he prayed fervently that, even though the pillaging hordes might, in their fury against the inhabitants, devastate the city, the fact that they claimed the same God as their Savior to whose glory the cathedral had been erected would prove its safeguard and protection. But, even as he prayed, a great bomb blazed a trailthrough the gray light, and hurled itself on the roof of the sacred edifice. It exploded with concentrated fury, tearing off great pieces of the roof and casting them at his feet.
“They’ve found the range!” excitedly exclaimed a man who stood near the archbishop. “Can it be possible that they intend to destroy the cathedral?”
The archbishop was staring with incredulous eyes at the gaping wound the shot had made.
“No,” he declared firmly, without removing his eyes. “It is not possible. This injury is an unfortunate mistake. Sacred edifices are protected by human and moral laws, and, besides, the Cathedral of Rheims, because of its perfection, belongs to all time and all peoples. No one destroys his own heritage.”
Nevertheless, the remembrance of the destruction of Louvain and the desecration of many churches by the Germans since their treacherous entrance into Belgium, when they cast aside men’s faith in their honor, seared itself across his mind. Their acts had disproved their vaunted belief in God which, had it existed, would have shown itself in a reverent solicitude for His dwelling place.
The words had hardly left his lips when a shower of explosives fell on and about the massive structure, hewing out huge lumps of the masonry, which descended in a deluge of stone on the roofs of the adjacent houses.
A glare of light flared behind the great rose-window, throwing for the last time a blaze of glory into the horror-stricken faces below; then it burst into a thousand fragments that shivered to pieces on the pavement of the Square.
Surrounded by the gleaming bits of imprisonedsunshine, Jean Monneuze gazed with wide, unbelieving eyes at the yawning space in the façade. The thought took shape in his mind that this act of profanation could not be true, that it must be some hideous nightmare at which he would scoff in the morning, and he prayed aloud that the awakening would be soon, that he might be relieved of the torture he was undergoing. A voice at his elbow roused him.
“May God curse the Kaiser, and the rest of his breed, for this sacrilege!”
The oldvitrierturned quickly, the fury of a mother for her ravished young in his working face. “Amen!” he exclaimed harshly.
A group of people near him parted, and out of it Jean saw the archbishop slowly advance. The look of intense suffering on his face had driven away the peace that formerly rested there, but his countenance was untinged by venom or desire for revenge. His sunken eyes met the glass-maker’s, and Jean, a sob clutching at his throat, fell on his knees and began gathering up the gems of shattered glass that lay at his feet. He rose as the archbishop reached him, and held out the fragments to him. For a moment they gazed into each other’s eyes without speaking, then a wistful little smile flitted across the archbishop’s face.
“The Lord hath given—the Lord hath taken away.” There was a pause while he waited for the response; but the oldvitrier’schin had sunk on his breast, and his eyes, swimming with tears, were fastened on the gleaming bits of glass. Once more the archbishop’s voice fell on his ears:
“Blessed be the name of the Lord.” There was an accent of surprised reproach in the patienttones, but only pity shone on the gentle countenance as he noted the quivering face of the old man who, turning abruptly away, disappeared into the crowd.
A chorus of voices rose shrilly above the shrieking of the shells:
“The roof is on fire! It’s burning!”
The words galvanized the archbishop into action.
“The wounded!” he exclaimed. “They will perish if they remain where they are!”
“Let ’em!” retorted a thick-setouvrier. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. “They deserve to die, and they’re not fit to live!” He turned brusquely away, and stared with sullen eyes at the smoking roof from which jets of flame were spurting.
A look of anguish crept over the archbishop’s face. Could it be that his flock had caught so little of the spirit of his teaching that, when it was put to the test, it collapsed as the mighty edifice was crumbling under the demolishing shells? If this were so, it explained the destruction of the cathedral as the retribution for the failure of his ministry. His life work, as well as his life trust, was disintegrating before his eyes. Even Jean Monneuze, the spirituality of whose life, in daily contact with the inspiring sanctuary they both adored, had faltered under the supreme test, and if Jean, for whom he would have vouched under all circumstances, would succumb, how could he expect that the others, with so incomparably less sustaining spiritual strength in their lives, would respond to the call. The bitterness of Gethsemane fell on him, and his face, lighted by the glare from the burning structure, was drawn with pain.
A shell hurtled through the air, and fell against the portal. Rending from its place the head of the Angel with the Smile, it flung it into the Square. Angry mutterings rose from the crowd as theouvrierpicked up the head and held it aloft for every one to see.
The archbishop stepped up on the base of the pedestal of the statue to the Maid of Orleans. He raised his hand impressively.
“My children,” he began in a voice tremulous with emotion. “The Master admonishes us to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us, to pray for them that despitefully use us and persecute us. If we do good only to those who love us, how much better are we than the heathen? Did you not see that, despite its destruction, the Angel of Rheims smiled on?” He spread out his arms in an agony of entreaty. “Oh my children,” he pleaded, “do not fail me now!”
The rays of the rising sun shone on his face and illumined it with unearthly radiance. The people stood spellbound before him.
Once more he raised his hand and, pointing to the burning cathedral, cried in a resonant voice that rang like a clarion:
“The wounded! Who helps me rescue them?”
Still that tense silence hung over the motionless throng which the crackling of the flames, and the moaning and singing of death as it whistled through the air, only served to accentuate.
The oldvitrierelbowed his way through the crowd and, laying his hand on the base of the statue, said in a clear, loud voice:
“Monseigneur, I will assist.”
In the uncertain light the two old men stoodscanning the quivering, upturned faces. Then a sudden change swept over the mass.
“Au secours!Au secours!” The voice of the crowd rose as from one man in a cry, increasing in volume with each repetition until, in the archbishop’s ears, it sounded like a shout of victory. The men turned, and surged toward the entrance of the cathedral.
The archbishop’s face went white, and he grasped the spurred foot of the Maid for support. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved spasmodically. Then they parted in a smile of such celestial beauty that the oldvitrier, standing at his feet, averted his eye as though unable to bear the sight.
The large central door of the cathedral swung open, and four men, carrying a litter on which lay a gray, motionless form, emerged. They were followed by others in what seemed an endless procession, gently bearing their burdens through the showers of flying pieces of granite statuary and structure stone which the shells were cleaving from the façade.
The flames that were devouring the roof rose in a dull roar; a great bomb crashed through the hallowed walls, and fell on the palace, where it exploded with terrific force.
The archbishop looked silently at the ruin of his home, then he concentrated his attention on the stream of wounded still flowing from the mutilated pile, and directed and guided the movements of the rescuers. When the last of the sufferers had been removed to a place of safety, he stepped down from the pedestal and, entering a little house on the other side of the Square, mounted the stairs until he reached a small room which faced the east.
He entered and, softly closing the door, walked to the window, from which the glass had fallen. Kneeling down in the chill morning air he gazed out at the blackened, smoking husk, his soul in his eyes, as one kneels by the bedside of all that life holds dear, waiting with bated breath for the final dissolution of soul from body with the dull knowledge that, with the passing of that spirit, the light of the world is extinguished.
Still he watches, noting day by day the destruction by wanton shells of one of man’s most glorious tributes to God, ever with the patient look of suffering on his face, as though the prayer from ceaseless repetition had crystallized on his brain:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
Emily W. Scott.
The Trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant, far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.
This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanillafinca, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof thatleaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiledsala, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.
With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.
Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country.
Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still, I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents abean to three and a half), leaving England at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.
The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! Neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. How could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?
Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”
Fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, “come into some money.” In the United States, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. But in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.
Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It neverseemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffeefincaso much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.
He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get something to do. But there was really nothing in Mexico he could do. He was splendidly strong, and, in the United States, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t.
There was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh, because he did not know Spanish. It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish. To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.
When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, andditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo.
Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with mymozoat an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on themozo’smule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village.
He put me up not only that night, but as mymozodidn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.
In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.
They had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh womenhad them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.
Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on theasoleadero, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.
From the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.
In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphry Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were apage, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours With the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.
Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous littlerodadorasthat stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.
“We love to drink tea in the dingle-dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the dingle-dangle I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam and all the rest of it. But, try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina and I walked over to inspect theasoleaderoand washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.
With most English speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated littleasoleadero, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “GladstoneBags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.
To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”
The best place for haberdashery, in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.
“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.
“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there wasalso in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.
The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. Water fell on the roof like so much lead, and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the north wing’s blurred window the writhing banana trees of the dingle-dangle looked like strange things one sees in an aquarium.
As soon as I could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the Trawnbeigh ideal—I went into thesala, where the dinner table was already set with a really heartrending attempt at splendor. I have said that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to “keep it up,” a window in the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen, and at one end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress coat, his trousers rolled up half way to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—be-bangled,be-cameoed, be-plumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on thebrassero.