Graham, riding solitary through the redwood canyons among the hills that overlooked the ranch center, was getting acquainted with Selim, the eleven-hundred-pound, coal-black gelding which Dick had furnished him in place of the lighter Altadena. As he rode along, learning the good nature, the roguishness and the dependableness of the animal, Graham hummed the words of the “Gypsy Trail” and allowed them to lead his thoughts. Quite carelessly, foolishly, thinking of bucolic lovers carving their initials on forest trees, he broke a spray of laurel and another of redwood. He had to stand in the stirrups to pluck a long-stemmed, five-fingered fern with which to bind the sprays into a cross. When the patteran was fashioned, he tossed it on the trail before him and noted that Selim passed over without treading upon it. Glancing back, Graham watched it to the next turn of the trail. A good omen, was his thought, that it had not been trampled.
More five-fingered ferns to be had for the reaching, more branches of redwood and laurel brushing his face as he rode, invited him to continue the manufacture of patterans, which he dropped as he fashioned them. An hour later, at the head of the canyon, where he knew the trail over the divide was difficult and stiff, he debated his course and turned back.
Selim warned him by nickering. Came an answering nicker from close at hand. The trail was wide and easy, and Graham put his mount into a fox trot, swung a wide bend, and overtook Paula on the Fawn.
“Hello!” he called. “Hello! Hello!”
She reined in till he was alongside.
“I was just turning back,” she said. “Why did you turn back? I thought you were going over the divide to Little Grizzly.”
“You knew I was ahead of you?” he asked, admiring the frank, boyish way of her eyes straight-gazing into his.
“Why shouldn’t I? I had no doubt at the second patteran.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten about them,” he laughed guiltily. “Why didyouturn back?”
She waited until the Fawn and Selim had stepped over a fallen alder across the trail, so that she could look into Graham’s eyes when she answered:
“Because I did not care to follow your trail.—To follow anybody’s trail,” she quickly amended. “I turned back at the second one.”
He failed of a ready answer, and an awkward silence was between them. Both were aware of this awkwardness, due to the known but unspoken things.
“Do you make a practice of dropping patterans?” Paula asked.
“The first I ever left,” he replied, with a shake of the head. “But there was such a generous supply of materials it seemed a pity, and, besides, the song was haunting me.”
“It was haunting me this morning when I woke up,” she said, this time her face straight ahead so that she might avoid a rope of wild grapevine that hung close to her side of the trail.
And Graham, gazing at her face in profile, at her crown of gold-brown hair, at her singing throat, felt the old ache at the heart, the hunger and the yearning. The nearness of her was a provocation. The sight of her, in her fawn-colored silk corduroy, tormented him with a rush of visions of that form of hers—swimming Mountain Lad, swan-diving through forty feet of air, moving down the long room in the dull-blue dress of medieval fashion with the maddening knee-lift of the clinging draperies.
“A penny for them,” she interrupted his visioning. His answer was prompt.
“Praise to the Lord for one thing: you haven’t once mentioned Dick.”
“Do you so dislike him?”
“Be fair,” he commanded, almost sternly. “It is because I like him. Otherwise...”
“What?” she queried.
Her voice was brave, although she looked straight before her at the Fawn’s pricking ears.
“I can’t understand why I remain. I should have been gone long ago.”
“Why?” she asked, her gaze still on the pricking ears.
“Be fair, be fair,” he warned. “You and I scarcely need speech for understanding.”
She turned full upon him, her cheeks warming with color, and, without speech, looked at him. Her whip-hand rose quickly, half way, as if to press her breast, and half way paused irresolutely, then dropped down to her side. But her eyes, he saw, were glad and startled. There was no mistake. The startle lay in them, and also the gladness. And he, knowing as it is given some men to know, changed the bridle rein to his other hand, reined close to her, put his arm around her, drew her till the horses rocked, and, knee to knee and lips on lips, kissed his desire to hers. There was no mistake—pressure to pressure, warmth to warmth, and with an elate thrill he felt her breathe against him.
The next moment she had torn herself loose. The blood had left her face. Her eyes were blazing. Her riding-whip rose as if to strike him, then fell on the startled Fawn. Simultaneously she drove in both spurs with such suddenness and force as to fetch a groan and a leap from the mare.
He listened to the soft thuds of hoofs die away along the forest path, himself dizzy in the saddle from the pounding of his blood. When the last hoof-beat had ceased, he half-slipped, half-sank from his saddle to the ground, and sat on a mossy boulder. He was hard hit—harder than he had deemed possible until that one great moment when he had held her in his arms. Well, the die was cast.
He straightened up so abruptly as to alarm Selim, who sprang back the length of his bridle rein and snorted.
What had just occurred had been unpremeditated. It was one of those inevitable things. It had to happen. He had not planned it, although he knew, now, that had he not procrastinated his going, had he not drifted, he could have foreseen it. And now, going could not mend matters. The madness of it, the hell of it and the joy of it, was that no longer was there any doubt. Speech beyond speech, his lips still tingling with the memory of hers, she had told him. He dwelt over that kiss returned, his senses swimming deliciously in the sea of remembrance.
He laid his hand caressingly on the knee that had touched hers, and was grateful with the humility of the true lover. Wonderful it was that so wonderful a woman should love him. This was no girl. This was a woman, knowing her own will and wisdom. And she had breathed quickly in his arms, and her lips had been live to his. He had evoked what he had given, and he had not dreamed, after the years, that he had had so much to give.
He stood up, made as if to mount Selim, who nozzled his shoulder, then paused to debate.
It was no longer a question of going. That was definitely settled. Dick had certain rights, true. But Paula had her rights, and did he have the right to go, after what had happened, unless ... unless she went with him? To go now was to kiss and ride away. Surely, since the world of sex decreed that often the same men should love the one woman, and therefore that perfidy should immediately enter into such a triangle—surely, it was the lesser evil to be perfidious to the man than to the woman.
It was a real world, he pondered as he rode slowly along; and Paula, and Dick, and he were real persons in it, were themselves conscious realists who looked the facts of life squarely in the face. This was no affair of priest and code, of other wisdoms and decisions. Of themselves must it be settled. Some one would be hurt. But life was hurt. Success in living was the minimizing of pain. Dick believed that himself, thanks be. The three of them believed it. And it was nothing new under the sun. The countless triangles of the countless generations had all been somehow solved. This, then, would be solved. All human affairs reached some solution.
He shook sober thought from his brain and returned to the bliss of memory, reaching his hand to another caress of his knee, his lips breathing again to the breathing of hers against them. He even reined Selim to a halt in order to gaze at the hollow resting place of his bent arm which she had filled.
Not until dinner did Graham see Paula again, and he found her the very usual Paula. Not even his eye, keen with knowledge, could detect any sign of the day’s great happening, nor of the anger that had whitened her face and blazed in her eyes when she half-lifted her whip to strike him. In everything she was the same Little Lady of the Big House. Even when it chanced that her eyes met his, they were serene, untroubled, with no hint of any secret in them. What made the situation easier was the presence of several new guests, women, friends of Dick and her, come for a couple of days.
Next morning, in the music room, he encountered them and Paula at the piano.
“Don’t you sing, Mr. Graham?” a Miss Hoffman asked.
She was the editor of a woman’s magazine published in San Francisco, Graham had learned.
“Oh, adorably,” he assured her. “Don’t I, Mrs. Forrest?” he appealed.
“It is quite true,” Paula smiled, “if for no other reason that he is kind enough not to drown me quite.”
“And nothing remains but to prove our words,” he volunteered. “There’s a duet we sang the other evening—” He glanced at Paula for a sign. “—Which is particularly good for my kind of singing.” Again he gave her a passing glance and received no cue to her will or wish. “The music is in the living room. I’ll go and get it.”
“It’s the ‘Gypsy Trail,’ a bright, catchy thing,” he heard her saying to the others as he passed out.
They did not sing it so recklessly as on that first occasion, and much of the thrill and some of the fire they kept out of their voices; but they sang it more richly, more as the composer had intended it and with less of their own particular interpretation. But Graham was thinking as he sang, and he knew, too, that Paula was thinking, that in their hearts another duet was pulsing all unguessed by the several women who applauded the song’s close.
“You never sang it better, I’ll wager,” he told Paula.
For he had heard a new note in her voice. It had been fuller, rounder, with a generousness of volume that had vindicated that singing throat.
“And now, because I know you don’t know, I’ll tell you what a patteran is,” she was saying....
“Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean,” Terrence McFane said in fatherly tones.
The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.
“Mere naming of one’s position does not settle it, Terrence,” Dick replied. “I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace.”
“And I am to conclude,” Hancock broke in, “that a Hottentot is as good as a white man?”
“Now the South speaks, Aaron,” Dick retorted with a smile. “Prejudice, not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer’s handicap of the early influence of the Manchester School.”
“And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?” Dar Hyal challenged.
Dick shook his head.
“Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace-makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities, enable them to travel a faster collective pace.
“Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle.”
“Go on, Dick, develop the idea,” Terrence encouraged. “I begin to glimpse your drive, and you’ll soon have Aaron on the run with his race prejudices and silly vanities of superiority.”
“These above-average men,” Dick continued, “these pace-makers, are the inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows. It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as bestial, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as retrogressive, as the average savage. But the average white man has a faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society give him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.
“What great man, what hero—and by that I mean what sporting dominant— has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced only one— Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only two, Booker T. Washington and Du Bois—and both with white blood in them....”
Paula feigned a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She did not appear bored, but to Graham’s sympathetic eyes she seemed inwardly to droop. And in an interval of tilt between Terrence and Hancock, she said in a low voice to Graham:
“Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose Dick is right—he so nearly always is; but I confess to my old weakness of inability to apply all these floods of words to life—to my life, I mean, to my living, to what I should do, to what I must do.” Her eyes were unfalteringly fixed on his while she spoke, leaving no doubt in his mind to what she referred. “I don’t know what bearing sporting dominants and race-paces have on my life. They show me no right or wrong or way for my particular feet. And now that they’ve started they are liable to talk the rest of the evening....
“Oh, I do understand what they say,” she hastily assured him; “but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Words, words, words—and I want to know what to do, what to do with myself, what to do with you, what to do with Dick.”
But the devil of speech was in Dick Forrest’s tongue, and before Graham could murmur a reply to Paula, Dick was challenging him for data on the subject from the South American tribes among which he had traveled. To look at Dick’s face it would have been unguessed that he was aught but a carefree, happy arguer. Nor did Graham, nor did Paula, Dick’s dozen years’ wife, dream that his casual careless glances were missing no movement of a hand, no change of position on a chair, no shade of expression on their faces.
What’s up? was Dick’s secret interrogation. Paula’s not herself. She’s positively nervous, and all the discussion is responsible. And Graham’s off color. His brain isn’t working up to mark. He’s thinking about something else, rather than about what he is saying. What is that something else?
And the devil of speech behind which Dick hid his secret thoughts impelled him to urge the talk wider and wilder.
“For once I could almost hate the four sages,” Paula broke out in an undertone to Graham, who had finished furnishing the required data.
Dick, himself talking, in cool sentences amplifying his thesis, apparently engrossed in his subject, saw Paula make the aside, although no word of it reached his ears, saw her increasing nervousness, saw the silent sympathy of Graham, and wondered what had been the few words she uttered, while to the listening table he was saying:
“Fischer and Speiser are both agreed on the paucity of unit-characters that circulate in the heredity of the lesser races as compared with the immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or German, or English....”
No one at the table suspected that Dick deliberately dangled the bait of a new trend to the conversation, nor did Leo dream afterward that it was the master-craft and deviltry of Dick rather than his own question that changed the subject when he demanded to know what part the female sporting dominants played in the race.
“Females don’t sport, Leo, my lad,” Terrence, with a wink to the others, answered him. “Females are conservative. They keep the type true. They fix it and hold it, and are the everlasting clog on the chariot of progress. If it wasn’t for the females every blessed mother’s son of us would be a sporting dominant. I refer to our distinguished breeder and practical Mendelian whom we have with us this evening to verify my random statements.”
“Let us get down first of all to bedrock and find out what we are talking about,” Dick was prompt on the uptake. “What is woman?” he demanded with an air of earnestness.
“The ancient Greeks said woman was nature’s failure to make a man,” Dar Hyal answered, the while the imp of mockery laughed in the corners of his mouth and curled his thin cynical lips derisively.
Leo was shocked. His face flushed. There was pain in his eyes and his lips were trembling as he looked wistful appeal to Dick.
“The half-sex,” Hancock gibed. “As if the hand of God had been withdrawn midway in the making, leaving her but a half-soul, a groping soul at best.”
“No I no!” the boy cried out. “You must not say such things!—Dick, you know. Tell them, tell them.”
“I wish I could,” Dick replied. “But this soul discussion is vague as souls themselves. We all know, of our selves, that we often grope, are often lost, and are never so much lost as when we think we know where we are and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than ours? What is the personality of a moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble-minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream? When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have colic? When you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with the sense of the beauty of the world and think you think all inexpressible unutterable thoughts?
“I saythink you thinkintentionally. Did you really think, then your sense of the beauty of the world would not be inexpressible, unutterable. It would be clear, sharp, definite. You could put it into words. Your personality would be clear, sharp, and definite as your thoughts and words. Ergo, Leo, when you deem, in exalted moods, that you are at the summit of existence, in truth you are thrilling, vibrating, dancing a mad orgy of the senses and not knowing a step of the dance or the meaning of the orgy. You don’t know yourself. Your soul, your personality, at that moment, is a vague and groping thing. Possibly the bullfrog, inflating himself on the edge of a pond and uttering hoarse croaks through the darkness to a warty mate, possesses also, at that moment, a vague and groping personality.
“No, Leo, personality is too vague for any of our vague personalities to grasp. There are seeming men with the personalities of women. There are plural personalities. There are two-legged human creatures that are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. We, as personalities, float like fog-wisps through glooms and darknesses and light-flashings. It is all fog and mist, and we are all foggy and misty in the thick of the mystery.”
“Maybe it’s mystification instead of mystery—man-made mystification,” Paula said.
“There talks the true woman that Leo thinks is not a half-soul,” Dick retorted. “The point is, Leo, sex and soul are all interwoven and tangled together, and we know little of one and less of the other.”
“But women are beautiful,” the boy stammered.
“Oh, ho!” Hancock broke in, his black eyes gleaming wickedly. “So, Leo, you identify woman with beauty?”
The young poet’s lips moved, but he could only nod.
“Very well, then, let us take the testimony of painting, during the last thousand years, as a reflex of economic conditions and political institutions, and by it see how man has molded and daubed woman into the image of his desire, and how she has permitted him—”
“You must stop baiting Leo,” Paula interfered, “and be truthful, all of you, and say what you do know or do believe.”
“Woman is a very sacred subject,” Dar Hyal enunciated solemnly.
“There is the Madonna,” Graham suggested, stepping into the breach to Paula’s aid.
“And the cérébrale,” Terrence added, winning a nod of approval from Dar Hyal.
“One at a time,” Hancock said. “Let us consider the Madonna-worship, which was a particular woman-worship in relation to the general woman-worship of all women to-day and to which Leo subscribes. Man is a lazy, loafing savage. He dislikes to be pestered. He likes tranquillity, repose. And he finds himself, ever since man began, saddled to a restless, nervous, irritable, hysterical traveling companion, and her name is woman. She has moods, tears, vanities, angers, and moral irresponsibilities. He couldn’t destroy her. He had to have her, although she was always spoiling his peace. What was he to do?”
“Trust him to find a way—the cunning rascal,” Terrence interjected.
“He made a heavenly image of her,” Hancock kept on. “He idealized her good qualities, and put her so far away that her bad qualities couldn’t get on his nerves and prevent him from smoking his quiet lazy pipe of peace and meditating upon the stars. And when the ordinary every-day woman tried to pester, he brushed her aside from his thoughts and remembered his heaven-woman, the perfect woman, the bearer of life and custodian of immortality.
“Then came the Reformation. Down went the worship of the Mother. And there was man still saddled to his repose-destroyer. What did he do then?”
“Ah, the rascal,” Terrence grinned.
“He said: ‘I will make of you a dream and an illusion.’ And he did. The Madonna was his heavenly woman, his highest conception of woman. He transferred all his idealized qualities of her to the earthly woman, to every woman, and he has fooled himself into believing in them and in her ever since... like Leo does.”
“For an unmarried man you betray an amazing intimacy with the pestiferousness of woman,” Dick commented. “Or is it all purely theoretical?” Terrence began to laugh.
“Dick, boy, it’s Laura Marholm Aaron’s been just reading. He can spout her chapter and verse.”
“And with all this talk about woman we have not yet touched the hem of her garment,” Graham said, winning a grateful look from Paula and Leo.
“There is love,” Leo breathed. “No one has said one word about love.”
“And marriage laws, and divorces, and polygamy, and monogamy, and free love,” Hancock rattled off.
“And why, Leo,” Dar Hyal queried, “is woman, in the game of love, always the pursuer, the huntress?”
“Oh, but she isn’t,” the boy answered quietly, with an air of superior knowledge. “That is just some of your Shaw nonsense.”
“Bravo, Leo,” Paula applauded.
“Then Wilde was wrong when he said woman attacks by sudden and strange surrenders?” Dar Hyal asked.
“But don’t you see,” protested Leo, “all such talk makes woman a monster, a creature of prey.” As he turned to Dick, he stole a side glance at Paula and love welled in his eyes. “Is she a creature of prey, Dick?”
“No,” Dick answered slowly, with a shake of head, and gentleness was in his voice for sake of what he had just seen in the boy’s eyes. “I cannot say that woman is a creature of prey. Nor can I say she is a creature preyed upon. Nor will I say she is a creature of unfaltering joy to man. But I will say that she is a creature of much joy to man— "
“And of much foolishness,” Hancock added.
“Of much fine foolishness,” Dick gravely amended.
“Let me ask Leo something,” Dar Hyal said. “Leo, why is it that a woman loves the man who beats her?”
“And doesn’t love the man who doesn’t beat her?” Leo countered.
“Precisely.”
“Well, Dar, you are partly right and mostly wrong.—Oh, I have learned about definitions from you fellows. You’ve cunningly left them out of your two propositions. Now I’ll put them in for you. A man who beats a woman he loves is a low type man. A woman who loves the man who beats her is a low type woman. No high type man beats the woman he loves. No high type woman,” and all unconsciously Leo’s eyes roved to Paula, “could love a man who beats her.”
“No, Leo,” Dick said, “I assure you I have never, never beaten Paula.”
“So you see, Dar,” Leo went on with flushing cheeks, “you are wrong. Paula loves Dick without being beaten.”
With what seemed pleased amusement beaming on his face, Dick turned to Paula as if to ask her silent approval of the lad’s words; but what Dick sought was the effect of the impact of such words under the circumstances he apprehended. In Paula’s eyes he thought he detected a flicker of something he knew not what. Graham’s face he found expressionless insofar as there was no apparent change of the expression of interest that had been there.
“Woman has certainly found her St. George tonight,” Graham complimented. “Leo, you shame me. Here I sit quietly by while you fight three dragons.”
“And such dragons,” Paula joined in. “If they drove O’Hay to drink, what will they do to you, Leo?”
“No knight of love can ever be discomfited by all the dragons in the world,” Dick said. “And the best of it, Leo, is in this case the dragons are more right than you think, and you are more right than they just the same.”
“Here’s a dragon that’s a good dragon, Leo, lad,” Terrence spoke up. “This dragon is going to desert his disreputable companions and come over on your side and be a Saint Terrence. And this Saint Terrence has a lovely question to ask you.”
“Let this dragon roar first,” Hancock interposed. “Leo, by all in love that is sweet and lovely, I ask you: why do lovers, out of jealousy, so often kill the woman they love?”
“Because they are hurt, because they are insane,” came the answer, “and because they have been unfortunate enough to love a woman so low in type that she could be guilty of making them jealous.”
“But, Leo, love will stray,” Dick prompted. “You must give a more sufficient answer.”
“True for Dick,” Terrence supplemented. “And it’s helping you I am to the full stroke of your sword. Love will stray among the highest types, and when it does in steps the green-eyed monster. Suppose the most perfect woman you can imagine should cease to love the man who does not beat her and come to love another man who loves her and will not beat her—what then? All highest types, mind you. Now up with your sword and slash into the dragons.”
“The first man will not kill her nor injure her in any way,” Leo asserted stoutly. “Because if he did he would not be the man you describe. He would not be high type, but low type.”
“You mean, he would get out of the way?” Dick asked, at the same time busying himself with a cigarette so that he might glance at no one’s face.
Leo nodded gravely.
“He would get out of the way, and he would make the way easy for her, and he would be very gentle with her.”
“Let us bring the argument right home,” Hancock said. “We’ll suppose you’re in love with Mrs. Forrest, and Mrs. Forrest is in love with you, and you run away together in the big limousine—”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t,” the boy blurted out, his cheeks burning.
“Leo, you are not complimentary,” Paula encouraged.
“It’s just supposing, Leo,” Hancock urged.
The boy’s embarrassment was pitiful, and his voice quivered, but he turned bravely to Dick and said:
“That is for Dick to answer.”
“And I’ll answer,” Dick said. “I wouldn’t kill Paula. Nor would I kill you, Leo. That wouldn’t be playing the game. No matter what I felt at heart, I’d say, ‘Bless you, my children.’ But just the same—” He paused, and the laughter signals in the corners of his eyes advertised a whimsey—"I’d say to myself that Leo was making a sad mistake. You see, he doesn’t know Paula.”
“She would be for interrupting his meditations on the stars,” Terrence smiled.
“Never, never, Leo, I promise you,” Paula exclaimed.
“There do you belie yourself, Mrs. Forrest,” Terrence assured her. “In the first place, you couldn’t help doing it. Besides, it’d be your bounden duty to do it. And, finally, if I may say so, as somewhat of an authority, when I was a mad young lover of a man, with my heart full of a woman and my eyes full of the stars, ’twas ever the dearest delight to be loved away from them by the woman out of my heart.”
“Terrence, if you keep on saying such lovely things,” cried Paula, ”I’ll run away with both you and Leo in the limousine.”
“Hurry the day,” said Terrence gallantly. “But leave space among your fripperies for a few books on the stars that Leo and I may be studying in odd moments.”
The combat ebbed away from Leo, and Dar Hyal and Hancock beset Dick.
“What do you mean by ’playing the game’?” Dar Hyal asked.
“Just what I said, just what Leo said,” Dick answered; and he knew that Paula’s boredom and nervousness had been banished for some time and that she was listening with an interest almost eager. “In my way of thinking, and in accord with my temperament, the most horrible spiritual suffering I can imagine would be to kiss a woman who endured my kiss.”
“Suppose she fooled you, say for old sake’s sake, or through desire not to hurt you, or pity for you?” Hancock propounded.
“It would be, to me, the unforgivable sin,” came Dick’s reply. “It would not be playing the game—for her. I cannot conceive the fairness, nor the satisfaction, of holding the woman one loves a moment longer than she loves to be held. Leo is very right. The drunken artisan, with his fists, may arouse and keep love alive in the breast of his stupid mate. But the higher human males, the males with some shadow of rationality, some glimmer of spirituality, cannot lay rough hands on love. With Leo, I would make the way easy for the woman, and I would be very gentle with her.”
“Then what becomes of your boasted monogamic marriage institution of Western civilization?” Dar Hyal asked.
And Hancock: “You argue for free love, then?”
“I can only answer with a hackneyed truism,” Dick said. “There can be no love that is not free. Always, please, remember the point of view is that of the higher types. And the point of view answers you, Dar. The vast majority of individuals must be held to law and labor by the monogamic institution, or by a stern, rigid marriage institution of some sort. They are unfit for marriage freedom or love freedom. Freedom of love, for them, would be merely license of promiscuity. Only such nations have risen and endured where God and the State have kept the people’s instincts in discipline and order.”
“Then you don’t believe in the marriage laws for say yourself,” Dar Hyal inquired, “while you do believe in them for other men?”
“I believe in them for all men. Children, family, career, society, the State—all these things make marriage, legal marriage, imperative. And by the same token that is why I believe in divorce. Men, all men, and women, all women, are capable of loving more than once, of having the old love die and of finding a new love born. The State cannot control love any more than can a man or a woman. When one falls in love one falls in love, and that’s all he knows about it. There it is— throbbing, sighing, singing, thrilling love. But the State can control license.”
“It is a complicated free love that you stand for,” Hancock criticised. “True, and for the reason that man, living in society, is a most complicated animal.”
“But there are men, lovers, who would die at the loss of their loved one,” Leo surprised the table by his initiative. “They would die if she died, they would die—oh so more quickly—if she lived and loved another.”
“Well, they’ll have to keep on dying as they have always died in the past,” Dick answered grimly. “And no blame attaches anywhere for their deaths. We are so made that our hearts sometimes stray.”
“My heart would never stray,” Leo asserted proudly, unaware that all at the table knew his secret. “I could never love twice, I know.”
“True for you, lad,” Terrence approved. “The voice of all true lovers is in your throat. ’Tis the absoluteness of love that is its joy—how did Shelley put it?—or was it Keats?—’All a wonder and a wild delight.’ Sure, a miserable skinflint of a half-baked lover would it be that could dream there was aught in woman form one-thousandth part as sweet, as ravishing and enticing, as glorious and wonderful as his own woman that he could ever love again.”
And as they passed out from the dining room, Dick, continuing the conversation with Dar Hyal, was wondering whether Paula would kiss him good night or slip off to bed from the piano. And Paula, talking to Leo about his latest sonnet which he had shown her, was wondering if she could kiss Dick, and was suddenly greatly desirous to kiss him, she knew not why.
There was little talk that same evening after dinner. Paula, singing at the piano, disconcerted Terrence in the midst of an apostrophe on love. He quit a phrase midmost to listen to the something new he heard in her voice, then slid noiselessly across the room to join Leo at full length on the bearskin. Dar Hyal and Hancock likewise abandoned the discussion, each isolating himself in a capacious chair. Graham, seeming least attracted, browsed in a current magazine, but Dick observed that he quickly ceased turning the pages. Nor did Dick fail to catch the new note in Paula’s voice and to endeavor to sense its meaning.
When she finished the song the three sages strove to tell her all at the same time that for once she had forgotten herself and sung out as they had always claimed she could. Leo lay without movement or speech, his chin on his two hands, his face transfigured.
“It’s all this talk on love,” Paula laughed, “and all the lovely thoughts Leo and Terrence ... and Dick have put into my head.”
Terrence shook his long mop of iron-gray hair.
“Into your heart you’d be meaning,” he corrected. “’Tis the very heart and throat of love that are yours this night. And for the first time, dear lady, have I heard the full fair volume that is yours. Never again plaint that your voice is thin. Thick it is, and round it is, as a great rope, a great golden rope for the mooring of argosies in the harbors of the Happy Isles.”
“And for that I shall sing you theGloria,"she answered, “to celebrate the slaying of the dragons by Saint Leo, by Saint Terrence ... and, of course, by Saint Richard.”
Dick, missing nothing of the talk, saved himself from speech by crossing to the concealed sideboard and mixing for himself a Scotch and soda.
While Paula sang theGloria,he sat on one of the couches, sipping his drink and remembering keenly. Once before he had heard her sing like that—in Paris, during their swift courtship, and directly afterward, during their honeymoon on theAll Away.
A little later, using his empty glass in silent invitation to Graham, he mixed highballs for both of them, and, when Graham had finished his, suggested to Paula that she and Graham sing the “Gypsy Trail.”
She shook her head and beganDas Kraut Ver-gessenheit.
“She was not a true woman, she was a terrible woman,” the song’s close wrung from Leo. “And he was a true lover. She broke his heart, but still he loved her. He cannot love again because he cannot forget his love for her.”
“And now, Red Cloud, the Song of the Acorn,” Paula said, smiling over to her husband. “Put down your glass, and be good, and plant the acorns.”
Dick lazily hauled himself off the couch and stood up, shaking his head mutinously, as if tossing a mane, and stamping ponderously with his feet in simulation of Mountain Lad.
“I’ll have Leo know that he is not the only poet and love-knight on the ranch. Listen to Mountain Lad’s song, all wonder and wild delight, Terrence, and more. Mountain Lad doesn’t moon about the loved one. He doesn’t moon at all. He incarnates love, and rears right up in meeting and tells them so. Listen to him!”
Dick filled the room and shook the air with wild, glad, stallion nickering; and then, with mane-tossing and foot-pawing, chanted:
“Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetimes through their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.”
It was the first time the sages of the madrono grove had heard Dick’s song, and they were loud in applause. Hancock took it for a fresh start in the discussion, and was beginning to elaborate a biologic Bergsonian definition of love, when he was stopped by Terrence, who had noticed the pain that swept across Leo’s face.
“Go on, please, dear lady,” Terrence begged. “And sing of love, only of love; for it is my experience that I meditate best upon the stars to the accompaniment of a woman’s voice.”
A little later, Oh Joy, entering the room, waited till Paula finished a song, then moved noiselessly to Graham and handed him a telegram. Dick scowled at the interruption.
“Very important—I think,” the Chinese explained to him.
“Who took it?” Dick demanded.
“Me—I took it,” was the answer. “Night clerk at Eldorado call on telephone. He say important. I take it.”
“It is, fairly so,” Graham spoke up, having finished reading the message. “Can I get a train out to-night for San Francisco, Dick?”
“Oh Joy, come back a moment,” Dick called, looking at his watch. “What train for San Francisco stops at Eldorado?”
“Eleven-ten,” came the instant information. “Plenty time. Not too much. I call chauffeur?”
Dick nodded.
“You really must jump out to-night?” he asked Graham.
“Really. It is quite important. Will I have time to pack?”
Dick gave a confirmatory nod to Oh Joy, and said to Graham:
“Just time to throw the needful into a grip.” He turned to Oh Joy. “Is Oh My up yet?”
“Yessr.”
“Send him to Mr. Graham’s room to help, and let me know as soon as the machine is ready. No limousine. Tell Saunders to take the racer.”
“One fine big strapping man, that,” Terrence commented, after Graham had left the room.
They had gathered about Dick, with the exception of Paula, who remained at the piano, listening.
“One of the few men I’d care to go along with, hell for leather, on a forlorn hope or anything of that sort,” Dick said. “He was on theNethermerewhen she went ashore at Pango in the ’97 hurricane. Pango is just a strip of sand, twelve feet above high water mark, a lot of cocoanuts, and uninhabited. Forty women among the passengers, English officers’ wives and such. Graham had a bad arm, big as a leg— snake bite.
“It was a thundering sea. Boats couldn’t live. They smashed two and lost both crews. Four sailors volunteered in succession to carry a light line ashore. And each man, in turn, dead at the end of it, was hauled back on board. While they were untying the last one, Graham, with an arm like a leg, stripped for it and went to it. And he did it, although the pounding he got on the sand broke his bad arm and staved in three ribs. But he made the line fast before he quit. In order to haul the hawser ashore, six more volunteered to go in on Evan’s line to the beach. Four of them arrived. And only one woman of the forty was lost—she died of heart disease and fright.
“I asked him about it once. He was as bad as an Englishman. All I could get out of the beggar was that the recovery was uneventful. Thought that the salt water, the exercise, and the breaking of the bone had served as counter-irritants and done the arm good.”
Oh Joy and Graham entered the room from opposite ends. Dick saw that Graham’s first questing glance was for Paula.
“All ready, sir,” Oh Joy announced.
Dick prepared to accompany his guest outside to the car; but Paula evidenced her intention of remaining in the house. Graham started over to her to murmur perfunctory regrets and good-by.
And she, warm with what Dick had just told of him, pleasured at the goodly sight of him, dwelling with her eyes on the light, high poise of head, the careless, sun-sanded hair, and the lightness, almost debonaireness, of his carriage despite his weight of body and breadth of shoulders. As he drew near to her, she centered her gaze on the long gray eyes whose hint of drooping lids hinted of boyish sullenness. She waited for the expression of sullenness to vanish as the eyes lighted with the smile she had come to know so well.
What he said was ordinary enough, as were her regrets; but in his eyes, as he held her hand a moment, was the significance which she had unconsciously expected and to which she replied with her own eyes. The same significance was in the pressure of the momentary handclasp. All unpremeditated, she responded to that quick pressure. As he had said, there was little need for speech between them.
As their hands fell apart, she glanced swiftly at Dick; for she had learned much, in their dozen years together, of his flashes of observance, and had come to stand in awe of his almost uncanny powers of guessing facts from nuances, and of linking nuances into conclusions often startling in their thoroughness and correctness. But Dick, his shoulder toward her, laughing over some quip of Hancock, was just turning his laughter-crinkled eyes toward her as he started to accompany Graham.
No, was her thought; surely Dick had seen nothing of the secret little that had been exchanged between them. It had been very little, very quick—a light in the eyes, a muscular quiver of the fingers, and no lingering. How could Dick have seen or sensed? Their eyes had certainly been hidden from Dick, likewise their clasped hands, for Graham’s back had been toward him.
Just the same, she wished she had not made that swift glance at Dick. She was conscious of a feeling of guilt, and the thought of it hurt her as she watched the two big men, of a size and blondness, go down the room side by side. Of what had she been guilty? she asked herself. Why should she have anything to hide? Yet she was honest enough to face the fact and accept, without quibble, that she had something to hide. And her cheeks burned at the thought that she was being drifted into deception.
“I won’t be but a couple of days,” Graham was saying as he shook hands with Dick at the car.
Dick saw the square, straight look of his eyes, and recognized the firmness and heartiness of his gripping hand. Graham half began to say something, then did not; and Dick knew he had changed his mind when he said:
“I think, when I get back, that I’ll have to pack.”
“But the book,” Dick protested, inwardly cursing himself for the leap of joy which had been his at the other’s words.
“That’s just why,” Graham answered. “I’ve got to get it finished. It doesn’t seem I can work like you do. The ranch is too alluring. I can’t get down to the book. I sit over it, and sit over it, but the confounded meadowlarks keep echoing in my ears, and I begin to see the fields, and the redwood canyons, and Selim. And after I waste an hour, I give up and ring for Selim. And if it isn’t that, it’s any one of a thousand other enchantments.”
He put his foot on the running-board of the pulsing car and said, “Well, so long, old man.”
“Come back and make a stab at it,” urged Dick. “If necessary, we’ll frame up a respectable daily grind, and I’ll lock you in every morning until you’ve done it. And if you don’t do your work all day, all day you’ll stay locked in. I’ll make you work.—Got cigarettes?—matches?”
“Right O.”
“Let her go, Saunders,” Dick ordered the chauffeur; and the car seemed to leap out into the darkness from the brilliantly lighted porte cochére.
Back in the house, Dick found Paula playing to the madrono sages, and ensconced himself on the couch to wait and wonder if she would kiss him good night when bedtime came. It was not, he recognized, as if they made a regular schedule of kissing. It had never been like that. Often and often he did not see her until midday, and then in the presence of guests. And often and often, she slipped away to bed early, disturbing no one with a good night kiss to her husband which might well hint to them that their bedtime had come.
No, Dick concluded, whether or not she kissed him on this particular night it would be equally without significance. But still he wondered.
She played on and sang on interminably, until at last he fell asleep. When he awoke he was alone in the room. Paula and the sages had gone out quietly. He looked at his watch. It marked one o’clock. She had played unusually late, he knew; for he knew she had just gone. It was the cessation of music and movement that had awakened him.
And still he wondered. Often he napped there to her playing, and always, when she had finished, she kissed him awake and sent him to bed. But this night she had not. Perhaps, after all, she was coming back. He lay and drowsed and waited. The next time he looked at his watch, it was two o’clock. She had not come back.
He turned off the lights, and as he crossed the house, pressed off the hall lights as he went, while the many unimportant little nothings, almost of themselves, ranged themselves into an ordered text of doubt and conjecture that he could not refrain from reading.
On his sleeping porch, glancing at his barometers and thermometers, her laughing face in the round frame caught his eyes, and, standing before it, even bending closer to it, he studied her long.
“Oh, well,” he muttered, as he drew up the bedcovers, propped the pillows behind him and reached for a stack of proofsheets, “whatever it is I’ll have to play it.”
He looked sidewise at her picture.
“But, oh, Little Woman, I wish you wouldn’t,” was the sighed good night.