“No, Gavan, I will not go. I will speak my mind. This is my hour. The time has come for me to speak my mind. Let’s have the truth; truth at all costs is my motto. A noble and generous action. But, my dear,” he leaned his head toward her and spoke in a loud whisper, “you’re well rid of him, you know—well rid of him. Don’t try to patch it up. Don’t come in that hope. So like a woman—I know, I know. But give it up; that’s my advice. Give it up. He’s a poor fellow—a very poor fellow.He wouldn’t make you happy; just take that from me—a friend, a true friend. He wouldn’t make any woman happy. He’s a poor creature, and a false creature, and I’ll say this,” the captain, now trembling violently, burst into tears: “if he has been a false lover to you he has been a bad son to me.”
With both hands, sobbing, he clung to her, while, with a look of sick distress, Gavan tried, not too violently, to draw him from his hold on her.
Eppie had not flushed. “Don’t mind,” she said, glancing at the helpless son, “he has mixed it up, you see.” And, bending on the captain eyes severe in kindly intention, like the eyes of a nurse firmly administering a potion, “You are mistaken about Gavan. It was another man who jilted me. Now let him take you up-stairs. You are ill.”
But the captain still clung, she, erect in her spare young strength, showing no shrinking of repulsion. “No, no,” he said; “you always try to shield him. A woman’s way. He won your heart, and then he broke it, as he has mine. He has no heart, or he’d take you now. Give it up. Don’t come after him. Sir, how dare you! I won’t submit to this. How dare you, Sir!” Gavan had wrenched him away, and in a flare of silly passion he struck at him again and again, like a furious child. It was a wrestle with the animal, the vegetable thing, the pinioning of vicious tentacles. Mrs. Arley fluttered in helpless consternation, while Eppie, firm and adequate, assisted Gavan in securing the wildly striking hands. Caught, held, haled toward the door, the captain became,with amazing rapidity, all smiles and placidity.
“Gently, gently, my dear boy. This is unseemly, you know, very childish indeed. Temper! Temper! You get it from me, no doubt—though your mother could be very spiteful at moments. I’ll come now. I’ve said my say. Well rid of him, my dear, well rid of him,” he nodded from the door.
“Eppie! My dear!” cried Mrs. Arley, when father and son had disappeared. “How unutterably hateful. I am more sorry for him than for you, Eppie. His face!”
Eppie was shrugging up her shoulders and straightening herself as though the captain’s grasp still threatened her.
“Hateful indeed; but trivial. Gavan understands that I understand. We must make him feel that it’s nothing.”
“He’s quite mad, horrible old man.”
“Not quite; more uncomfortably muddled than mad. We must make him see that we think nothing of it,” Eppie repeated. She turned to Gavan, who entered as she spoke, still with his sick flush and showing a speechless inability to frame apologies.
“This is what it is to have echoes, Gavan,” she said. “My little misfortunes have reached your father’s ears.” She went to him, she took his hand, she smiled at him, all her radiance recovered, a garment of warmth and ease to cover the shivering the captain’s words might have made. “Please don’t mind. I wasn’t a bit bothered, really.”
He could almost have wept for the relief of hersmile, her sanity. The linking of their names in such an unthinkable connection had given him the nausea qualm of a terrifying obsession. He could find now only trite words in which to tell her that she was very kind and that he was more sorry than he could say.
“But you mustn’t be. It was such an obvious muddle for a twisted mind. He knew,” said Eppie, still smiling with the healing radiance, “that I had been jilted, and he knew that I was very fond of you, and he put together the one and one make two that happened to be before him.” She saw that his distress had been far greater than her own, that she now gave him relief.
Afterward, as she and Mrs. Arley sped away, her own reaction from the healing attitude showed in a rather grim silence. She leaned back in the swift, keen air, her arms folded in the fullness of her capes.
But Mrs. Arley could not repress her own accumulations of feeling. “My dear Eppie,” she said, her hand on her shoulder, and with an almost more than maternal lack of reticence, “I want you to marry him. Don’t glare Medusa at me. I hate tact and silences. Heaven knows I would have scouted the idea of such a match for you before seeing him to-day. But my hard old heart is touched. He is such a dear; so lonely. It’s a nice little place, too, and there is some money. Jim Grainger is too drab-colored a person for you,—all his force, all his sheckles, can’t gild him,—and Kenneth Langley is penniless. This dear creature is not a bit drab andnot quite penniless. And you are big enough to marry a man who needs you rather than one you need.Willyou think of it, Eppie?”
“Grace, you are worse than Captain Palairet,” said Eppie, whose eyes were firmly fixed on the neat leather back of the chauffeur in front of them.
“Don’t be cross, Eppie. Why should you mind my prattle?”
“Because I care for him so much.”
“Well, that’s what I say.”
“No; not as I mean it.”
“Heof course cares, as I mean it.”
Eppie did not pause over this.
“It’s something different, quite different, from anything else in the world. It can’t be talked about like that. Please, Grace, never, never be like Captain Palairet again.Youhaven’t softening of the brain. I shall lose Gavan if my friends and his father have such delusions too openly.”
GAVAN went down the noisy, dirty thoroughfare, looking for the turning which would lead him, so the last policeman consulted said, to Eppie’s little square.
It was a May day, suddenly clear after rain, liquid mud below, and above a sharply blue sky, looking its relentless contrast at the reeking, sordid streets, the ugly, hurrying life of the wide thoroughfare.
All along the gutter was a vociferous fringe of dripping fruit-and food-barrows, these more haphazard conveniences faced by a line of gaudy, glaring shops.
The blue above was laced with a tangle of tram-wires and cut with the jagged line of chimney-pots.
The roaring trams, the glaring shops, seemed part of a cruel machinery creative of life, and the grim air of permanence, the width and solidity of the great thoroughfare, were more oppressive to Gavan’s nerves, its ugliness fiercer, more menacing, than the narrower meanness of the streets where life seemed to huddle with more despondency.
In one of these he found that he had, apparently, lost his way.
A random turn brought him to a squalid court with sloping, wet pavement and open doors disgorging, from inner darkness, swarms of children. They ran; tottered on infantile, bandy legs; locked in scuffling groups, screaming shrilly, or squatted on the ground, absorbed in some game.
Gavan surveyed them vaguely as he wandered seeking an outlet. His eye showed neither shrinking nor tenderness, rather a bleak, hard, unmoved pity, like that of the sky above. He was as alien from that swarming, vivid life as the sky; but, worn as he was with months of nervous overstrain, he felt rising within him now and then a faint sense of nausea such as one might feel in contemplating a writhing clot of maggots.
He threaded his way among them all, and at a corner of the court found a narrow exit. This covered passage led, apparently, to another and fouler court, and emerging from it, coming suddenly face to face with him, was Eppie. She was as startling, seen here, as “a lily in the mouth of Tartarus,” and he had a shock of delight in her mere aspect. For Eppie was as exquisite as a flower. Her garments had in no way adapted themselves to mud and misery. Her rough dress of Japanese blue showed at the open neck of its jacket a white linen blouse; her short, kilted skirt swung with the grace of petals; her little upturned cap of blue made her look like a Rosalind ready for a background of woodland glade, streams, and herds of deer.
And here she stood, under that cruel sky, among the unimaginable ugliness of this City of Dreadful Night.
In her great surprise she did not smile, saying, as she gave him her hand, “Gavan! by all that’s wonderful!”
“You asked me to come and see you when I was next in London.”
“So I did.”
“So here I am. I had a day off by chance; some business that had to be seen to.”
“And your father?”
“Slowly going.”
“And you have come down here, for how long?”
“For as long as you’ll keep me. I needn’t go back till night.”
Her eye now wandered away from him to the maggots, one of whom, Gavan observed, had attached itself to her skirt, while a sufficiently dense crowd surrounded them, staring.
“You have a glimpse of our children,” said Eppie, surveying them with, not exactly a maternal, but, as it were, a fraternal eye of affectionate familiarity.
“What’s that, Annie?” in answer to a husky whisper. “Do I expect you to-night? Rather! Is that the doll, Ada? Well, I can’t say that you’ve kept it very tidy. Where’s its pinafore?” She took the soiled object held up to her and examined its garments. “Where’s its petticoat?”
“Please, Miss, Hemly took them.”
“Took them away from you?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“For her own doll, I suppose.”
“Yes, Miss.”
Eppie cogitated. “I’ll speak to Emily about it presently. You shall have them back.”
“Please, Miss, I called her a thief.”
“You spoke the truth. How are you, Billy? You look decidedly better. Gavan, my hands are full for the next hour or so and I can’t even offer to take you with me, for I’m going to sick people. But I shall be back and through with all my work by tea-time, if you don’t mind going to my place and waiting. You’ll find Maude Allen there. She lives down here, and with me when I am here. She is a nice girl, though she will talk your head off.”
“How do I find her? I don’t mind waiting.”
“You follow this to the end, take the first turning to the right, and that will bring you to my place. I’ll meet you there at five.”
Gavan, thus directed, made his way to the dingy little house occupied by the group of energetic women whom Eppie joined yearly for her three months of—dissipation? he asked himself, amused by her variegated vigor.
The dingy little house looked on a dingy little square—shell of former respectable affluence from which the higher form of life had shriveled. The sooty trees were thickly powdered with young green, and uneven patches of rough, unkempt grass showed behind broken iron railings. A cat’s-meat man called his dangling wares along the street, and Gavan, noticing a thin and furtive cat, that stole from a window-ledge, stopped him and bought a large three-penny-worth, upon which he left the cat regaling itself with an odd, fastidious ferocity.
He entered another world when he entered Eppie’s sitting-room. Here was life at its most austerelysweet. Books lined the walls, bowls of primroses and delicate Japanese bronzes set above their shelves; chintz-covered chairs were drawn before the fire; the latest reviews lay on a table, and on the piano stood open music; there were wide windows in the little room, and crocuses, growing in flat, earthenware dishes, blew out their narrow chalices against the sunlit muslin curtains.
Miss Allen sat sewing near the crocuses, and, shy and voluble, rose to greet him. She was evidently accustomed to Eppie’s guests—accustomed, too, perhaps, to taking them off her hands, for though she was shy her volubility showed a familiarity with the situation. She was almost as funny a contrast to Eppie as the slum children had been an ugly one. She wore a spare, drab-colored skirt and a cotton shirt, its high, hard collar girt about by a red tie that revealed bone buttons before and behind. Her sleek, fair hair, relentlessly drawn back, looked like a varnish laid upon her head. Her features, at once acute and kindly, were sharp and pink.
She was sewing on solid and distressingly ugly materials.
“Yes, I am usually at home. Miss Gifford is the head and I am the hands, you see,” she smiled, casting quick, upward glances at the long, pale young man in his chair near the fire. “Miss Henderson, Miss Grey, and I live here all year round, and I do so look forward to Miss Gifford’s coming. Oh, yes, it’s a most interesting life. Do you do anything of the sort? Are you going to take up a club? Perhaps you are going into the Church?”
Miss Allen asked her swift succession of questions as if in a mild desperateness.
Gavan admitted that his interest was wholly in Miss Gifford.
“Sheisinteresting,” Miss Allen, all comprehension, agreed. “So many people find her inspiring. Do you know Mr. Grainger, the M.P.? He comes here constantly. He is a cousin, you know. He has known her, of course, ever since she was a child. I think it’s very probable that she influences his political life—oh, quite in a right sense, I mean. He is such a conscientious man—everybody says that. And then she isn’t at all eccentric, you know, as so many fashionable women who come down here are; they do give one so much trouble when they are like that,—all sorts of fads that one has to manage to get on with. She isn’t at all faddish. And she isn’t sentimental, either. I think the sentimental ones are worst—for the people, especially, giving them all sorts of foolish ideas. And it’s not that she doesn’tcare. She cares such a lot. That’s the secret of her not getting discouraged, you see. She never loses her spirit.”
“Is it such discouraging work?” Gavan questioned from his chair. With his legs crossed, his hat and stick held on his knee, he surveyed Miss Allen and the crocuses.
“Well, not to me,” she answered; “but that’s very different, for I have religious faith. Miss Gifford hasn’t that, so of course she must care a great deal to make up for it. When one hasn’t a firm faith it is far more difficult, I always think, to seeany hope in it all. I think she would find it far easier if she had that. She can’t resign herself to things. She is rather hot-tempered at times,” Miss Allen added, with one of her sharp, shy glances.
Gavan, amused by the idea that Eppie lacked religious faith, inquired whether the settlement were religious in intention, and Miss Allen sighed a little in answering no,—Miss Grey, indeed, was a Positivist. “But we Anglicans are very broad, you know,” she said. “I can work in perfectly with them all—better with Miss Grey and Miss Gifford than with Miss Henderson, who is very, very Low. Miss Gifford goes in more for social conditions and organization—trades-unions, all that sort of thing; that’s where she finds Mr. Grainger so much of a help, I think.” And he gathered from Miss Allen’s further conversation, from its very manner of vague though admiring protest, a clearer conception of Eppie’s importance down here. To Miss Allen, she evidently embodied a splendid, pagan force, ambiguous in its splendor. He saw her slightly shrinking vision of an intent combatant; no loving sister of charity, but a young Bellona, the latest weapons of sociological warfare in her hands, its latest battle-cry on her lips. And all for what? thought Gavan, while, with a sense of contrasting approval, he looked at Miss Allen’s tidy little head against the sunlit crocuses and watched the harmless occupation of her hands. All for life, more life; the rousing of desire; the struggling to higher forms of consciousness. She was in it, the strife, the struggle. He had seen on her face to-day, with all its surprise, perhaps itsgladness, that alien look of grave preoccupation that passed from him to the destinies she touched. In thinking of it all he felt particularly at peace, though there was the irony of his assurance that Eppie’s efforts among this suffering life where he found her only resulted in a fiercer hold on suffering. Physical degradation and its resultant moral apathy were by no means the most unendurable of human calamities. Miss Allen’s anodynes—the mere practical petting, soothing, telling of pretty tales—were, in their very short-sightedness, more fitted to the case.
Miss Allen little thought to what a context her harmless prattle was being adjusted. She would have been paralyzed with horror could she have known that to the gentle young man, sitting there so unalarmingly, she herself was only a rather simple symptom of life that he was quietly studying. In so far from suspecting, her shyness went from her; he was so unalarming—differing in this from so many people—that she found it easy to talk to him. And she still had a happy little hope of a closer community of interest than he had owned to. He looked, she thought, very High Church. Perhaps he was in the last stages of conversion.
She had talked on for nearly an hour when another visitor was announced. This proved to be a young man slightly known to Gavan, a graceful, mellifluous youth, whose artificiality of manner and great personal beauty suggested a mingling of absinthe and honey. People had rather bracketed Gavan and Basil Mayburn together; one could easily deal with both as lumped in the same category,—charmingdrifters, softly disdainful of worldly aims and efforts. Mayburn himself took sympathy for granted, though disconcerted at times by finding his grasp of the older man to be on a sliding, slippery surface. Palairet had, to be sure, altogether the proper appreciations of art and literature, the rhythm of highly evolved human intercourse; the aroma distilled for the esthete from the vast tragic comedy of life; so that he had never quite satisfied himself as to why he could get no nearer on this common footing. Palairet was always charming, always interested, always courteous; but one’s hold did slip.
And to Gavan, Basil Mayburn, with his fluent ecstasies, seemed a sojourner in a funny half-way house. To Mayburn the hallucination of life was worth while esthetically. His own initial appeal to life had been too fundamentally spiritual for the beautiful to be more to him than a second-rate illusion.
Miss Allen greeted Mr. Mayburn with a coolness that at once discriminated for Gavan between her instinctive liking for himself and her shrinking from a man who perplexed and displeased her.
Mayburn was all glad sweetness: delighted to see Miss Allen; delighted to see Palairet; delighted to wait in their company for the delightful Miss Gifford; and, turning to Miss Allen, he went on to say, as a thing that would engage her sympathies, that he had just come from a service at the Oratory.
“I often go there,” he said; “one gets, as nowhere else that I know of in London, the quintessence of aspiration—the age-long yearning of the world. How are your schemes for having that little church built down here succeeding? I do so believe in it. Don’t let any ugly sect steal a march on you.”
Miss Allen primly replied that the plans for the church were prospering; and adding that Miss Gifford would be here in a moment and that she must leave them, she gathered up her work and departed with some emphasis.
“Nice, dear little creature, that,” said Mayburn, “though she does so dislike me. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I never quite know how far her Anglicanism goes; such a pity that it doesn’t go a little further and carry her into a nunnery of the Catholic Church. She is the nun type. She ought to be done up in their delicious costume; it would lend her the flavor she lacks so distressingly now. Did you notice her collar and her hair? Astonishing the way that Eppie makes use of all these funny,guindéecreatures whom she gets hold of down here. Have you ever seen Miss Grey?—dogmatic, utilitarian, strangely ugly Miss Grey, another nun type corrupted by our silly modern conditions. She reeks of Comte and looks like a don. And all the rest of them,—the solemn humanitarians, the frothy socialists, the worldly, benign old ecclesiastics,—Eppie works them all; she has a genius for administration. It’s an art in her. It almost consoles one for seeing her wasted down here for so much of the year.”
“Why wasted?” Gavan queried. “She enjoys it.”
“Exactly. That’s the alleviation. Wasted forus, I mean. You have known her for a long time, haven’t you, Palairet?”
Gavan, irked by the question and by the familiarity of Mayburn’s references to their absent hostess, answered dryly that he had known Miss Gifford since childhood; and Mayburn, all tact, passed at once to less personal topics, inquiring with a new earnestness whether Palairet had seen Selby’s Goya, and expatiating on its exquisite horror until the turning of a key in the hall-door, quick steps on the stairs leading up past the sitting-room, announced Eppie’s arrival.
She was with them in a moment, cap and jacket doffed, her muddy shoes changed for slender patent-leather, fresh in her white blouse. She greeted Mayburn, turning to Gavan with, “I’m so glad you waited. You shall both have tea directly.”
With all her crisp kindliness, Gavan fancied a change in her since the greeting of an hour and a half before. Things hadn’t gone well with her. And he could flatter himself, also, with the suspicion that she was vexed at finding their tête-à-tête interrupted.
Mayburn loitered about the room after her while she straightened the shade on the student’s lamp, just brought in, and made the tea, telling her about people, about what was going on in the only world that counted, telling her about Chrissie Bentworth’s astounding elopement, and, finally, about the Goya. “You really must see it soon,” he assured her.
Eppie, adjusting the flame of her kettle, said that she didn’t want to see it.
“You don’t care for Goya, dear lady?”
“Not just now.”
“Well, of course I don’t mean just now. I mean after you have burned out this particular flame. But, really, it’s a sensation before you and you mustn’t miss having it. An exquisite thing. Horror made beautiful.”
“I don’t want to see it made beautiful,” Eppie, with cheerful rudeness, objected.
“Now that,” said Mayburn, drawing up to the tea-table with an appreciative glance for the simple but inviting fare spread upon it—“now that is just where I always must argue with you. Don’t you agree with me, Palairet, that life is beautiful—that it’s only in terms of beauty that it has significance?”
“If you happen to see it so,” Gavan ambiguously assented.
“Exactly; I accept your amendment—if you happen to have the good fortune to see it so; if you have the faculty that gives the vision; if, like Siegfried, the revealing dragon’s-blood has touched your lips. Eppie has the gift and shouldn’t wilfully atrophy it. She shouldn’t refuse to share the vision of the Supreme Artist, to whom all horror and tragedy are parts of the picture that his eternal joy contemplates; she should not refuse to listen with the ear of the Supreme Musician, to whom all the discords that each one of us is, before we taste the dragon’s-blood,—for what is man but a dissonance, as our admirable Nietzsche says,—to whom all these discords melt into the perfect phrase. All art, alltruth is there. I’m rather dithyrambic, but, in your more reticent way, you agree with me, don’t you, Palairet?”
Eppie’s eye, during this speech, had turned with observant irony upon Gavan.
“How do you like your echo, Gavan?” she inquired, and she answered for him: “Of course he agrees, but in slightly different terms. He doesn’t care a fig about the symphony or about the Eternal Goya. There isn’t a touch of the ‘lyric rapture’ about him. Now pray don’t ask him to define his own conceptions, and drink your tea. And don’t say one word to me, either, about your gigantic, Bohemian deity. You have spoken of Nietzsche, and I know too well what you are coming to: the Apollonian spirit of the world of Appearances in which the Dionysiac spirit of Things-in-Themselves mirrors its vital ecstasy. Spare me, I’m not at all in the humor to see horror in terms of loveliness.”
“Ay de mi!” Mayburn murmured, “you make me feel that I’m still a dissonance when you talk like this.”
“A very wholesome realization.”
“You are cross with life to-day, and therefore with me, its poor little appreciator.”
“I’m never cross with life.”
“Only with me, then?”
“Only with you, to-day.”
Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup withthe business-like air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside trivialities.
Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in the Eternal Goya.
“Don’t, don’t, I pray of you, let him take the color out of life for you,” Mayburn pleaded, turning from this rebuff, tea-cup in hand, to Eppie; and Eppie, with a rather grim smile, again full of reminiscences for Gavan, declared that neither of them could take anything out of it for her.
She kept, after that, the talk in pleasant enough shallows; but Mayburn fancied, more than once, that he heard the grating of his keel on an unpropitious shore. Eppie didn’t want him to-day, that was becoming evident; she wasn’t going to push him off into decorative sailing. And presently, wondering a little if his tact had already been too long at fault, wondering anew about the degree of intimacy between the childhood friends, who had, evidently, secrets in which he did not share, he gracefully departed.
Eppie leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and closed her eyes as though to give herself the relief of a long silence.
Her hair softly silhouetted against the green shade and the flickering illumination of the firelight upon her, her passive face showed a stern wistfulness. Things had gone wrong with her.
Looking at her, Gavan’s memory went back to the last time they had been together, alone, in firelight, to his impulse and her startlingly acute interpretationof it. Her very aspect now, her closed eyes and folded arms, seemed to show him how completely she disowned, for both of them, even the memory of such an unfitting episode. More keenly than ever he recognized the fineness in her, the generosity, the willingness to outlive trifles, to put them away forever; and the contagion of her somber peace enveloped him.
She remarked presently, not opening her eyes: “I should like to make a bon-fire of all the pictures in the world, all the etchings, the carvings, the tapestries, the bric-à-brac in general,—and Basil Mayburn, in sackcloth and ashes, should light it.”
“What puritanic savagery, Eppie!”
“I prefer the savage puritan to the Basil Mayburn type; at least I do just now.”
“What’s the matter?” Gavan asked, after a little pause.
“Do I show it so evidently?” she asked, with a faint smile. “Everything is the matter.”
“What, in particular, has gone wrong?”
Eppie did not reply at first, and he guessed that she chose only to show him a lesser trouble when she said, “I’ve had a great quarrel with Miss Grey, for one thing.”
“The positivistic lady?”
“Yes; did Maude tell you that? She really is a very first-rate person—and runs this place; but I lost my temper with her—a stupid thing to do, and not suddenly, either, which made it the less excusable.”
“Are your theories so different that you came to a clash?”
“Of course they are different, though it was apparently only over a matter of practical administration that we fought.” Eppie drew a long breath, opening her eyes. “I shall stay on here this spring—I usually go to my cousin Alicia for the season. But one can’t expect things to go as one wants them unless one keeps one’s hand on the engine most of the time. She has almost a right to consider me a meddling outsider, I suppose. I shall stay on till the end of the summer.”
“And smash Miss Grey?”
Eppie, aware of his amusement, turned an unresentful glance upon him.
“No, don’t think me merely brutally dominant. I really like her. I only want to use her to the best advantage.”
At this he broke into a laugh. “Not brutally dominant, I know; but I’m sorry for Miss Grey.”
“Miss Grey can well take care of herself, I assure you.”
“What else has gone wrong?”
Again Eppie chose something less wrong to show him. “The factory where some of my club-girls work has shut down half of its machinery. There will be a great deal of suffering. And we have pulled them above a flippant acceptance of state relief.”
“And because you have pulled them up, they are to suffer more?”
“Exactly, if you choose to put it so,” said Eppie.
He saw that she had determined that he should not frighten her again, or, at all events, that he should never see it if he did frighten her; and he had himself determined that his mist should never again close round her. She should not see, even if she guessed at it pretty clearly, the interpretation that he put upon the afternoon’s frictions and failures, and, on the plane of a matter-of-fact agreement as to practice, he drew her on to talk of her factory-girls, of the standards of wages, the organization of woman’s labor, so that she presently said, “What a pleasure it is to hear you talking sense, Gavan!”
“You have heard me talk a great deal of nonsense, I’m sure.”
“A great deal. Worse than Basil Mayburn’s.”
“I saw too clearly to-day the sorry figure I must have cut in your eyes. I have learned to hold my tongue. When one can only say things that sound particularly silly that is an obvious duty.”
“I am glad to hear you use the word, my dear Gavan; use it, even though it means nothing to you.Glissez mortel, n’appuyez passhould be your motto for a time; then, after some wholesome skating about on what seems the deceptive, glittering surface of things you will find, perhaps, that it isn’t an abyss the ice stretches over, but a firm meadow, the ice melted off it and no more need of skates.”
He was quite willing that she should so see his case; he was easier to live with, no doubt, on this assumption of his curability.
Eppie, still leaning back, still with folded arms, had once more closed her eyes, involuntarily sighing,as though under her own words the haunting echo of the abyss had sounded for her.
She had not yet shown him what the real trouble was, and he asked her now, in this second lull of their talk, “What else is there besides the factory-girls and Miss Grey?”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “You guess that there is something else.”
“I can see it.”
“And you are sorry?”
“Sorry, dear Eppie? Of course.”
“It’s a child, a cripple,” said Eppie. “It had been ill for a long time, but we thought that we could save it. It died this morning. I didn’t know. I didn’t get there in time. I only found out after leaving you this afternoon. And it cried for me.” She had turned her head from him as it leaned against the chair, but he saw the tears slowly rolling down her cheeks.
“I am so sorry, dear Eppie,” he said.
“The most darling child, Gavan.” His grave pity had brought him near and it gave her relief to speak. “It had such a wistful, dear little face. I used to spend hours with it; I never cared for any child so much. What I can’t bear is to think that it cried for me.” Her voice broke. Without a trace, now, of impulse or glamour, he took her hand, repeating his helpless phrase of sympathy. Yes, he thought, while she wept, here was the fatal flaw in any Tolstoian half-way house that promised peace. Love for others didn’t help their suffering; suffering with them didn’t stop it. Here was the brute fact of life thatto all peace-mongers sternly said, Where there is love there is no peace.
It was only after her hand had long lain in his fraternal clasp that she drew it away, drying her tears and trying to smile her thanks at him. Looking before her into the fire, and back into a retrospect of sadness, she said: “How often you and I meet death together, Gavan. The poor monkey, and Bobbie, and Elspeth even, ought to count.”
“You must think of me and death together,” he said.
He felt in a moment that the words had for her some significance that he had not intended. In her silence was a shock, and in her voice, when she spoke, a startled thing determinedly quieted.
“Not more than you must think of me and it together.”
“You and death, dear Eppie! You are its very antithesis!”
She did not look at him, and he could not see her eyes, but he knew, with the almost uncanny intuition that he so often had in regard to her, that a rising strength, a strength that threatened something, strove with a sudden terror.
“Life conquers death,” she said at last.
He armed himself with lightness. “Of course, dear Eppie,” he said; “of course it does; always and always. The poor baby dies, and—I wonder how many other babies are being born at this moment? Conquers death? I should think it did!”
“I did not mean in that way,” she answered. Shehad risen, and, looking at the clock, seemed to show him that their time was over. “But we won’t discuss life and death now,” she said.
“You mean that it’s late and that I must go?” he smiled.
“Perhaps I mean only that I don’t want to discuss,” she smiled back. “Though—yes, indeed, it is late; almost seven. I have a great many things to do this evening, so that I must rest before dinner, and let you go.”
“I may come again?”
“Whenever you will. Thank you for being so kind to-day.”
“Kind, dear Eppie?”
“For being sorry, I mean.”
“Who but a brute would not have been?”
“And you are not a brute.”
The shaded light cast soft upward shadows on her face, revealing sweet oddities of expression. In their shadow he could not fathom her eyes; but a tenderness, peaceful, benignant, even a recovered gaiety, hovered on her brow, her upper lip, her cheeks. It was like a reflection of sunlight in a deep pool, this dim smiling of gratitude and gaiety.
He had a queer feeling, and a profounder one than in their former moment when she had repudiated his helpless emotion, that she spared him, that she restrained some force that might break upon this fraternal nearness. For an instant he wondered if he wanted to be spared, and with the wonder was once more the wrench at leaving her there, alone, in her fire-lit room. But it was her strength that carriedthem over all these dubious undercurrents, and he so relied on it that, holding her hand in good-by, he said, “I will come soon. I like it here.”
“And you are coming to Kirklands this summer. Uncle expects it. You mustn’t disappoint him, and me. I shall be there for a month.”
“I’ll come.”
“Jim Grainger will be there, too. You remember Jim. You can fight with him from morning till night, but you and I will fight about nothing, absolutely nothing, Gavan. We will—glisser. We will talk about Goya! We will be perfectly comfortable.”
He really believed that they might be, so happily convincing was her tone.
“Grainger is a great chum of yours, isn’t he?” he asked.
“You remember, he and his brother were old playmates; Clarence has turned out a poor creature; he’s a nobody in the church. I’m very fond of Jim. And I admire him tremendously. He is the conquering type, you know—the type that tries for the high grapes.”
“You won’t set him at me, to mangle me for your recreation?”
“Do I seem such a pitiless person?”
“Oh, it would be for my good, of course.”
“You may come with no fear of manglings. You sha’n’t be worried or reformed.”
They had spoken as if the captain were non-existent, but Gavan put the only qualifying touch to his assurance of seeing her at Kirklands. “I’ll come—if I can get there by then.”
BUT he did not go to her again in the slums. The final phases of his father’s long illness kept him in Surrey, and he found, on thinking it over, that he was content to rest in the peace of that last seeing of her.
It was clear to him that, were it not for that paralysis of the heart and will, he would have been her lover. Like a veiled, exquisite picture, the impossible love was with him always; he could lift the veil and look upon it with calmness. That he owed something of this calmness to Eppie he well knew. She loved him,—that, too, was evident,—but as a sister might love, perhaps as a mother might. He was her child, her sick child or brother, and he smiled over the simile, well content, and with an odd sense of safety in his assurance. Peace was to be their final word, and in the long months of a still, hot summer, this soft, persistent note of peace was with him and filled a lassitude greater than any he had known.
Monotonously the days went by like darklyfreighted boats on a sultry sea—low-lying boats, sliding with the current under sleepy sails.
He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange, sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)—with his mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current, so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain through him.
In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came—trivial, yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his wasted hand for his,—Gavan held it to the end—was the reminiscence of the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had drooped and died at Kirklands.
On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery work—toward that same end,—the end of the monkey, of his father, his mother,—was profoundly disgusting.
It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods, wheel against a sunset sky.
Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked a drawer of the writing-tablebeside him and taken out a case of pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final and only logical move of stopping itself.
He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and, indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn on his pillow and fall asleep.
Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped through the emptiness ofthought. He was aware, while he watched the visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.
He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.
And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible.
He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to whether head or heart were thesurer exit, when a quiet step at the door arrested him.
“Shall I bring the lamps, sir?” asked Howson’s quiet voice.
Gavan could but admire his own deftness in tossing a newspaper over the pistol. He found himself perfectly prepared to keep up the last appearances. He said that he didn’t want the lamps yet and that Howson could leave the curtains undrawn. “It’s sultry this evening,” he added.
“It is, sir; I expect we’ll have thunder in the night,” said Howson, whose voice partook of the day’s decorous gloom. He had brought in the evening mail and laid the letters and newspapers beside Gavan, slightly pushing aside the covered pistol to make room for them, an action that Gavan observed with some intentness. But Howson saw nothing.
Left alone again, Gavan, not moving in his chair, glanced at the letters and papers neatly piled beside his elbow.
After the rending agony of that moment of hideous realization, when, in every fiber, he had felt his own woeful humanity, an odd sleepiness almost overcame him.
He felt much more like going to sleep than killing himself, and, yawning, stretching, he shivered a little from sheer fatigue.
The edge of the newspaper that covered the pistol was weighted down by the pile of papers, and in putting out his hand for it, automatically, he pushed the letters aside, then, yawning again, picked them up instead of the pistol. He glanced over the envelops,not opening them,—the last hand at cards, that could hold no trumps for him. It was with as mechanical an interest as that of the condemned criminal who, on the way to the scaffold, turns his head to look at some unfamiliar sight. But at the last letter he paused. The post-mark was Scotch; the writing was Eppie’s.
He might have considered at that moment that the shock he felt was a warning that life was by no means done with him, and that his way of safety lay in swift retreat.
But after the wrench of agony and the succeeding sliding languor, he did not consider anything. It was like a purely physical sensation, what he felt, as he held the letter and looked at Eppie’s writing. Soft, recurrent thrills went through him, as though a living, vibrating thing were in his hands. Eppie; Kirklands; the heather under a summer sky. Was it desire, or a will-less drifting with a new current that the new vision brought? He could not have told.
He opened the letter and read Eppie’s matter-of-fact yet delicate sympathy.
He must be worn out. She begged him to remember his promise and to come to them at once.
At once, thought Gavan. It must be that, indeed, or not at all. He glanced at the clock. He could really go at once. He could catch the London train, the night express for Scotland, and he could be at Kirklands at noon next day. He rose and rang the bell, looking out at the darker pink of the sky, where the rooks no longer wheeled, until Howson appeared.
“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” Hefound himself repeating the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.”
Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only natural.
Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols with a short, decisive snap—a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in which his mind was steeped.
The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose. Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding? He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet to watch. Of that he was sure.
THE moor was like an amethyst under a radiant August sky, and the air, with its harmony of wind and sunlight, was like music.
Eppie walked beside him and Peter trotted before. The forms were changed, but it might almost have been little Eppie, the boy Gavan, and Robbie himself who went together through the heather. The form was changed, but the sense of saneness so strong that it would have seemed perfectly natural to pass an arm about a child Eppie’s neck and to talk of the morning’s reading in the Odyssey.
Never had the feeling of reality been so vague or the dream sense been so beautiful. His instinctive choice of this peace, instead of the other, had been altogether justified. It was all like a delightful game they had agreed to play, and the only rule of the game was to take each other’s illusions for granted and, in so doing, to put them altogether aside.
It was as if they went in a dream that tallied while, outside their dream, the sad life of waking slept. It was all limpid, all effortless, all clear sunlight and clear wind: limpid, like a happy dream,yet deliciously muddled too, as a happy dream is often muddled, with its mazed consciousness that, since it is a dream, ordinary impossibilities may become quite possible, that one only has to direct a little the turnings of the fairy-tale to have them lead one where one will, and yet that to all strange happenings there hovers a background of contradiction that makes them the more of an enchanted perplexity.
In the old white house the general and Miss Barbara would soon be expecting them back to tea, both older, both vaguer, both, to Gavan’s appreciation, more and more the tapestried figures, the background to the young life that still moved, felt, thought in the foreground until it, too, should sink and fade into a tapestry for other dramas, other fairy-tales.
The general retold his favorite anecdotes with shorter intervals between the tellings; cared more openly, with an innocent greediness, about the exactitudes of his diet; was content to sit idly with an unremembering, indifferent benignancy of gaze. All the sturdier significances of life were fast slipping from him, all the old martial activities; it was like seeing the undressing of a child, the laying aside of the toy trumpet and the soldier’s kilt preparatory to bed. Miss Barbara was sweeter than ever—a sweetness even less touched with variations than last year. And she was sillier, poor old darling; her laugh had in it at moments the tinkling, feeble foolishness of age.
Gavan saw it all imperturbably—how, in boyhood, the apprehension of it would have cut into him!—and it all seemed really very good—as the furnitureto a fairy-tale; the sweet, dim, silly tapestry was part of the peace. How Eppie saw it he didn’t know; he didn’t care; and she seemed willing not to care, either, about what he saw or thought. Eppie had for him in their fairy-tale all the unexacting loveliness of summer nature, healing, sunny, smiling. He had been really ill, he knew that now, and that the peace was in part the languor of convalescence, and, for the sake of his recovery, she seemed to have become a part of nature, to ask no questions and demand no dues.
To have her so near, so tender, so untroubling, was like holding in his hands a soft, contented wild bird. He could, he thought, have held it against his heart, and the heart would not have throbbed the faster.
There was nothing in her now of the young Valkyrie of mists and frosts, shaking spears and facing tragedy with stern eyes. She threatened nothing. She saw no tragedy. It was all again as if, in a bigger, more beautiful way, she gave him milk to drink from a silver cup. Together they drank, no potion, no enchanted, perilous potion, but, from the cup of innocent summer days, the long, sweet dream of an Eternal Now.
To-day, for the first time, the hint of a cloud had crept into the sky.
“And to-morrow, Eppie, ends our tête-à-tête,” he said. “Or will Grainger make as little of a third as the general and Miss Barbara?”
“He sha’n’t spoil things, if that’s what you mean,” said Eppie.
She wore a white dress and a white hat wreathedwith green; the emerald drops trembled in the shadow of her hair. She made him think of some wandering princess in an Irish legend, with the white and green and the tranquil shining of her eyes.
“Not our things, perhaps; but can’t he interfere with them? He will want to talk with you about all the things we go on so happily without talking of.”
“I’ll talk to him and go on happily with you.”
It was almost on his lips to ask her if she could marry Grainger and still go on happily, like this, with him, Gavan. That it should have seemed possible to ask it showed how far into fairy-land they had wandered; but it was one of the turnings that one didn’t choose to take; one was warned in one’s sleep of lurking dangers on that road. It might lead one straight out of fairy-land, straight into uncomfortable waking.
“How happily we do go on, Eppie,” was what he did choose to say. “More happily than ever before. What a contrast this—to East London.”
She glanced at him. “And to Surrey.”
“And to Surrey,” he accepted.
“Surrey was worse than East London,” she said.
“I didn’t know how much of a strain it had been until I got away from it.”
“One saw it all in your face.”
“‘One’ meaning a clever Eppie, I suppose. But, yes, I had a bad moment there.”
The memory of that heave of sod had no place in fairy-land, even less place than the forecast of an Eppie married to Jim Grainger, and he didn’t lethis thought dwell on it even when he owned to the bad moment, and he was thinking, really with amusement over her unconsciousness, of the two means of escape from it that he had found to his hand,—the pistol and her letter,—when she took up his words with a quiet, “Yes, I knew you had.”
“Knew that I had had a strain, you mean?”
“No, had a bad moment,” she answered.
“You saw it in my face?”
“No. I knew. Before I saw you.”
He smiled at her. “You have a clairvoyant streak in your Scotch blood?”
She smiled back. “Probably. I knew, you see.”
Her assurance, with its calm over what it knew, really puzzled him.
“Well, what did you know?”
She had kept on quietly smiling while she looked at him, and, though she now became grave, it was not as if for pain but for thankfulness. “It was in the evening, the day after I wrote to you, the day your father was buried. I went to my room to dress for dinner, my room next yours, you know. And I was looking out,—at the pine-tree, the summer-house where we played, and, in especial, I remember, at the white roses that I could smell in the evening so distinctly,—when I knew, or saw, I don’t know which, that you were in great suffering. It was most of all as if I were in you, feeling it myself, rather than seeing or knowing. Then,” her voice went on in its unshaken quiet, “I did seem to see—a grave; not your father’s grave. You were seeing it, too,—a green grave. And then I came back into myself andknew. You were in some way,—going. I stood there and looked at the roses and seemed only to wait intensely, to watch intensely. And after that came a great calm, and I knew that you were not going.”
She quietly looked at him again,—her eyes had not been on him while she spoke,—and, though he had paled a little, he looked as quietly back.
He found himself accepting, almost as a matter of course, this deep, subconscious bond between them.
But in another moment, another realization came. He took her hand and raised it to his lips.
“I always make you suffer.”
“No,” she answered, though she, now, was a little pale, “I didn’t suffer. I was beyond, above all that. Whatever happened, we were really safe. That was another thing I knew.”
He relinquished the kissed hand. “Dear Eppie, dear, dear Eppie, I am glad that this happened.”
It had been, perhaps, to keep the dream safely around them that she had shown him only the calm; for now she asked, and he felt the echo of that suffering—that shared suffering—in it, “You had, then, chosen to go?”
Somehow he knew that they were safe in the littler sense, that she would keep the dream unawakened, even if they spoke of the outside life. “Yes,” he said, “you saw what was happening to me, Eppie. I had chosen to go. But your letter came, and, instead, I chose to come to you.”
She asked no further question, walking beside him with all her tranquillity.
But, to her, it was not in a second childhood, not in a fairy-tale, that they went. She was tranquil, for him; a child, for him; healing, unexacting nature, for him. But she knew she had not needed his admission to know it, that it was life and death that went together.
Sometimes, as they walked, the whole glory of the day melted into a phantasmagoria, unreal, specious, beside the intense reality of their unspoken thoughts, his thoughts and hers; those thoughts that left them only this little strip of fairy-land where they could meet in peace. Thoughts only, not dislikes, not indifferences, sundered them. Their natures, through all nature’s gamut, chimed; they looked upon each other—when in fairy-land—with eyes of love. But above this accord was a region where her human breath froze in an icy airlessness, where her human flesh shattered itself against ghastly precipices. To see those thoughts of Gavan’s was like having the lunar landscape suddenly glare at one through a telescope. His thoughts and hers were as real as life and death; they alone were real; only—and this was why, under its burden, Eppie’s heart throbbed more deeply, more strongly,—only, life conquered death. No, more still,—for so the strange evening vision had borne its speechless, sightless witness,—life had already conquered death. She had not needed him to tell her that, either.
And these days were life; not the dream he thought them, not the fairy-tale, but balmy dawn stealing in, fresh, revivifying, upon his long, arcticnight; the flush of spring over the lunar landscape. So she saw it with her eyes of faith.
The mother was strong in her. She could bide her time. She could see death near him and, so that he should not see her fear, smile at him. She could play games with him, and wait.
JIM GRAINGER arrived that evening, and Gavan was able to observe, at the closest sort of quarters, his quondam rival.
His condition was so obvious that its very indifference to observation took everybody into its confidence. Nobody counted with Mr. Grainger except his cousin, and since he held open before her eyes—with angry constancy, gloomy patience—the page of his devotion, the rest of the company were almost forced to read with her. One couldn’t see Mr. Grainger without seeing that page.
He held it open, but the period of construing had evidently passed. All that there was to understand she understood long since, so that he was, for the most part, silent.
In Eppie’s presence he would wander aimlessly about, look with an oddly irate, unseeing eye at books or pictures, and fling himself into deep chairs, where he sat, his arms folded in a sort of clutch, his head bent forward, gazing at her with an air of dogged, somber resolve.
He was not by nature so taciturn. It was amusing to see the vehemence of reaction that would overtakehim in the smoking-room, where his volubility became almost as overbearing and oppressive as his silences.
He was a man at once impatient and self-controlled. His face was all made up of short, resolute lines. His nose, chopped off at the tip; his lips, curled yet compressed; the energetic modeling of his brows with their muscular protuberances; the clefted chin; the crest of chestnut hair,—all expressed a wilful abruptness, an arrested force, the more vehement for its repression.
And at present his appearance accurately expressed him as a determined but exasperated lover.
“Of course,” Miss Barbara said, in whispered confidence to Gavan, mingled pity and reprobation in her voice, “as her cousin he comes when he wishes to do so. But she has refused him twice already—he told me so himself; and, simply, he will not accept it. He only spoke of it once, and it was quite distressing. It really grieved me to hear him. He said that he would hang on till one or the other of them was dead.” Grainger’s words in Miss Barbara’s voice were the more pathetic for their incongruity.
“And you don’t think she will have him,—if he does hang on?” Gavan asked.
Miss Barbara glanced at him with a soft, scared look, as though his easy, colloquial question had turned a tawdry light on some tender, twilight dreaming of her own.
He had wondered, anew of late, what Miss Barbara did think about him and Eppie, and what shehad thought he now saw in her eyes, that showed their little shock, as at some rather graceless piece of pretence. He was quite willing that she should think him pretending, and quite willing that she should place him in Grainger’s hopeless category, if future events would be most easily so interpreted for her; so that he remained silent, as if over his relief, when she assured him, “Oh, I am sure not. Eppie does not change her mind.”
Grainger’s presence, for all its ineffectuality, thus witnessed to by Miss Barbara, was as menacing to peace and sunshine as a huge thunder-cloud that suddenly heaves itself up from the horizon and hangs over a darkened landscape. But Eppie ignored the thunder-cloud; and, hanging over fairy-land, it became as merely decorative as an enchanted giant tethered at a safe distance and almost amusing in his huge helplessness.
Eppie continued to give most of her time to Gavan, coloring her manner with something of a hospital nurse’s air of devotion to an obvious duty, and leaving Grainger largely to the general’s care while she and Gavan sat reading for hours in the shade of the birch-woods.
Grainger often came upon them so; Eppie in her white dress, her hat cast aside, a book open upon her knees, and Gavan, in his white flannels, lying beside her, frail and emaciated, not looking at her,—Grainger seldom saw him look at her,—but down at the heather that he softly pulled and wrenched at. They were as beautiful, seen thus together, as any fairy-tale couple; flakes of gold wavering over theirwhiteness, the golden day all about their illumined shade, and rivulets from the sea of purple that surrounded them running in among the birches, making purple pools and eddies.
Very beautiful, very strange, very pathetic, with all their serenity; even the unimaginative Grainger so felt them when, emerging from the gold and purple, he would pause before them, swinging his stick and eying them oddly, like people in a fairy-tale upon whom some strange enchantment rested. One might imagine—but Grainger’s imagination never took him so far—that they would always sit there among the birches, spellbound in their peace, their smiling, magic peace.
“Come and listen to Faust, Jim. We are polishing up our German,” Eppie would cheerfully suggest; but Grainger, remarking that he had none to polish, would pass on, carrying the memory of Gavan’s impassive, upward glance at him and the meaning in Eppie’s eyes—eyes in which, yes, he was sure of it, and it was there he felt the pathos, some consciousness seemed at once to hide from and to challenge him.
“Is he ill, your young Palairet?” he asked her one day, when they were alone together in the library. His rare references to his own emotions made the old, cousinly intimacy a frequent meeting-ground.
He noticed that a faint color drifted into Eppie’s cheek when he named Gavan.
“He is as old as you are, Jim,” she remarked.
“He looks like a person to be taken care of, all the same.”
“He has been ill. He took care of some one else, as it happens. He nursed his father for months.”
“Um,” Grainger gave an inarticulate grunt, “just about what he’s fit for, isn’t it? to help dying people out of the world.”
Eppie received this in silence, and he went on: “He looks rather like a priest, or a poet—something decorative and useless.”
“Would you call Buddha decorative and useless?”
“After all, Palairet isn’t a Hindoo. One expects something more normal from a white man.”
His odd penetration was hurting her, but she laughed at his complacent Anglo-Saxondom. “If you want a white man, what do you make of the one who wrote the Imitation?”
“Make of him? Nothing. Nor any one else, I fancy. What does your young Palairet do?” Grainger brought the subject firmly back from her digression.
Eppie was sitting in the window-seat, and, leaning her head back, framed in an arabesque of creepers, she now owned, after a little pause, and as if with a weariness of evasion she was willing to let him see as she did: “Nothing, really.”
“Does he care about anything?” Grainger placed himself opposite her, folding his arms with an air of determined inquiry.
And again Eppie owned, “He believes in nothing, so how can he care?”
“Believes in nothing? What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” with a real sense of amusement over the inner icy weight, she was ready to put it in its crudest, most inclusive terms, “he doesn’t believe in immortality.”
Grainger stared, taken aback by the ingenuous avowal.
“Immortality? No more do I,” he retorted.
“Oh, yes, you do,” said Eppie, looking not at him but out at the summer sky. “You believe in life and so you do believe in immortality, even though you don’t know that you do. You are, like most energetic people, too much preoccupied with living to know what your life means, that’s all.”
“My dear child,”—Grainger was fond of this form of appellation, an outlet for the pent-up forces of his baffled tenderness,—“any one who is alive finds life worth while without a Paradise to complete it, and any one who isn’t a coward doesn’t turn from it because it’s also unhappy.”
“If you think that Gavan does that you mistake the very essence of his skepticism, or, if you like to call it so, of his faith. It’s not because he finds it unhappy that he turns from it, but because he finds it meaningless.”
“Meaningless?—a place where one can work, achieve, love, suffer?”
Grainger jerked out the words from an underlying growl of protest.
Eppie now looked from the sky to him, her unconscious ally. “Dear old Jim, I like to hear you.You’ve got it, all. Every word you say implies immortality. It’s all a question of being conscious of one’s real needs and then of trusting them.”
“Life, here, now, could satisfy my needs,” he said.
She kept her eyes on his, at this, for a grave moment, letting it have its full stress as she took it up with, “Could it? With death at the end of it?” and without waiting for his answer she passed from the personal moment. “You said that life was worth while, and you meant, I suppose, that it was worth while because we were capable of making it good rather than evil.”
“Well, of course,” said Grainger.
“And a real choice between good and evil is only possible to a real identity, you’ll own?”
“If you are going to talk metaphysics I’ll cut and run, I warn you. Socratic methods of tripping one up always infuriate me.”
“I’m only trying to talk common-sense.”
“Well, go on. I agree to what you say of a real identity. We’ve that, of course.”
“Well, then, can an identity destroyed at death by the destruction of the body be called real? It can’t, Jim. It’s either only a result of the body, a merely materialistic phenomenon, or else it is a transient, unreal aspect of some supremely real World-Self and its good and its evil just as fated by that Self’s way of thinking it as the color of its hair and eyes is fated by nature. And if that were so the sense of freedom, of identity, that gives us our only sanction for goodness, truth, and worth, would be a mere illusion.”
Her earnestness, as she worked it out for him, held his eyes more than her words his thoughts. He was observing her with such a softening of expression as rarely showed itself on his virile countenance.
“You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?” he said.
“I’ve tried to. Knowing Gavan has made me. It has converted me,” she smiled.
“So that’s your conversion.”
“Oh, more than that. I know that I’minlife;forit, and that’s more than all such reasoning.”
“And you believe that you’ll go on forever as you are now,” he said. His eyes dwelt on her: “Young and beautiful.”
“Forever; what queer words we must use to try to express it. We are in Forever now. It’s just that one casts in one’s lot, open-eyed, with life.”
“And has Palairet cast in his with death?”
Again the change of color was in her cheek, but it was to pallor now.
“He thinks so.”