"Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, "She came through a moment ago, saying, 'Where'sArnold?' and went out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once more rose plaintively.
The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian."
Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.
The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath.
Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning ofAm Meer. Sylvia sat, passive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head….
When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing, did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.
When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as harmoniously as the music…. "Do you know what I wish you would do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think about you…."
"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.
"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly, "I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think about her."
A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"
"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "Honor!Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold. She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In any case, it was absurd to think ofyoufor Arnold. It merely shows how driven poor Victoria was!"
Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh,Ilike Arnold very much. I always have. There's something … something sort oftouchingabout Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much … one kind of 'liking.'"
"Of course you like him," assented the older man, who had been watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not base—and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you had cared to waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him by a single hair. But then, everybody 'likes' you."
"Old Mr. Sommerville doesn't!" said Sylvia, on an impulse.
Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers together with exquisite precision. "So you add second sight to your other accomplishments! How in the world could a girl of your age have the experience and intuition to feel that? Old Sommerville passes for a great admirer of yours. You won't, I hope, go so uncannily far in your omniscience as to pretend to knowwhyhe doesn't like you?"
"No, I won't," said Sylvia, "because I haven't the very faintest idea.Have you?"
"I know exactly why. It's connected with one of the old gentleman's eccentricities. He's afraid of you on account of his precious nephew."
"I didn't know hehada nephew." Sylvia was immensely astonished.
"Well, he has, and he bows down and worships him, as he does his granddaughter. You see how he adores Molly. It's nice of the old fellow, the cult he has for his descendants, but occasionally inconvenient for innocent bystanders. He thinks everybody wants to make off with his young folks. You and I are fellow-suspects. Haven't you felt him wish he could strike me dead, when Molly makes tea for me, or turns over music as I play?" He laughed a little, a gentle, kind, indulgent laugh. "Molly!" he said, as if his point were more than elucidated by the mere mention of her name.
Sylvia intimated with a laugh that her point was clearer yet in that she had no name to mention. "But I never saw his nephew. I never even heard of him until this minute."
"No, and very probably never will see him. He's very seldom here. And if you did see him, you wouldn't like him—he's an eccentric of the worst brand," said Morrison tranquilly. "But monomanias need no foundation in fact—" He broke off abruptly to say: "Is this all another proof of your diabolical cleverness? I started in to hear something about yourself, and here I find myself talking about everything else in the world."
"I'm not clever," said Sylvia, hoping to be contradicted.
"Well, you're a great deal too nice to beconsciouslyso," admitted Morrison. "See here," he went on, "it's evident that you're more than a match for me at this game. Suppose we strike a bargain. You introduce yourself to me and I'll do the same by you. Isn't it quite the most fantastic of all the bizarreries of human intercourse that an 'introduction' to a fellow-being consists in being informed of his name,—quite the most unimportant, fortuitous thing about him?"
Sylvia considered. "What do you want to know?" she asked finally.
"Well, I'dliketo know everything," said the man gaily. "My curiosity has been aroused to an almost unappeasable pitch. But of course I'll take any information you feel like doling out. In the first place,how, coming from such a …" He checked himself and changed the form of his question: "I overheard you speaking to Victoria's maid, and I've been lying awake nights ever since, wondering how it happened that you speak French with so pure an accent."
"Oh, that's simple! Professor and Madame La Rue are old friends of the family and I've spent a lot of time with them. And then, of course, French is another mother-language for Father. He and Aunt Victoria were brought up in Paris, you know."
Morrison sighed. "Isn't it strange how all the miracles evaporate into mere chemical reactions when you once investigate! All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano—the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards. It's astonishing to hear anybody of your crude youth playing Bach at all—and then to hear it played right—and afterwards to hear a modern givenhisright note…."
Sylvia was perfectly aware that she was being flattered, and she was immensely enjoying it. She became more animated, and the peculiar sparkle of her face more spirited. "Oh, that's old Reinhardt, my music teacher. He would take all the skin off my knuckles if I played a Bach gigue the least bit like that Arlésienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous classicist."
"Isn't it," inquired Morrison, phrasing his question carefully, "isn't it, with no disrespect to La Chance intended, isn't it rather unusually good fortune for a smallish Western city to own a real musician?"
"Well, La Chance bears up bravely under its good fortune," said Sylvia dryly. "Old Mr. Reinhardt isn't exactly a prime favorite there. He's a terribly beery old man, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve. Our house was the only respectable one in town that he could go into. But then, our house isn't so very respectable. It has its advantages, not being so very respectable, though it 'most killed me as a young girl to feel us so. But I certainly have a choice gallery of queer folks in my acquaintance, and I have the queerest hodge-podge of scraps of things learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindström. She's a Swedish old maid who does uplift work among the negroes—isn't that a weird combination? You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically—save the mark!—from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old cousin of Mother's who hangs round the house more or less."
"I begin to gather," surmised Morrison, "that you must have a remarkable father and mother. What aretheylike?"
"Well," said Sylvia thoughtfully, "Mother's the bravest thing you ever saw. She's not afraid ofanything! I don't mean cows, or the house-afire, or mice, or such foolishness. I mean life and death, and sickness and poverty and fear…."
Morrison nodded his head understandingly, a fine light of appreciation in his eyes, "Not to be afraid of fear—that's splendid."
Sylvia went on to particularize. "When any of us are sick—it's my little brother Lawrence who is mostly—Judith and I are always well—Father just goes all to pieces, he gets so frightened. But Mother stiffens her back andmakeseverything in the house go on just as usual, very quiet, very calm. She holds everything togethertight. She says it's sneaking and cowardly if you're going to accept life at all, not to acceptallof it—the sour with the sweet—and not whimper."
"Very fine,—very fine! Possibly a very small bit … grim?" commentedMorrison, with a rising inflection.
"Oh, perhaps, a little!" agreed Sylvia, as if it did not matter; "butI can't give you any idea of Mother. She's—she's justgreat! Andyet I couldn't live like her, without wanting to smash everything up.She's somebody that Seneca would have liked."
"And your father?" queried Morrison.
"Oh, he's great too—dear Father—but so different! He and Mother between them have just about all the varieties of human nature that are worth while! Father's red-headed (though it's mostly gray now), and quick, and blustering, and awfully clever, and just adored by his students, and talks every minute, and apparently does all the deciding, and yet … he couldn't draw the breath of life without Mother; and when it comes right down todoinganything, what he always does is what he knows will come up to her standard."
Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. Go on, go on!"
Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"—she flamed out suddenly as at some long-hoarded grievance—"I was brought up in a moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being transplanted into real earth in the real world."
Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years."
"Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks! And now I find thatI'mreal folks! I can't help it. You are as youare, you know. They kept representing to me always that thebestpleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks—music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine novel—and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden."
No old associate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those 'best pleasures'?"
"Of course you don't understand anything of the sort," said Sylvia very earnestly. "They've soaked me so in music that I'm a regular bond-slave to it. And a perfect rose is associated with so many lovely recollections of Mother's wonderful silent joy in it, that I could weep for pleasure. What I'm talking about—what I'm trying to tell you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially unworldly atmosphere of home—for there's no use talking, itisartificial!—to find thatthosepleasures aren't the ones that are considered important and essential. How did I find things in the real world? Why, I find that people don't give a thought to those 'best pleasures' until they have a lot of other things first. EverythingI'd been trained to value and treasure was negligible, not worth bothering about. But money—position—not having to work—elegance—thosearevital—prime! Real people can't enjoy hearing a concert if they know they've got to wash up a lot of dishes afterwards. Hiring a girl to do that work is thefirstthing to do! There isn't another woman in the world, except my mother, who'd take any pleasure in a perfect rose if she thought her sleeves were so old-fashioned that people would stare at her. Folkstalkabout liking to look at a fine sunset, but what they give their blood and bones for, is a fine house on the best street in town!"
"Well, but you're not 'people' in that vulgar sense!" protested Morrison. He spoke now without the slightestarrière-penséeof flattering her, and Sylvia in her sudden burst for self-expression was unconscious of him, save as an opponent in an argument.
"You justsaythat, in that superior way," she flashed at him, "becauseyoudon't have to bother your head about such matters, because you don't have to associate with people who are fighting for those essentials. For theyarewhat everybody except Father and Mother—everybody feels to be the essentials—a pretty house, handsome clothes, servants to do the unpleasant things, social life—oh, plenty of money sums it all up, 'vulgar' as it sounds. And I don't believe you are different. I don't believe anybody you know is really a bit different! Let Aunt Victoria, let old Mr. Sommerville, lose their money, and you'd see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!"
"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Morrison. "Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?"
"I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous. And if I don't know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess!Youhaven't gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven't enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are.Youhaven't taught music for three years in the middle-class families of a small Western city!" She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat. "You'd think I was addressing a meeting," she said in her usual tone. "I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it. There are so few who could understand. If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I'd be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn't pay any attention! Professor Kennedy could understand—but he's such a fanatic on the other side."
Morrison looked a quick suspicion. "Who is Professor Kennedy?" he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained: "He's the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw. And thinks himself immensely clever for being so! He just loathes people—the way they really are—and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they're not like anybody else. And he hates me because they couldn't all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes. He thinks it low of me to realize that if you're going to live at all, you've got to livewith people, and you can't just calmly brush their values on one side. He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and buttons and junk. And I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn't get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the savages by selling them junk. And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold. There I was hitting athim!He's spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made. And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he's awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being—taking advantage of the idiocies of savages—he meant me, of course—and he's right, itisa mean business; I hate it. And that's why I've always wanted to get on another island—not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have—but one where—well,thisis one!" she waved her hand about the lovely room, "thisisjust one! Where everything's beautiful—costly too—but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's bothering—where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly—and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day—the day Judith came—when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. Ifhedid that, on just that phrase—what mustyouthink, after all thisconfession intime d'un enfant du siècle?" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.
"But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least anenfant du siècle!" he cried. "It means that you're dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious …" he qualified on a second thought, "unless your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?"
"No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas! He's just great on analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on analysis—especially of what made us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings—he's always getting it off to his University classes—that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak—that if you know, for instance, that it's your vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you caredhardenough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it."
"My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking—dazzled—into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole! You're wonderfully, you're terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!"
Breaking in upon this speech, there came the quick, smooth purr of an automobile with all its parts functioning perfectly, a streak of dark gray past the shutters, the sigh of an engine stopped suddenly—Molly Sommerville sprang from behind the steering wheel and ran into the house. She was exquisitely flushed and eager when she came in, but when she saw the two alone in the great, cool, dusky room, filled to its remotest corners with the ineffable aroma of long, intimate, and interrupted talk, she was brought up short. She faltered for an instant and then continued to advance, her eyes on Sylvia. "It's so hot," she said, at random, "and I thought I'd run over for tea—"
"Oh, of course," said Sylvia, jumping up in haste, "it's late! I'd forgotten it was time for tea! Blameme!Since I've been here, Aunt Victoria has left it to me—where shall I say to have it set?"
"The pergola's lovely," suggested Molly. She took her close motor-hat from the pure gold of her hair with a rather listless air.
"All right—the pergola!" agreed Sylvia, perhaps a little too anxiously. In spite of herself, she gave, and she knew she was giving, the effect of needing somehow to make something up to Molly….
Sylvia was sitting in the garden, an unread book on her knees, dreaming among red and yellow and orange gladioli. She looked with a fixed, bright, beatific stare at the flame-colored flowers and did not see them. She saw only Felix Morrison, she heard only his voice, she was brimming with the sense of him. In a few moments she would go into the house and find him in the darkened living-room, as he had been every afternoon for the last fortnight, ostensibly come in to lounge away the afternoon over a book, really waiting for her to join him. And when she came in, he would look up at her, that wonderful penetrating deep look of his … and she would welcome him with her eyes.
And then they would talk! Judith and Arnold would be playing tennis, oblivious of the heat, and Aunt Victoria would be annihilating the tedious center of the day by sleep. Nobody would interrupt them for hours. How they would talk! How they had talked! As she thought of it the golden fortnight hummed and sang about Sylvia's ears like a Liszt Liebes-Traum.
They had talked of everything in the world, and it all meant but one thing, that they had discovered each other, a discovery visibly as wonderful for Morrison as for the girl. They had discovered each other, and they had been intelligent enough to know at once what it meant. They knew! And in a moment she would go into the house to him. She half closed her eyes as before a too-great brilliance….
Arnold appeared at the other end of the long row of gladioli. He was obviously looking for some one. Sylvia called to him, with the friendly tone she always had for him: "Here I am! I don't know where Judith is. Will I do?"
From a distance Arnold nodded, and continued to advance, the irregularity of his wavering gait more pronounced than usual. As soon as she could see the expression of his face, Sylvia's heart began to beat fast, with a divination of something momentous. He sat down beside her, took off his hat, and laid it on the bench. "Do you remember," he asked in a strange, high voice, "that you said you would like me for your brother?"
She nodded.
"Well, I'm going to be," he said, and covering his face with his hands, burst into sobs.
Sylvia was so touched by his emotion, so sympathetically moved by his news, that even through her happy ejaculations the tears rained down her own cheeks. She tried to wipe them away and discovered, absurdly enough, that she had lost her handkerchief. "Aren't we idiots!" she cried in a voice of joyful quavers. "I never understood before why everybody cries at a wedding. See here, Arnold, I've lost my handkerchief. Loan me yours." She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, she wiped her eyes, she put a sisterly kiss on his thin, sallow cheek, she cried: "You dears! Isn't it too good to be true! Arnold! So soon! Inside two weeks! How ever could you have the courage? Judith! My Judith! Why, she never looked at a man before. How did you dare?"
His overmastering fit of emotion was passed now. His look was of white, incredulous exaltation. "We saw each other and ran into each other's arms," he said; "I didn't have to 'dare.' It was like breathing."
"Oh, how perfect!" she cried, "how simply, simply perfect!" and now there was for an instant a note of wistful envy in her voice. "It'sallperfect! She never so much as looked at a man before, and you said the other night you'd never been in love before."
Arnold looked at her wildly. "I said that!" he cried.
"Why, yes, don't you remember, after that funny, joking talk with me, you said that was the nearest you'd ever come to proposing to any girl?"
"God Almighty!" cried the man, and did not apologize for the blasphemy. He looked at her fixedly, as though unguessed-at horizons of innocence widened inimitably before his horrified eyes. And then, following some line of association which escaped Sylvia, "I'm not fit tolookat Judith!" he cried. The idea seemed to burst upon him like a thunder-clap.
Sylvia patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. "That's the proper thing for a lover to think!" she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity. She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, "But where's Judy? WhereisJudy?"
He nodded towards the house. "She sent me out to get you. She's in her room—she wants to tell you—but when I saw you, I couldn't keep it to myself." His exaltation swept back like a wave, from the crest of which he murmured palely, "Judith! Judith!" and Sylvia laughed at him, with the tears of sympathy in her eyes, and leaving him there on the bench staring before him at the living fire of the flame-colored flowers, she ran with all her speed into the house.
Morrison, lounging in a chair with a book, looked up, startled at her whirlwind entrance. "What's up?" he inquired.
At the sound of his voice, she checked herself and pirouetted with a thistle-down lightness to face him. Her face, always like a clear, transparent vase lighted from within, now gave out, deeply moved as she was, an almost visible brightness. "Judith!" she cried, her voice ringing like a silver trumpet, "Judith and Arnold!" She was poised like a butterfly, and as she spoke she burst into flight again, and was gone.
She had not been near him, but the man had the distinct impression that she had thrown herself on his neck and kissed him violently, in a transport of delight. In the silent room, still fragrant, still echoing with her passage, he closed his book, and later his eyes, and sat with the expression of a connoisseur savoring an exquisite, a perfect impression….
* * * * *
Tea that afternoon was that strangest of phenomena, a formal ceremony of civilized life performed in the abashing and disconcerting presence of naked emotion. Arnold and Judith sat on opposite sides of the pergola, Judith shining and radiant as the dawn, her usually firmly set lips soft and tremulous; Arnold rather pale, impatient, oblivious to what was going on around him, his spirit prostrated before the miracle; and when their starry eyes met, there flowed from them and towards them from every one in the pergola, a thousand unseen waves of excitement.
The mistress of the house herself poured tea in honor of the great occasion, and she was very humorous and amusing about the mistakes caused by her sympathetic agitation. "There! I've put three lumps in yours, Mr. Sommerville. HowcouldI! But I really don't know what I'm doing. This business of having love-at-first-sight in one's very family—! Give your cup to Molly; I'll make you a fresh one. Oh, Arnold! Howcouldyou look at Judith just then! You made me fill this cup so full I can't pass it!"
Mr. Sommerville, very gallant and full of compliments and whimsical allusions, did his best to help their hostess strike the decent note of easy pleasantry; but they were both battling with something too strong for them. Unseconded as they were by any of the others, they gave a little the effect of people bowing and smirking to each other at the foot of a volcano in full eruption. Morrison, picking up the finest and sharpest of his conversational tools, ventured the hazardous enterprise of expressing this idea to them. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, trying one topic after another, expressed an impatience with the slow progress of a Henry James novel she was reading, and Mr. Sommerville, remarking with a laugh, "Oh, you cannot hurry Henry," looked to see his mild witticism rewarded by a smile from the critic. But Morrison shook his head, "No, my dear old friend.Il faut hurler avec les loups—especially if you are so wrought up by their hurlements that you can't hear yourself think. I'm just giving myself up to the rareness, the richness of the impression."
The new fiancée herself talked rather more than usual, though this meant by no means loquacity, and presented more the appearance of composure than any one else there; although this was amusingly broken by a sudden shortness of breath whenever she met Arnold's eyes. She said in answer to a question that she would be going on to her hospital the day after tomorrow—her two weeks' vacation over—oh yes, she would finish her course at the hospital; she had only a few more months. And in answer to another question, Arnold replied, obviously impatient at having to speak to any one but Judith, that of course he didn't mind if she went on and got her nurse's diploma—didn't shewantto? Anything she wanted….
No—decidedly the thing was too big to make a successful fête of. Morrison was silent and appreciatively observant, his eyes sometimes on Sylvia, sometimes on Judith; Mr. Sommerville, continuing doggedly to make talk, descended to unheard-of trivialities in reporting the iniquities of his chauffeur; Molly stirred an untasted cup, did not raise her eyes at all, and spoke only once or twice, addressing to Sylvia a disconnected question or two, in the answers to which she had obviously no interest. Judith and Arnold had never been very malleable social material, and in their present formidable condition they were as little assistance in the manufacture of geniality as a couple of African lions.
The professional fête-makers were consequently enormously relieved when it was over and their unavailing efforts could be decently discontinued. Professing different reasons for escape, they moved in disjointed groups across the smooth perfection of the lawn towards the house, where Molly's car stood, gleaming in the sun. Sylvia found herself, as she expected, manoeuvered to a place beside Morrison. He arranged it with his unobtrusive deftness in getting what he wanted out of a group of his fellow-beings, and she admired his skill, and leaned on it confidently. They had had no opportunity that day for the long talk which had been a part of every afternoon for the last week; and she now looked with a buoyant certainty to have him arrange an hour together before dinner. Her anticipation of it on that burning day of reflected heat sent thrills of eager disquietude over her. It was not only for Judith and Arnold that the last week had been one of meeting eyes, long twilight evenings of breathless, quick-ripening intimacy….
As they slackened their pace to drop behind Mr. Sommerville, who walked hand-in-hand with his granddaughter in front of them, Morrison said, looking at her with burning eyes, "… an instrument so finely strung that it vibrates at the mere sound of another wakened to melody—what mortal man lives who would not dream of its response if he could set his own hand to the bow?"
The afternoon had been saturated with emotional excitement and the moment had come for its inevitable crystallization into fateful words. The man spoke as though he were not wholly conscious of what he was saying. He stepped beside her like one in a dream. He could not take his eyes from her, from her flushed, grave, receptive face, from her downcast, listening eyes, her slow, trance-like step as she waited for him to go on. He went on: "It becomes, my dear, I assure you—the idea of that possibility becomes absolutely an obsession—even to a man usually quite his own master—"
They were almost at a standstill now, and the two in front of them had reached the house. Sylvia had a moment of what seemed to her the purest happiness she had ever known….
From across the lawn they saw a violent gesture—Molly had thrown her grandfather's clinging hand from her, and flashed back upon the two, lingering there in the sunlight. She cast herself on Sylvia, panting and trying to laugh. Her little white teeth showed in what was almost a grimace. "Why in the world are you two poking along so?" she cried, passing her arm through Sylvia's. Her beautiful sunny head came no more than to Sylvia's shoulder. Without waiting for an answer she went on hurriedly, speaking in the tones of suppressed excitement which thrilled in every one's voice that day: "Come on, Sylvia—let's work it off together! Let me take you somewhere—let's go to Rutland and back."
"That's thirty miles away!" said Sylvia, "and it's past five now."
"I'll have you there and back long before seven," asserted Molly. "Come on … come on …" She pulled impatiently, petulantly at the other girl's arm.
"I'm not invited, I suppose," said Morrison, lighting a cigarette with care.
Molly looked at him a little wildly. "No, Felix, you're not invited!" she said, and laughed unsteadily.
She had hurried them along to the car, and now they stood by the swift gray machine, Molly's own, the one she claimed to love more than anything else in the world. She sprang in and motioned Sylvia to the seat beside her.
"Hats?" suggested Morrison, looking at their bare, shining heads. He was evidently fighting for time, manoeuvering for an opening. His success was that of a man gesticulating against a gale. Molly's baldly unscrupulous determination beat down the beginnings of his carefully composed opposition before he could frame one of his well-balanced sentences. "No—no—it takes too long to go and get hats!" she cried peremptorily. "If you can't have what you want when you want it, it's no use having it at all!"
"I'm not sure," remarked Morrison, "that Miss Marshall wants this at all."
"Yes, she does; yes, she does!" Molly contradicted him heatedly. Sylvia, hanging undecided at the step, felt herself pulled into the car; the door banged, the engine started with a smooth sound of powerful machinery, the car leaped forward. Sylvia cast one backward glance at Morrison, an annoyed, distinguished, futile presence, standing motionless, and almost instantly disappearing in the distance in which first he, and then the house and tall poplars over it, shrank to nothingness.
Their speed was dizzying. The blazing summer air blew hot and vital in their faces; their hair tugged at the pins and flew back in fluttering strands; their thin garments clung to their limbs, molded as closely by the compressing wind as by water. Molly did not turn her eyes from the road ahead, leaping up to meet them, and vanishing under the car. She tried to make a little casual talk: "Don't you love to let it out, give it all the gas there is?" "There's nothing like a quick spin for driving the nightmares out of your mind, is there?" But as Sylvia made no answer to these overtures (the plain fact was that Sylvia had no breath for speech,—for anything but a horrified fascinated glare at the road), she said suddenly, somberly, "If I were you, I certainly should despise me!" She took the car around a sharp curve on two wheels.
Sylvia clutched at the side and asked wonderingly, "Whyin the world?" in a tone so permeated with sincerity that even Molly felt it.
"Don't youknow?" she cried. "Do you mean to say you don'tknow?"
"Knowwhat?" asked Sylvia. Hypnotized by the driver's intent and unwavering gaze on the road, she kept her own eyes as fiercely concentrated, her attention leaping from one quickly seen, instantly disappearing detail to another,—a pile of gravel here,—a half-buried rock there.—They both raised their voices to be heard above the sound of the engine and the rush of the car. "Know what?" repeated Sylvia loudly.
"Why do yousupposeI made myself ridiculous by pulling you away from Felix that idiotic, humiliating way!" Molly threw this inquiry out, straight before her, angrily. The wind caught at her words and hurled them behind.
In a flash Sylvia understood something to which she had been resolutely closing her perceptions. She felt sick and scared. She clutched the side, watched a hill rise up steep before them and flatten out under the forward leap of the car. She thought hard. Something of her little-girl, overmastering horror of things, rough, outspoken, disagreeable, swept over her. She violently wished that she could escape from the conversation before her. She would have paid almost any price to escape.
But Molly's nerves were not so sensitive. She evidently had no desire to escape or to let Sylvia. The grim little figure at the steering-wheel controlled with her small hands the fate of the two. She broke out now, impatient at Sylvia's silence: "Any fool could see that it was because I couldn't bear to see you with Felix another minute, and because I hadn't any other way to get you apart. Everybody else there knew why. I knew they knew. But I couldn't help it. I couldn't bear it another instant!"
She broke the glass of decent reticence with a great clattering blow. It shivered into fragments. There was nothing now between them but the real issue in all its uncomely bareness. This real issue, the maenad at the wheel now held up before them in a single brutal statement—"Are you in love with Felix? I am."
There was something eerie, terrifying, in her casting these words out, straight before her. Sylvia looked in awe at the pale, pinched profile, almost unrecognizable in its stern misery. "Because if you're not," Molly went on, her white lower lip twitching, "I wish you'd keep out. It was all right before you came with your horrible cleverness. It was all right. It was all right."
Through the iteration of this statement, through the tumult of her own thoughts, through the mad rush of the wind past her ears, Sylvia heard as clearly as though she sat again in the great, dim, quiet room, a melodious voice saying gently, indulgently, laughingly, "Molly!" Secure in her own safe place of favor she felt a great wave of generous pity for the helpless self-deception of her sister-woman. Fired by this and by the sudden perception of an opening for an act of spectacular magnanimity—would it be any the less magnanimous because it would cost her nothing in the end?—she reached for the mantle of thebeau rôleand cast it about her shoulders. "Why, Molly dear!" she cried, and her quick sympathies had never been more genuinely aroused, "Molly dear, of course I'll keep out, if you want me to. I'll leave the coast clear to you as long as you please."
She was almost thrown from the seat by the jarring grind of the car brought to a sudden standstill. Molly caught her hands, looked into her face, the first time their eyes had met. "Do you mean it … Sylvia?"
Sylvia nodded, much agitated, touched by the other's pain, half ashamed of her own apparent generosity which was to mean no loss to her, no gain to Molly. In the sudden becalmed stillness of the hot afternoon their bright, blown hair fell about their faces in shining clouds.
"I didn't understand before," said Sylvia; and she was speaking the truth.
"And you'll let him alone? You won't talk to him—play his accompaniments—oh, those long talks of yours!"
"We've been talking, you silly dear, of the Renaissance compared to the Twentieth Century, and of the passing of the leisure class, and all the beauty they always create," said Sylvia. Again she spoke the literal truth. But the true truth, burning on Molly's tongue, shriveled this to ashes. "You've been making him admire you, be interested in you, see how littleIamount to!" she cried. "But if youdon'tcare about him yourself—if you'll—two weeks, Sylvia—just keep out for two weeks…." As if it were part of the leaping forward of her imagination, she suddenly started the car again, and with a whirling, reckless wrench at the steering-wheel she had turned the car about and was racing back over the road they had come.
"Where are you going?" cried Sylvia to her, above the noise of their progress.
"Back!" she answered, laughing out. "What's the use of going on now?" She opened the throttle to its widest and pressing her lips together tightly, gave herself up to the intoxication of speed.
Once she said earnestly: "You'refine, Sylvia! I never knew a girl could be like you!" And once more she threw out casually: "Do you know what I was going to do if I found out you and Felix—if you hadn't…? I was going to jump the car over the turn there on Prospect Hill."
Remembering the terrible young face of pain and wrath which she had watched on the way out, Sylvia believed her; or at least believed that she believed her. In reality, her immortal youth was incapable of believing in the fact of death in any form. But the words put a stamp of tragic sincerity on their wild expedition, and on her companion's suffering. She thought of the two weeks which lay before Molly, and turned away her eyes in sympathy….
* * * * *
Ten days after this, an announcement was made of the engagement of Mary Montgomery Sommerville, sole heiress of the great Montgomery fortune, to Felix Morrison, the well-known critic of aesthetics.
Sylvia faced her aunt's dictum with heartsick shrinking from its rigor; but she recognized it as an unexaggerated statement of the facts. "You can't go home now, Sylvia—everybody would say you couldn't stand seeing Molly's snatch at Felix successful. You really must stay on to let people see that you are another kind of girl from Molly, capable of impersonal interest in a man of Felix's brains."
Sylvia thought of making the obviously suitable remark that she cared nothing about what people thought, but such a claim was so preposterously untrue to her character that she could not bring the words past her lips. As a matter of fact, she did care what people thought. She always had! She always would! She remained silent, looking fixedly out of the great, plate-glass window, across the glorious sweep of blue mountain-slope and green valley commanded by Mrs. Marshall-Smith's bedroom. She did not resemble the romantic conception of a girl crossed in love. She looked very quiet, no paler than usual, quite self-possessed. The only change a keen eye could have noted was that now there was about her an atmosphere of slightly rigid dignity, which had not been there before. She seemed less girlish.
No eyes could have been more keenly analytical than those of Mrs. Marshall-Smith. She saw perfectly the new attribute, and realized perfectly what a resolute stiffening of the will it signified. She had never admired and loved Sylvia more, and being a person adept in self-expression, she saturated her next speech with her admiration and affection. "Of course, you know, my dear, thatI'mnot one of the herd. I know entirely that your feeling for Felix was just what mine is—immense admiration for his taste and accomplishments. As a matter of fact it was apparent to every one that, even in spite of all Molly's money, if you'd really cared to …"
Sylvia winced, actually and physically, at this speech, which brought back to her with a sharp flick the egregiousness of her absurd self-deception. What a simpleton she had been—what a little naïve, provincial simpleton! In spite of her high opinion of her own cleverness and knowledge of people, how stupidly steeped she had been in the childish, idiotic American tradition of entire disinterestedness in the relations of men and women. It was another instance of how betrayed she constantly was, in any manoeuver in the actual world, by the fatuous idealism which had so colored her youth—she vented her emotion in despising that idealism and thinking of hard names to call it.
"… though of course you showed your intelligence bynotreally caring to," went on Mrs. Marshall-Smith; "it would have meant a crippled life for both of you. Felix hasn't a cent more than he needs for himself. If he was going to marry at all, he was forced to marry carefully. Indeed, it has occurred to me that he may have thrown himself into this, because he was in danger of losing his head over you, and knew how fatal it would be. For you, you lovely thing of great possibilities, you need a rich soil foryourroots, too, if you're to bloom out as you ought to."
Sylvia, receiving this into a sore and raw consciousness, said to herself with an embittered instinct for cynicism that she had never heard more euphonious periphrases for selling yourself for money. For that was what it came down to, she had told herself fiercely a great many times during the night. Felix had sold himself for money as outright as ever a woman of the streets had done.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, continuing steadily to talk (on the theory that talking prevents too great concentration of thought), and making the round of all the possible things to say, chanced at this moment upon a qualification to this theory of Morrison's conduct which for an instant caught Sylvia's attention, "—and then there's always the possibility that even if youhadcared to—Molly might have been too much for you, for both of you. She always has had just what she wanted—and people who have, get the habit. I don't know if you've noticed it, in the little you've seen of her, but it's very apparent to me, knowing her from childhood up as I have, that there's a slight coarseness of grain in Molly, when it's a question of getting what she wants. I don't mean she's exactly horrid. Molly's a dear in her way, and I'm very fond of her, of course. If she can get what she wantswithoutwalking over anybody's prostrate body, she'll go round. But there's a directness, a brilliant lack of fine shades in Molly's grab…. It makes one remember that her Montgomery grandfather had firmness of purpose enough to raise himself from an ordinary Illinois farmer to arbiter of the wheat pit. Such impossible old aunts—such cousins—occasionally crop up still from the Montgomery connection. But all with the same crude force. It's almost impossible for a temperament like Felix's to contend with a nature like that."
Sylvia was struck by the reflection, but on turning it over she saw in it only another reason for anger at Morrison. "You make your old friend out as a very weak character," she said.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith's tolerant, clear view of the infirmities of humanity was grieved by this fling of youthful severity. "Oh, my dear! my dear! A young, beautiful, enormendously rich, tremendously enamored girl? That's a combination! I don't think we need consider Felix exactly weak for not having resisted!"
Sylvia thought she knew reasons for his not yielding, but she did not care to discuss them, and said nothing.
"But whether," continued Mrs. Marshall-Smith, attempting delicately to convey the only reflection supposed to be of comfort to a girl in Sylvia's situation, "whether or not Molly will find after marriage that even a very masterful and ruthless temperament may fail entirely to possess and hold the things it has grabbed and carried off …"
Sylvia repudiated the tacit conception that this would be a balm to her. "Oh, I'm sure I hope they'll manage!" she said earnestly.
"Of course! Of course!" agreed Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "Who doesn't hope so?" She paused, her loquacity run desperately thin. There was the sound of a car, driving up to the front door. Sylvia rose in apprehension. Her aunt motioned a reassurance. "I told Tojiko to tell every one that we are not in—to anybody."
Hélène came to the door on silent, felt-shod feet, a black-and-white picture of well-trained servility. "Pardon, Madame, Tojiko says that Mlle. Sommerville wishes to see Mlle. Sylvie."
Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with considerable apprehension at her niece. "You must get it over with some time, Sylvia. It'll be easier here than with a lot of people staring at you both, and making nasty speculations." Neither she nor Sylvia noticed that for an instant, in her haste, she had quite dropped her careful pretension that Sylvia could, of course, if she had really cared to….
Sylvia set her jaw, an action curiously visible under the smooth, subtle modeling of her young cheeks. She said to Hélène in a quiet voice: "Mais bien sûr!Tell her we're not yet dressed, but if she will give herself the trouble to come up…."
Hélène nodded and retreated. Sylvia looked rather pale.
"You don't know what a joy your perfect French is to me, dear," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith, still rapidly turning every peg in sight in an endeavor to loosen tension; but no noticeable relaxation took place in Sylvia. It did not seem to her at just that moment of great importance that she could speak good French.
With desperate haste she was saying to herself, "At least Molly doesn't know about anything. I told her I didn't care. She believed me. I must go on pretending that I don't. But can I! But can I!"
Light, rapid steps came flying up the stairs and down the long hall."Sylvia! Sylvia!" Molly was evidently hesitating between doors.
"Here—this way—last door—Aunt Victoria's room!" called Sylvia, and felt like a terror-stricken actor making a first public appearance, enormously surprised, relieved, and heartened to find her usual voice still with her. As Molly came flying into the room, she ran to meet her. They fell into each other's arms with incoherent ejaculations and, under the extremely appreciative eye of Mrs. Marshall-Smith, kissed each other repeatedly.
"Oh, isn't she the dear!" cried Molly, shaking out amply to the breeze a victor's easy generosity. "Isn't she the darlingest girl in the world! Sheunderstandsso! When I saw how perfectlysweetshe was the day Arnold and Judith announced their engagement, I said to myself I wanted her to be the first person I spoke to about mine."
The approach of the inexorable necessity for her first words roused Sylvia to an inspiration which struck out an almost visible spark of admiration from her aunt. "You just count too much on my being 'queer,' Molly," she said playfully, pulling the other girl down beside her, with an affectionate gesture. "How doyouknow that I'm not fearfully jealous of you?Sucha charmer as your fiancé is!"
Molly laughed delightedly. "Isn't she wonderful—not to care a bit—really!" she appealed to Sylvia's aunt. "How anybodycouldresist Felix—but then she's so clever. She's wonderful!"
Sylvia, smiling, cordial, clear-eyed and bitter-hearted, thought that she really was.
"But I can't talk about it here!" cried Molly restlessly. "I came to carry Sylvia off. I can't sit still at home. I want to go ninety miles an hour! I can't think straight unless I'm behind the steering-wheel. Come along, Sylvia!"
Mrs. Marshall-Smith thereupon showed herself, for all her amenity and grace, more of a match of Molly's force and energy than either Sylvia or Morrison had been on a certain rather memorable occasion ten days before. She opposed the simple irresistible obstacle of a flat command. "Sylvia'snotgoing out in a car dressed in a lace-trimmed négligée, with a boudoir cap on, whether you get what you want the minute you want it or not, Molly Sommerville," she said with the authoritative accent which had always quelled Arnold in his boyhood (as long as he was within earshot). The method was effective now. Molly laughed. Sylvia even made shift to laugh; and Helene was summoned to put on the trim shirt-waist, the short cloth skirt and close hat which Mrs. Marshall-Smith selected with care and the history of which she detailed at length, so copiously that there was no opportunity to speak of anything less innocuous. Her unusual interest in the matter even caused her to accompany the girls to the head of the stairs, still talking, and she called down to them finally as they went out of the front door, "… it's the only way with Briggs—he's simply incorrigible about delays—and yet nobody does skirts as he does! You just have to tell him youwill not take it, if he doesn't get it done on time!"
Sylvia cast an understanding, grateful upward look at her aunt and stepped into the car. So far it had gone better than she feared. But a tête-à-tête with Molly, overflowing with the confidences of the newly betrothed—she was not sure that she could get through with that with credit.
Molly, however, seemed as little inclined to overflow as Sylvia to have her. She talked of everything in the world except of Felix Morrison; and it was not long before Sylvia's acuteness discovered that she was not thinking of what she was saying. There passed through her mind a wild, wretched notion that Molly might after all know—that Felix might have been base enough to talk about her to Molly, that Molly might be trying to "spare her." But this idea was instantly rejected: Molly was not subtle enough to conceive of such a course, and too headlong not to make a hundred blunders in carrying it out; and besides, it would not explain her manner. She was abstracted obviously for the simple reason that she had something on her mind, something not altogether to her liking, judging from the uneasy color which came and went in her face, by her rattling, senseless flow of chatter, by her fidgeting, unnecessary adjustments of the mechanism of the car.
Sylvia herself, in spite of her greater self-control, looked out upon the world with nothing of her usual eager welcome. The personality of the man they did not name hung between and around the two women like a cloud. As they swept along rapidly, young, fair, well-fed, beautifully dressed, in the costly, shining car, their clouded faces might to a country eye have been visible proofs of the country dictum that "rich city folks don't seem to get no good out'n their money and their automobiles: always layin' their ears back and lookin' 'bout as cheerful as a balky horse."
But the country eyes which at this moment fell on them were anything but conscious of class differences. It was a desperate need which reached out a gaunt claw and plucked at them when, high on the flank of the mountain, as they swung around the corner of a densely wooded road, they saw a wild-eyed man in overalls leap down from the bushes and yell at them.
Sylvia was startled and her first impression was the natural feminine one of fear—a lonely road, a strange man, excited, perhaps drunk—But Molly, without an instant's hesitation, ground the car to a stop in a cloud of dust. "What's the matter?" she shouted as the man sprang up on the running-board. He was gasping, purple, utterly spent, and for an instant could only beat the air with his hands. Then he broke out in a hoarse shout—the sound in that quiet sylvan spot was like a tocsin: "Fire! An awful fire! Hewitt's pine woods—up that road!" He waved a wild, bare arm—his shirt-sleeve was torn to the shoulder. "Go and git help. They need all the men they can git!"
He dropped from the running-board and ran back up the hill through the bushes. They saw him lurch from one side to the other; he was still exhausted from his dash down the mountain to the road; they heard the bushes crash, saw them close behind him. He was gone.
Sylvia's eyes were still on the spot where he had disappeared when she was thrown violently back against the seat in a great leap forward of the car. She caught at the side, at her hat, and saw Molly's face. It was transfigured. The brooding restlessness was gone as acrid smoke goes when the clear flame leaps up.
"What are you doing?" shouted Sylvia.
"To get help," answered Molly, opening the throttle another notch. The first staggering plunge over, the car settled down to a terrific speed, purring softly its puissant vibrant song of illimitable strength. "Hear her sing! Hear her sing!" cried Molly. In three minutes from the time the man had left them, they tore into the nearest village, two miles from the woods. It seemed that in those three minutes Molly had not only run the car like a demon, but had formed a plan. Slackening speed only long enough to waltz with the car on a street-corner while she shouted an inquiry to a passer-by, she followed the wave of his hand and flashed down a side-street to a big brick building which proclaimed itself in a great sign, "Peabody Brush-back Factory."
The car stopped. Molly sprang out and ran as though the car were a rifle and she the bullet emerging from it. She ran into a large, ugly, comfortable office, where several white-faced girls were lifting their thin little fingers from typewriter keys to stare at the young woman who burst through and in at a door marked "Manager."
"There's a fire on the mountain—a great fire in Hewitt's pine woods," she cried in a clear, peremptory voice that sounded like a young captain leading a charge. "I can take nine men on my car. Will you come with me and tell which men to go?"
A dignified, elderly man, with smooth, gray hair and a black alpaca office coat, sat perfectly motionless behind his desk and stared at her in a petrified silence. Molly stamped her foot. "There's not an instant to lose," she said; "they need every man they can get."
"Who's the fire-warden of this township?" said the elderly man foolishly, trying to assemble his wits.
Molly appeared visibly to propel him from his chair by her fury. "Oh, they need helpNOW!" she cried. "Come on! Come on!"
Then they stood together on the steps of the office. "Those men unloading lumber over there could go," said the manager, "and I'll get three more from the packing-rooms."
"Don't go yourself! Send somebody to get them!" commanded Molly. "You go and telephone anybody in town who has a car. There'll be sure to be one or two at the garage."
Sylvia gasped at the prodigy taking place before her eyes, the masterful, keen-witted captain of men who emerged like a thunderbolt from their Molly—Molly, the pretty little beauty of the summer colony!
She had galvanized the elderly New Englander beside her out of his first momentary apathy of stupefaction. He now put his own competent hand to the helm and took command.
"Yes," he said, and with the word it was evident that he was aroused. Over his shoulder, in a quiet voice that carried like the crack of a gun: "Henderson, go get three men from the packing-room to go to a forest-fire. Shut down the machinery. Get all the able-bodied men ready in gangs of seven. Perkins, you 'phone Tim O'Keefe to bring my car here at once. And get Pat's and Tom's and the two at the hotel."
"Tools?" said Molly.
He nodded and called out to the men advancing with a rush on the car: "There are hoes and shovels inside the power-house door. Better take some axes too."
In four minutes from the time they had entered the village (Sylvia had her watch in her hand) they were flying back, the car packed with men in overalls and clustered thick with others on the running-board. Back of them the whistle of the factory shrieked a strident announcement of disaster. Women and children ran to the doors to stare up and down, to cry out, to look and with dismayed faces to see the great cloud of gray smoke pouring up from the side of the mountain. There was no soul in that village who did not know what a forest-fire meant.
Then in a flash the car had left the village and was rushing along the dusty highroad, the huge, ominous pillar of smoke growing nearer. The men stared up at it with sober faces. "Pretty hot fire!" said one uneasily.
They reached the place where the man had yelled to them—ten minutes exactly since they had left it. Molly turned the car into the steep sandy side-road which led up the mountain. The men shouted out in remonstrance, "Hey, lady! You can't git a car up there. We'll have to walk the rest of the way. They don't never take cars there."
"This one is going up," sang out Molly gallantly, almost gaily, opening the throttle to its fullest and going into second speed.
The sound of the laboring engine jarred loudly through all the still, hot woods; the car shook and trembled under the strain on it. Molly dropped into low. A cloud of evil-smelling blue gasoline smoke rose up from the exhaust behind, but the car continued to advance. Rising steadily, coughing and choking, up the cruelly steep grades, bumping heavily down over the great water-bars, smoking, rattling, quivering—the car continued to advance. A trickle of perspiration ran down Molly's cheeks. The floor was hot under their feet, the smell of hot oil pungent in their nostrils.
They were eight minutes from the main road now, and near the fire. Over the trail hung a cloud of smoke, and, as they turned a corner and came through this, they saw that they had arrived. Sylvia drew back and crooked her arm over her eyes. She had never seen a forest fire before. She came from the plain-country, where trees are almost sacred, and her first feeling was of terror. But then she dropped her arm and looked, and looked again at the glorious, awful sight which was to furnish her with nightmares for months to come.
The fire was roaring down one side of the road towards them, and away to the right was eating its furious, sulphurous way into the heart of the forest. They stopped a hundred feet short, but the blare of heat struck on their faces like a blow. Through the dense masses of smoke, terrifying glimpses of fierce, clean flame; a resinous dead stump burning like a torch; a great tree standing helpless like a martyr at the stake, suddenly transformed into a frenzied pillar of fire…. Along the front of this whirlpool of flame toiled, with despairing fury, four lean, powerful men. As they raised their blackened, desperate faces and saw the car there, actually there, incredibly there, black with its load of men, they gave a deep-throated shout of relief, though they did not for an instant stop the frantic plying of their picks and hoes. The nine men sprang out, their implements in their hands, and dispersed along the fighting-line.
Molly backed the car around, the rear wheels churning up the sand, and plunged down the hill into the smoke. Through the choking fumes of this, Sylvia shouted at her, "Molly! Molly! You'regreat!" She felt that she would always hear ringing in her ears that thrilling, hoarse shout of relief.
Molly shouted in answer, "I could scream, I'm so happy!" And as they plunged madly down the mountain road, she said: "Oh, Sylvia, you don't know—I never was any use before—never once—never! I got the first load of help there! How they shouted!"
At the junction of the side-road with the highway, a car was discharging a load of men with rakes and picks. "Itook my car up!" screamed Molly, leaning from the steering wheel but not slackening speed as she tore past them.
The driver of the other car, a young man with the face of a fighting Celt, flushed at the challenge and, motioning the men back into the car, started up the sandy hill. Molly laughed aloud. "I never was so happy in my life!" she said again.
Both girls had forgotten the existence of Felix Morrison.
They passed cars now, many of them, streaming south at breakneck speed, full to overflowing with unsmiling men in working clothes, bristling with long-handled implements. But as they fled down the street to the factory they saw, waiting still, some twenty or more men in overalls drawn up, ready, armed, resolute….
"How strong men are!" said Molly, gazing in ecstasy at this array of factory hands. "I love them!" She added under her breath, "ButItake them there!"
While the men were swarming into the car, the gray-haired manager came out to report, as though to an officer equal in command, "I've telephoned to Ward and Howe's marble-works in Chitford," he said. "They've sent down fifty men from there. About seventy-five have gone from this village. I suppose all the farmers in that district are there by this time."
"Will they ever stop it!" asked Sylvia despairingly, seeing wherever she looked nothing but that ravening, fiery leap of the flames, feeling that terrible hot breath on her cheek.
The question and accent brought the man for the first time to a realization of the girls' youth and sex. He shifted to paternal reassurance. "Oh yes, oh yes," he said, looking up the valley appraisingly at the great volume of the smoke, "with a hundred and fifty men there, almost at once, they'll have it under control before long. Everything with a forest fire depends on getting help therequickly. Ten men there almost at once do more than fifty men an hour later. That's why your friend's promptness was so important. I guess it might have been pretty bad if they'd had to wait for help till one of them could have run to the village. A fire, a bad fire like that, gets so in an hour that you can't stop it—can't stop it till it gets out where you can plow a furrow around it. And that's a terrible place for a fire up there. Lots of slash left."
Molly called over her shoulder to the men climbing on the car, "All ready there?" and was off, a Valkyr with her load of heroes.
Once more the car toiled and agonized up the execrable sandy steepness of the side-road; but in the twenty minutes since they had been there the tide had turned. Sylvia was amazed at the total shifting of values. Instead of four solitary workers, struggling wildly against overwhelming odds, a long line of men, working with a disciplined, orderly haste, stretched away into the woods. Imperious and savage, the smoke and swift flames towered above them, leaping up into the very sky, darkening the sun. Bent over their rakes, their eyes on the ground, mere black specks against the raging glory of the fire, the line of men, with an incessant monotonous haste, drew away the dry leaves with their rakes, while others who followed them tore at the earth with picks and hoes. It was impossible to believe that such ant-labors could avail, but already, near the road, the fire had burnt itself out, baffled by its microscopic assailants. As far as the girls could see into the charred underbrush, a narrow, clean line of freshly upturned earth marked where the fiercest of all the elements had been vanquished by the humblest of all the tools of men. Bewildered, Sylvia's eyes shifted from the toiling men to the distance, across the blackened desolation near them, to where the fire still tossed its wicked crest of flames defiantly into the forest. She heard, but she did not believe the words of the men in the car, who cried out expertly as they ran forward, "Oh, the worst's over. They're shutting down on it." How could the worst be over, when there was still that whirling horror of flame and smoke beyond them?
Just after the men had gone, exultant, relieved, the girls turned their heads to the other side of the road, and there, very silent, very secret and venomous, leaped and glittered a little ring of flames. An hour before, it would have looked a pretty, harmless sight to the two who now sat, stricken by horror into a momentary frozen stillness. The flames licked at the dry leaves and playfully sprang up into a clump of tall dry grass. The fire was running swiftly towards a bunch of dead alders standing at the edge of the forest. Before it had spread an inch further, the girls were upon it, screaming for help, screaming as people in civilization seldom scream, with all their lungs. With uplifted skirts they stamped and trod out, under swift and fearless feet, the sinister, silent, yellow tongues. They snatched branches of green leaves and beat fiercely at the enemy. It had been so small a spot compared to the great desolation across the road, they stamped out the flames so easily, that the girls expected with every breath to see the last of it. To see it escape them, to see it suddenly flare up where it had been dead, to see it appear behind them while they were still fighting it in front, was like being in a nightmare when effort is impossible. The ring widened with appalling, with unbelievable rapidity. Sylvia could not think it possible that anything outside a dream could have such devouring swiftness. She trod and snatched and stamped and screamed, and wondered if she were indeed awake….