The four of us who remained huddled very close around the fireThe four of us who remained huddled very close around the fire
But now on the hearth-rug at my feet the Partridge Hunter lay in amiable corduroy comfort, with the little puff of his pipe and his lips throbbing out in pleasant, dozy regularity. He had traveled in Japan since last we met, and one's blood flowed pink and gold and purple, one's flesh turned silk, one's eyes onyx, before the wonder of his narrative.
No one was to be outdone in adventurous recital. Alrik had spent the summer guiding a party of amateur sports along the Allagash, and his garbled account of it would have stocked a comic paper for a month. The Pretty Lady had christened a warship, and her eager, brooky voice went rippling and churtling through such major details as blue chiffon velvet and the goldiest kind of champagne. Even Alrik's raw-boned Old Mother, clinking dirty supper dishes out in the kitchen, had a crackle-voiced tale of excitement to contribute about a flounderingspring bear that she had soused with soap-suds from her woodshed window.
But all the time the storm grew worse and worse. The poor, tiny old house tore and writhed under the strain. Now and again a shutter blew shrilly loose, or a chimney brick thudded down, or a great sheet of rain sucked itself up like a whirlpool and then came drenching and hurtling itself in a perfect frenzy against the frail, clattering window-panes.
It was a good night for four friends to be housed together in a red, red room, where the low ceiling brooded over you like a face and the warped floor curled around you like the cuddle of a hand. A living-room should always be red, I think, like the walls of a heart, and cluttered, as Alrik's was, with every possible object, mean or fine, funny or pathetic, that typifies the owner's personal experience.
Yet there are people, I suppose, people stuffed with arts, not hearts, who would have monotoned Alrik's bright walls a dull brain-gray, ripped down the furs, the fishing-tackle, the stuffed owls, the gaudy theatrical posters, the shelf of glasses, the spooky hair wreaths, the really terrible crayon portrait of some much-beloved ancient grandame; and, supplementing it all with a single, homesick Japanese print, yearning across the vacuum at a chalkywhite bust of a perfect stranger like Psyche or Ruskin, would have called the whole effect more "successful." Just as though the crudest possible room that represents the affections is not infinitely more worth while than the most esoteric apartment that represents the intellect.
There were certainly no vacuums in Alrik's room. Everything in it was crowded and scrunched together like a hard, friendly hand-shake. It was the most fiercely, primitively sincere room that I have ever seen, and king or peasant therefore would have felt equally at home in it. Surely no mere man could have crossed the humpy threshold without a blissful, instinctive desire to keep on his hat and take off his boots. Alrik knew how to make a room "homeful." Alrik knew everything in the world except grammar.
Red warmth, yellow cheer, and all-colored jollity were there with us.
Faster and faster we talked, and louder and louder we laughed, until at last, when the conversation lost its breath utterly, Alrik jumped up with a grin and started our old friend the phonograph. His first choice of music was a grotesqueduoby two back-yard cats. It was one of those irresistibly silly minstrel things that would have exploded any decent bishop in the midst of his sermon. Certainly no one of us had ever yet been able to withstandit.But now no bristling, injuriated dog jumped from his sleep and charged like a whole regiment on the perfectly innocent garden.And the duo somehow seemed strangely flat.
"Here is something we used to like," suggested Alrik desperately, and started a splendid barytone rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes."But no high-pitched, mocking tenor voice took up the solemn velvet song and flirted it like a cheap chiffon scarf.And the Pretty Lady rose very suddenly and went out to the kitchen indefinitely "for a glass of water." It was funny about the Blue Serge Man. I had not liked him overmuch, but I missednot-liking-himwith a crick in my heart that was almost sorrow.
"Oh, for heaven's sake try some other music!" cried the Partridge Hunter venomously, and Alrik clutched out wildly for the first thing he could reach. It was "Give My Regards to Broadway." We had practically worn out the record the year before, but its mutilated remains whirred along, dropping an occasional note or word, with the same cheerful spunk and unconcern that characterized the song itself:
"Give my regards to Broadway,Remember me to Herald Square,Tell all the—whirry—whirry, whirrrrry—whirrrrrrrThat I will soon be there."
ThePartridgeHunter began instantly to beat muffled time with his soft felt slippers. Alrik plunged as usual into a fearfully clever and clattery imitation of an ox shying at a street-car.But what of it? No wakened, sparkling-eyed girl came stealing forth from her corner to cuddle her blazing cheek against the cool, brass-colored jowl of the phonograph horn.An All-Goneness is an amazing thing. It was strange about Alrik's Wife. Her presence had been as negative as a dead gray dove. But herabsencewas like scarlet strung with bells!
The evening began to drag out like a tortured rubber band getting ready to snap.
It was surely eleven o'clock before the Pretty Lady returned from the kitchen with our hot lemonades. The tall glasses jingled together pleasantly on the tray. The height was there, the breadth, the precious, steaming fragrance.But the Blue Serge Man had always mixed our nightcaps for us.
With grandiloquent pleasantry, the Partridge Hunter jumped to his feet, raised his glass, toasted "Happy Days," choked on the first swallow, bungled his grasp, and dropped the whole glass in shattering, messy fragments to the floor.
"Lord," he muttered under his breath, "one could stand missing a fellow in a church or a graveyard or a mournful sunset glow—but to miss himin a foolish, folksy—hot lemonade!—Lord!" And he shook his shoulders almost angrily and threw himself down again on the hearth-rug.
The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.
But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in particular:
"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've justgotto know how it all happened!"
No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost resonance, but with mechanism only just that instant released, Alrik and the Pretty Lady burst into sound.
The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross, like the breath of a person who runs for a train—and misses it.
"It was—in—Florida," she gasped, "the—last—of March. The sailboat was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But hewouldgo out in it—alone—storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the shortcomingsof her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always find his pocket, but never his watch—his purse, but never his money—his song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid—wicked—wilful—accident," she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery—astonished—moment—just—as—as—plainly—as—though—I—had—been—there. Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even—Death—without making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: 'Thisis too salt!Thisis too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious, memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome, whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except—me—exceptm-e!'"
The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go—nothing could make him sad. But I know that it must have made him verymad. He had just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June—"
She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into the silence.
"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any of them thick things, I couldn't fool her—she just up an' said it was nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And Gruff—Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."
The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last, his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand, and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round his words.
"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three—Man, Girl, and Dog—are cuddling off together somewhere in the big, spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a star—talking—perhaps—about—us?"
The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one to be alone on such a night.
But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.
"Sheain'twith him!" he cried. "Sheain't, sheain't, she A-I-N-'T! I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"
And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly, all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.
"I'll wager sheiswith him," she whispered under her breath. "She always did tag him wherever he went!"
Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.
Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.
The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a lingering moment I dalliedwith her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar. Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands.It was the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well.With a hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it—oh, 'way, 'way back out of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find it.
Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could amanbe all gone, but his silly caplast?
My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my things.A trinket jingled—a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair.I slammed the drawer with a bang, and opened another.Metal and leather slid heavily along the bottom.It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not like to have mybureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked the looking-glass.
Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on the bed in all my clothes and began towake up—wider and wider and wider.
My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory, photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether too vivid to be pleasant.
Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol, chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned in the wind.
"Of course, of course, there are no ghosts," I reasoned, just as one reasons that there is no mistake in the dictionary, no flaw in the multiplicationtable. But sometimes one's fantastically jaded nerves think they have found the blunder in language, the fault in science. Ghosts or no ghosts—if youthoughtyou saw one, wouldn't it be just as bad? My eyes strained out into the darkness. Suppose—I—should—think—that I heard the bark of a dog? Suppose—suppose—that from that black shed door where the automobile used to live, I shouldthink—event-h-i-n-kthat I saw the Blue Serge Man come stumbling with a lantern? The black shed door burst open with a bang-bang-bang, and I screamed, jumped, snatched a blanket, and fled for the lamp-lighted hall.
A little dazzled by the sudden glow, I shrank back in alarm from a figure on the top stair. It was the Pretty Lady. Wrapped clumsily like myself in a big blanket, she sat huddled there with the kerosene lamp close beside her, mending the Blue Serge Man's cap. On the step below her, smothered in a soggy lavender comforter, crouched Alrik's Old Mother, her dim eyes brightened uncannily with superstitious excitement. I was evidently a welcome addition to the party, and the old woman cuddled me in like a meal-sack beside her.
"Naw one could sleep a night like this," she croaked.
"Sleep?" gasped the Pretty Lady. Scorn infinite was in her tone.
But comfortably and serenely from the end of the hall came the heavy, regular breathing of the Partridge Hunter, and from beyond that, Alrik's blissful, oblivious snore. Yet Alrik was the only one among us who claimed an agonizing, personal sorrow.
I began to laugh a bit hysterically. "Men are funny people," I volunteered.
Alrik's Old Mother caught my hand with a chuckle, then sobered suddenly, and shook her wadded head.
"Menain'texactly—people," she confided. "Menain'texactly people—at all!"
The conviction evidently burned dull, steady, comforting as a night-light, in the old crone's eighty years' experience, but the Pretty Lady's face grabbed the new idea desperately, as though she were trying to rekindle happiness with a wet match. Yet every time her fretted lips straightened out in some semblance of Peace, her whole head would suddenly explode in one gigantic sneeze. There was no other sound, I remember, for hours and hours, except the steady, monotonous, slobbery swash of a bursting roof-gutter somewhere close in the eaves.
Certainly Dawn itself was not more chilled and gray than we when we crept back at last to ourbeds, thick-eyed with drowsy exhaustion, limp-bodied, muffle-minded.
But when we woke again, the late, hot noonday sun was like a scorching fire in our faces, and the drenched dooryard steamed like a dye-house in the sudden burst of unseasonable heat.
After breakfast, the Pretty Lady, in her hundred-dollar ruffles, went out to the barn with shabby Alrik to help him mend a musty old plow harness. The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers. So were Alrik's. The exclusiveness of their task seemed therefore to thrust the Partridge Hunter and me off by ourselves into a sort of amateur sorrow class, and we started forth as cheerfully as we could to investigate the autumn woods.
Passing the barn door, we heard the strident sound of Alrik's complaining. Braced with his heavy shoulders against a corner of the stall, he stood hurling down his new-born theology upon the glossy blond head of the Pretty Lady who sat perched adroitly on a nail keg with two shiny-tipped fingers prying up the corners of her mouth into a smile. One side of the smile was distinctly wry. But Alrik's face was deadly earnest. Sweat bubbled out on his forehead like tears that could not possibly wait to reach his eyes.
"There ought to be a separate heaven for ladiesand gentlemen," he was arguing frantically. "'Tain't fair. 'Tain't right. I won't have it! I'll see a priest. I'll find a parson. If it ain't proper to live with people, it ain't proper to die with 'em. I tell you I won't have Amy careerin' round with strange men. She always was foolish about men. And I'm breakin' my heart for her, and Mother's gettin' old, and the house is goin' to rack and ruin, but how—howcan a man go and get married comfortable again when his mind's all torturin' round and round and round about his first wife?"
The Partridge Hunter gave a sharp laugh under his breath, yet he did not seem exactly amused. "Laugh fortwo!" I suggested, as we dodged out of sight round the corner and plunged off into the actual Outdoors.
The heat was really intense, the October sun dazzlingly bright. Warmth steamed from the earth, and burnished from the sky. A plushy brown rabbit lolling across the roadway dragged on one's sweating senses like overshoes in June. Under our ruthless, heavy-booted feet the wet green meadow winced like some tender young salad. At the edge of the forest the big pines darkened sumptuously. Then, suddenly, between a scarlet sumach and a slim white birch, the cavernous wood-path opened forthmysteriously, narrow and tall and domed like the arch of a cathedral. Not a bird twitted, not a leaf rustled, and, far as the eye could reach, the wet brown pine-needles lay thick and soft and padded like tan-bark, as though all Nature waited hushed and expectant for some exquisitely infinitesimal tragedy, like the travail of a squirrel.
With brain and body all a-whisper and a-tiptoe, the Partridge Hunter and I stole deeper and deeper into the Color and the Silence and the Witchery, dazed at every step by the material proof of autumn warring against the spiritual insistence of spring. It was the sort of day to make one very tender toward the living just because they were living, and very tender toward the dead just because they were dead.
At the gurgling bowl of a half-hidden spring, we made our first stopping-place. Out of his generous corduroy pockets the Partridge Hunter tinkled two drinking-cups, dipped them deep in the icy water, and handed me one with a little shuddering exclamation of cold. For an instant his eyes searched mine, then he lifted his cup very high and stared off intoNothingness.
"To the—All-Gone People," he toasted.
I began to cry. He seemed very glad to have me cry. "Cry for two," he suggested blithely, "cryfor two," and threw himself down on the twiggy ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand.
"Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last, I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue Serge Man himself is—quitegone. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course itisn'tso," he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man'sthingswere the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality accumulates in the few years' time allotted to him. The man himself, you see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that turns up a generation hence in a German prayer-book at a French book-stall.
"And isn't Death a teasing teacher? Holds up a personality suddenly like a map—makes you learn by heart every possible, conceivable pleasantdetail concerning that personality, and then, when you are fairly bursting with your happy knowledge, tears up the map in your face and says, 'There's no such country any more, so what you've learned won't do you the slightest good.' And there you'd only just that moment found out that your friend's hair was a beautiful auburn instead of 'a horrid red'; that his blessed old voice was hearty, not 'noisy'; that his table manners were quaint, not 'queer'; that his morals were broad, not 'bad.'"
The Partridge Hunter's mouth began to twist. "It's a horrid thing to say," he stammered, "but there ought to be a sample shroud in every home, so that when your husband is late to dinner, or your daughter smokes a cigarette, or your son decides to marry the cook, you could get out the shroud and try it on the offender, and make a few experiments concerning—well,values. Why, I saw a man last week dragged by a train—jerked in and out and over and under, with his head or his heels or the hem of his coat just missing Death every second by the hundred-millionth fraction of an inch. But when he was rescued at last and went home to dinner—shaken as an aspen, sicker than pulp, tongue-tied like a padlock—I suppose, very likely, his wife scolded him for having forgotten the oysters."
The Partridge Hunter's face flushed suddenly.
"I didn't care much for Alrik's Wife," he attested abruptly. "I always thought she was a trivial, foolish little crittur. But if I had known that I was never going to see her again—while the sun blazed or the stars blinked—I should like to have gone back from the buckboard that last morning and stroked her brown hair just once away from her eyes. Does that seem silly to you?"
"Why, no," I said. "It doesn't seem silly at all. If I had guessed that the Blue Serge Man was going off on such a long, long, never-stop journey, I might even have kissed him good-by. But I certainly can't imagine anything that would have provoked or astonished him more! People can't go round petting one another just on the possible chance of never meeting again. And goodness gracious! nobody wants to. It's only that when a person actuallydies, a sort of subtle, holy sense in you wakes up and wishes that just once for all eternity it might have gotten a signal through to that subtle, holy sense in the other person. And of course when a youngster dies, you feel somehow that he or she must have been different all along from other people, and you simply wish that you might have guessed that fact sooner—before it was too late."
The Partridge Hunter began to smile. "If you knew," he teased, "that I was going to be massacredby an automobile or crumpled by an elevator before next October—would you wish that you had petted me just a little to-day?"
"Yes," I acknowledged.
The Partridge Hunter pretended he was deaf. "Say that once again," he begged.
"Y-e-s," I repeated.
The Partridge Hunter put back his head and roared. "That's just about like kissing through the telephone," he said. "It isn't particularly satisfying, and yet it makes a desperately cunning sound."
Then I put back my head and laughed, too, because it is so thoroughly comfortable and pleasant to be friends for only one single week in all the year. Independence is at best such a scant fabric, and every new friendship you incur takes just one more tuck in that fabric, till before you know it your freedom is quite too short to go out in. The Partridge Hunter felt exactly the same way about it, and after each little October playtime we ripped out the thread with never a scar to show.
Even now while we laughed, we thought we might as well laugh at everything we could think of, and get just that much finished and out of the way.
"Perhaps," said the Partridge Hunter, "perhaps the Blue Serge Man wasgladto see Amy, and perhapshe was rattled, no one can tell. But I'll wager anything he was awfully mad to see Gruff. There were lots of meteors last June, I remember. I understand now. It was the Blue Serge Man raking down the stars to pelt at Gruff."
"Gruff was a very—nice dog," I insisted.
"He was a very growly dog," acceded the Partridge Hunter.
"If you growl all the time, it's almost the same as a purr," I argued.
The Partridge Hunter smiled a little, but not very generously. Something was on his mind. "Poor little Amy," he said. "Any man-and-woman game is playing with fire, but it's foolish to think that there are only two kinds, just Hearth-Fire and Hell-Fire. Why, there's 'Student-lamp' and 'Cook-stove' and 'Footlights.' Amy and the Blue Serge Man were playing with 'Footlights,' I guess. She needed an audience. And he was New York to her, great, blessed, shiny, rackety New York. I believe she loved Alrik. He must have been a pretty picturesque figure on that first and only time when he blazed his trail down Broadway. Buthappywith him—h-e-r-e? Away from New York? Five years? In just green and brown woods where the posies grow on the ground instead of on hats, and even the Christmas trees are trimmed with nothing except real snow and livesquirrels?G-l-o-r-y!Of course her chest caved in. There wasn't kinky air enough in the whole state of Maine to keep her kind of lungs active. Of course she starved to death. She needed her meat flavored with harp and violin; her drink aerated with electric lights. We might have done something for her if we'd liked her just a little bit better. But I didn't even know her till I heard that she was dead."
He jumped up suddenly and helped me to my feet. Something in my face must have stricken him. "Would you like my warm hand to walk home with?" he finished quite abruptly.
Even as he offered it, one of those chill, quick autumn changes came over the October woods. The sun grayed down behind huge, windy clouds. The leaves began to shiver and shudder and chatter, and all the gorgeous reds and greens dulled out of the world, leaving nothing as far as the eye could reach but dingy squirrel-colors, tawny grays and dusty yellows, with the far-off, panting sound of a frightened brook dodging zigzag through some meadow in a last, desperate effort to escape winter. As a draft from a tomb the cold, clammy, valley twilight was upon us.
Like two bashful children scuttling through a pantomime, we hurried out of the glowery, darkening woods, and then at the edge of the meadowbroke into a wild, mirthful race for Alrik's bright hearth-fire, which glowed and beckoned from his windows like a little tame, domesticated sunset. The Partridge Hunter cleared the porch steps at a single bound, but I fell flat on the bruising doormat.
Nothing really mattered, however, except the hearth-fire itself.
Alrik and the Pretty Lady were already there before us, kneeling down with giggly, scorching faces before a huge corn-popper foaming white with little muffled, ecstatic notes of heat and harvest.
The Pretty Lady turned a crimson cheek to us, and Alrik's tanned skin glowed like a freshly shellacked Indian. Even the Old Mother's asthmatic breath purred from the jogging rocker like a specially contented pussy-cat.
Nothing in all the room, I remember, looked pallid or fretted except the great, ghastly white face of the clock. I despise a clock that looks worried. It wasn't late, anyway. It was scarcely quarter-past four.
Indeed, it was only half-past four when the company came. We were making such a racket among ourselves that our very first warning was the sudden, blunt, rubberym-o-oof an automobile directly outside. Mud was the first thing I thought of.
Then the door flew open peremptorily, and there on the threshold stood the Blue Serge Man—not dank and wet with slime and seaweed, but fat and ruddy and warm in a huge gray 'possum coat. Only the fearful, stilted immovability of him gave the lie to his reality.
It was a miracle!I had always wondered a great deal about miracles. I had always longed, craved, prayed to experience a miracle. I had always supposed that a miracle was the supreme sensation of existence, the ultimate rapture of the soul. But it seems I was mistaken. A miracle doesn't do anything to your soul for days and days and days. Your heart, of course, may jump, and your blood foam, but first of all it simply makes you very, very sick in the pit of your stomach. It made a man like Alrik clutch at his belt and jump up and down and "holler" like a lunatic. It smote the Partridge Hunter somewhere between a cramp and a sob. It ripped the Old Mother close at her waist-line, and raveled her out on the floor like a fluff of gray yarn.
But the Pretty Lady just stood up with her hands full of pop-corn, and stared and stared and stared andstared. From her shining blond head to her jet-black slippers she was like an exploded pulse.
The Blue Serge Man stepped forward into the room and faltered. In that instant's faltering,Alrik jumped for him like a great, glad, loving dog, and ripped the coat right off his shoulders.
The Blue Serge Man's lips were all a-grin, but a scar across his forehead gave a certain tense, stricken dignity to his eyes. Very casually, very indolently, he began to tug at his gloves, staring all the while with malevolent joy on the fearful crayon portrait of the ancient grandame.
"That's the very last face I thought of when I was drowning," he drawled, "and there wasn't room enough in all heaven for the two of us. Bully old face, I'm glad I'm here. I've been in Cuba," he continued quite abruptly, "and I meant to play dead forever and ever. But there was an autumn leaf—a red autumn leaf in a lady's hat—and it made me homesick." His voice broke suddenly, and he turned to his wife with quick, desperate, pleading intensity. "I'm not—much—good," he gasped. "But I've—come back!"
I saw the flaky white pop-corn go trickling through the Pretty Lady's fingers, but she just stood there and shook and writhed like a tightly wrung newspaper smoldering with fire. Then her face flamed suddenly with a light I had never, never seen since my world was made.
"I don't care whether you're any good or not," she cried. "You're alive! You're alive! You're alive! You'realive!You're—alive!"
I thought she would never stop saying it, on and on and on and on. "You're alive, you're alive, you're alive." Like a defective phonograph disk her shattered sense caught on that one supreme phrase, "You're alive! You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!"
Then the blood that had blazed in her face spread suddenly to her nerveless hands, and she began to pluck at the crape ruffles on her gown. Stitch by stitch I heard the rip-rip-rip like the buzz of a fishing-reel. But louder than all came that maddening, monotonous cry, "You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!" I thought her brain was broken.
Then the Blue Serge Man sprang toward her, and I shut my eyes. But I caught the blessed, clumsy sound of a lover's boot tripping on a ruffle—the crushing out of a breath—the smother of a half-lipped word.
I don't know what became of Alrik. I don't know what became of Alrik's Old Mother. But the Partridge Hunter, with his arm across his eyes, came groping for me through the red, red room.
"Let's get out of this," he whispered. "Let's get out of this."
So once again, amateurs both in sorrow and in gladness, the Partridge Hunter and I fled fast before the Incomprehensible. Out we ran throughAmy's frost-blighted rose-garden,where no gay, shrill young voice challenged our desecration, out through the senile old apple orchard,where no suspicious dog came bristling forth to question our innocent intrusion, up through the green-ribbon roadway, up through the stumbling wood-path, to the safe, sound, tangible, moss-covered pasture-bars, where the warm, brown-fur bossies, sweet-breathed and steaming, came lolling gently down through the gauzy dusk to barter their pleasant milk for a snug night's lodging and a troughful of yellow mush.
A dozen mysterious wood-folk crackled close within reach, as though all the little day-animals were laying aside their starched clothes for the night; and the whole earth teemed with the exquisite, sleepy, nestling-down sound of fur and feathers and tired leaves. Out in the forest depths somewhere a belated partridge drummed out his excuses. Across on the nearest stone wall a tawny marauder went hunching his way along. It might have been a fox, it might have been Amy's thrown-away coon-cat. Short and sharp from the house behind us came the fast, furious crash of Alrik's frenzied young energies, chopping wood enough to warm a dozen houses for a dozen winters for a dozen new brides. But high above even the racket of his ax rang the sweet, wild, triumphant resonanceof some French Canadianchanson. His heart and his lungs seemed fairly to have exploded in relief.
And over the little house, and the dark woods, and the mellow pasture, and the brown-fur bossies, broke a little, wee, tiny prick-point of a star, as though some Celestial Being were peeping down whimsically to see just what the Partridge Hunter and I thought of it all.
W
ITH every night piercing her like a new wound, and every morning stinging her like salt in that wound, Ruth Dudley's broken engagement had dragged itself out for four long, hideous months. There's so much fever in a woman's sorrow.
At first, to be sure, there had been no special outward and visible sign of heartbreak except the thunderstorm shadows under the girl's blue eyes. Then, gradually, very gradually, those same plucky eyes had dulled and sickened as though every individual thought in her brain was festering. Later, an occasional loosened finger ring had clattered off into her untouched plate or her reeking strong cup of coffee. At the end of the fourth month the family doctor was quite busy attesting that she had no tubercular trouble of any sort. There never yet was any stethoscope invented that could successfully locate consumption of the affections.
It was about this time that Ruth's Big Brother,strolling smokily into her room one evening, jumped back in tragic dismay at the astonishing sight that met his eyes. There, like some fierce young sacrificial priestess, with a very modern smutty nose and scorched cheeks, Ruth knelt on the hearth-rug, slamming every conceivable object that she could reach into the blazing fire. The soft green walls of the room were utterly stripped and ravished. The floor in every direction lay cluttered deep with books and pictures and clothes and innumerable small bits of bric-a-brac. Already the brimming fireplace leaked forth across the carpet in little gray, gusty flakes of ash and cinder.
The Big Brother hooted right out loud. "Why, Ruthy Dudley," he gasped. "Whatareyou doing? You look like the devil!"
Blissfully unconscious of smoke or smut, the girl pushed back the straggling blond hair from her eyes and grinned, with her white teeth shot like a bolt through her under lip to keep the grin in place.
"I'm not a 'devil,'" she explained. "I'm a god! And what am I doing? I'm creating a new heaven and a new earth."
"You won't have much left to create it with," scoffed the Big Brother, kicking the tortured wreck of a straw hat farther back into the flames.
The girl reached up impatiently and smutted her other hand across her eyes. "Nothing left to createit with?" she mocked. "Why, if I had anything left to create it with, I'd be only a—mechanic!"
Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow flame into a writhing, half-charred bundle of letters.
Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her wedding gown. At two o'clock her violin went groaning into the flames. At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes, picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry. "Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any 'fuss,'" she protested. "I'm only just—burning my bridges." It was the first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
Twice after that—between three o'clock and breakfast time—the Big Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on fire. Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time hemet the Housekeeper scuttling along the halls on the same sniffy errand. Once with a flickering candle-light Ruth herself crept out to the doorway and laughed at them. "The house isn't on fire, you sillies," she cried. "Don't you know a burnt bridge when you smell it?" But the doctor had said quite distinctly: "You must watch that little girl. Sorrow in the tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the brain."
It was the Housekeeper, though, whose eyes looked worried and tortured at breakfast time. It was the Big Brother's face that showed a bit sharp on the cheek-bones. Ruth herself, for the first time in a listless, uncollared, unbelted, unstarched month, came frisking down to the table as white and fresh and crisp as linen and starch and curls could make her.
"I'm going to town this morning," she announced nonchalantly to her relieved and delighted hearers. The eyes that turned to her brother's were almost mischievous. "Couldn't you meet me at twelve o'clock," she suggested, "and take me off to the shore somewhere for lunch? I'll be shopping on Main Street about that time, so suppose I meet you at Andrew Bernard's office."
Half an hour later she was stealing out of thecreaky back door into the garden, along the gray, pebbly gravel walk between the tall tufts of crimson and purple phlox, to the little gay-faced plot of heart's-ease where the family doctor, symbolist and literalist, had bade her dig and delve every day in the good, hot, wholesome, freckly sunshine. Close by in the greensward an absurd pet lamb was tugging and bouncing at the end of its stingy tether. In a moment's time the girl had transferred the clumsy iron tether-stake to the midst of her posy bed. Then she started for the gate.
Pausing for just one repentant second with her hand on the gate latch, she turned and looked back to the ruthlessly trodden spot where the bland-eyed lamb stood eyeing her quizzically with his soft, woolly mouth fairly dripping with the tender, precious blossoms. "Heart's-ease. B-a-a!" mocked the girl, with a flicker of real amusement. "Heart's-ease. B-a-a-a!" scoffed the lamb, just because his stomach and his tongue happened to be made like that. Then with a quick dodge across the lane she ran to meet the electric car and started off triumphantly for the city, shutting her faint eyes resolutely away from all the roadside pools and ponds and gleams of river whose molten, ultimate peace possibilities had lured her sick mind so incessantly for the past dozen weeks.
Two hours later, with a hectic spurt of energy,she was racing up three winding, dizzy flights of stairs in a ponderous, old-fashioned office building.
Before a door marked "Andrew Bernard, Attorney at Law," she stopped and waited a frightened moment for breath and courage. As though the pounding of her heart had really sounded as loud as it felt, the door handle turned abruptly, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, grave-faced young man greeted her with attractive astonishment.
"Good morning, Drew," she began politely. "Why, I haven't seen you for a year." Then, with alarming vehemence, she finished: "Are you all alone? I want to talk with you."
Her breathlessness, her embarrassment, her fragile intensity sobered the young man instantly as he led her into his private office and stood for a moment staring inquiringly into her white face. Her mouth was just as he had last seen it a year ago, fresh and whimsical and virginal as a child's; but her eyes were scorched and dazed like the eyes of a shipwreck survivor or any other person who has been forced unexpectedly to stare upon life's big emotions with the naked eye.
"I hear you've been ill this spring," he began gently. "If you wanted to talk with me, Ruthy, why didn't you let me come out to the house and see you? Wouldn't it have been easier?"
She shook her head. "No," she protested, "I wanted to come here. What I've got to talk about is very awkward, and if things get too awkward—why, an embarrassed guest has so much better chance to escape than an embarrassed host." She struggled desperately to smile, but her lips twittered instead into a frightened quiver. With narrowing eyes the young man drew out his big leather chair for her. Then he perched himself on the corner of his desk and waited for her to speak.
"Ruthy dear," he smiled, "what's the trouble? Come, tell your old chum all about it."
The girl scrunched her eyes up tight, like a person who starts to jump and doesn't care where he lands. Twice her lips opened and shut without a sound. Then suddenly she braced herself with an intense effort.
"Drew," she blurted out, "do you remember—three years ago—you asked me to—marry—you?"
"Do I remember it?" gasped Drew. The edgy sharpness of his tone made the girl open her eyes and stare at him. "Yes," he acknowledged, "I remember it."
The girl began to smooth her white skirts with excessive precision across her knees. "What made you—ask me?" she whispered.
"What made me ask you?" cried the man.
"What made me ask you? Why, I asked you because I love you."
The girl bent forward anxiously as though she were deaf. "You asked me because—what?" she quizzed him.
"Because I love you," he repeated.
She jumped up suddenly and ran across the room to him. "Because you—love me?" she reiterated. "'Love?' Not 'loved'? Not past tense? Not all over and done with?"
There was no mistaking her meaning. But the man's face did not kindle, except with pain. Almost roughly he put his hands on her shoulders and searched down deep into her eyes. "Ruth," he probed, "what are you trying to do to me? Open an old wound? You know I—love you."
The girl's mouth smiled, but her eyes blurred wet with fright and tears.
"Would you care anything—about—marrying me—now?" she faltered.
Drew's face blanched utterly, and the change gave him such a horridly foreign, alien look that the girl drew away from his hands and scuttled back to the big chair, and began all over again to smooth and smooth the garish white skirt across her knees. "Oh, Drew, Drew," she pleaded, "please look like—you. Please—please—don't look like anybody else."
But Drew did not smile at her. He just stood there and stared in a puzzled, tortured sort of way.
"What about Aleck Reese?" he began with fierce abruptness.
The girl met the question with unwonted flippancy. "I've broken my engagement to Aleck Reese," she said coolly. "Broken it all to smash."
But the latent tremor in her voice did not satisfy the man. "Why did you break it?" he insisted. "Isn't Aleck Reese the man you want?"
Her eyes wavered and fell, and then rallied suddenly to Drew's utmost question.
"Yes, Drew," she answered ingenuously, "Aleck Reeseisthe man I want,but he's not the kind of man I want!" As the telltale sentence left her lips, every atom of strength wilted out of her, and she sank back into her chair all sick and faint and shuddery.
The impulsive, bitter laugh died dumb on Drew's lips. Instantly he was at her side, gentle, patient, compassionate, the man whom she knew so well. "Do you mean," he stammered in a startled sort of way, "do you mean that—love or no love—I, I am the kind of man that you do want?"
Her hand stole shyly into his and she nodded her head. But her eyes were turned away from him.
For the fraction of a second he wondered just what the future would hold for him and her if heshould snatch the situation into his arms and crush her sorrow out against his breast. Then in that second's hesitancy she shook her hair out of her eyes and looked up at him like a sick, wistful child.
"Oh, Drew," she pleaded, "you've never, never failed me yet—all my hard lessons, all my Fourth-of-July accidents, all my broken sleds and lost skates. Couldn't you help me now we're grown up? I'm so unhappy."
The grimness came back to Drew's face.
"Has Aleck Reese been mean to you?" he asked.
Her eyebrows lifted in denial. "Oh, no—not specially," she finished a trifle wearily. "I simply made up my mind at last that I didn't want to marry him."
Drew's frown relaxed. "Then what's the trouble?" he suggested.
Her eyebrows arched again. "What's the trouble?" she queried. "Why, I happen to love him. That's all."
She took her hand away from Drew and began to smooth her skirt once more.
"Yes," she repeated slowly, "as long ago as last winter I made up my mind that I didn't want to marry him—but I didn't make up my courage until Spring. My courage, I think, is just about six months slower than my mind. And then, too, my 'love-margin' wasn't quite used up, I suppose. Awoman usually has a 'love-margin,' you know, and, besides, there's always so much more impetus in a woman's love. Even though she's hurt, even though she's heartbroken, even though, worst of all, she's a tiny bit bored, all her little, natural love courtesies go on just the same of their own momentum, for a day or a week, or a month, or half a lifetime, till the love-flame kindles again—or else goes out altogether. Love has to be like that. But if I were a man, Drew, I'd be awfully careful that that love-margin didn't ever get utterly exhausted. Aleck, though, doesn't understand about such things. I smoothed his headaches just as well, and listened to his music just as well, so he shiftlessly took it for granted that I loved him just as well. What nonsense! 'Love?'" Her voice rose almost shrilly. "'Love?' Bah! What's love, anyway, but a wicked sort of hypnotism in the way that a mouth slants, or a cheek curves, or a lock of hair colors? Listen to me. If Aleck Reese were a woman and I were a man, I certainly wouldn't choose his type for a sweetheart—irritable, undomestic, wild for excitement. How's that for a test? And if Aleck Reese and I were both women, I certainly shouldn't want him for my friend. Oughtn't that to decide it? Not a vital taste in common, not a vital interest, not a vital ideal!"
She began to laugh hysterically. "And I can'tsleep at night for remembering the droll little way that his hair curls over his forehead, or the hurt, surprised look in his eyes when he ever really did get sorry about anything. My God! Drew, look at me!" she cried, and rolled up her sleeves to her elbow. The flesh was gone from her as though a fever had wasted her.
The muscles in Drew's throat began to twitch unpleasantly. "Was Aleck Reese mean to you?" he persisted doggedly.
A little faint, defiant smile flickered across her lips. "Never mind, Drew," she said, "whether Aleck Reese was mean to me or not. It really doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter at all just exactly what a man does or doesn't do to a woman as long as, by one route or another, before her wedding day, he brings her to the place where she can honestly say in her heart, 'This man that I want is not the kind of man that I want.' Honor, loyalty, strength, gentleness—why, Drew, the man I marry hasgotto be the kind of man I want.
"I've tried to be fair to Aleck," she mused almost tenderly. "I've tried to remember always that men are different from women, and that Aleck perhaps is different from most men. I've tried to remember always that he is a musician—a real, real musician with all the ghastly, agonizing extremesof temperament. I've tried to remember always that he didn't grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral, mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and adulation of—new—women is like the breath of life to him—that he simply couldn't live without it any more than I could live without the love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of outdoors, all of which borehimto distraction.
"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it out,tornit out, that he probably really and truly did love me quite a good deal—in his own way—when there wasn't anything else to do. But how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well asheknows how—if it isn't as well assheknows how? We won't talk about—Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness, selfishness, neglect, even infidelity itself, are such purely minor, incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact that—such and such a man isstupid in the affections."
With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked at last.
She opened her eyes in surprise. "Why, yes," she said, "that's all—that is, it's all if you understand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese didn't love me, but because, loving me, he wasn'tintelligentenough to be true to me. You do understand, don't you? You understand that it wasn't because he didn't pay his love bills, but because he didn't know enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his; he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, without ever, ever making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love that he could grab and squandered it on himself—always and forever on himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am very stupid. It has taken me three years."
"Well, what do you wantmeto do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically.
"I want you to advise me," she said.
"Advise you—what?" persisted Drew.
The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to—marryyou!" she announced."well, why not?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.
Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther end of his desk and smiled at him.
"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry. You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And, most of anything in the world, you areclever in the affections. You are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest, silliest thing that could possibly matter, you wouldn't—for instance—remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you wouldn't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than you'd blow out the gas. And you wouldn't—hurt me about—other women—any more than you'd eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached over and patted his hand with the tips ofher fingers. "As far as I can see," she teased, "there's absolutely no fault in you that matters to me except that I don't happen to love you."
Quick as her laugh the tears came scalding back to her eyes.
"Why, Drew," she hurried on desperately, "people seem to think it's a dreadful thing to marry a man whom you don't love; but nobody questions your marryinganykind of a man if you do love him. As far as I can make out, then, it's the love that matters, not the man. Then why not love the right man?" She began to smile again. "So here and now, sir, I deliberately choose to loveyou."
But Drew's fingers did not even tighten over hers.
"I want to be a happy woman," she pleaded. "Why, I'm only twenty-two. I can't let my life be ruined now. There'sgotto be some way out. And I'm going to find that way out if I have to crawl on my hands and knees for a hundred years. I'm luckier than some girls. I've got such a shining light to aim for."
Almost roughly Drew pulled his hand away, the color surging angrily into his cheeks. "I'm no shining light," he protested hotly, "and you shall never, never come crawling on your hands and knees to me."
"Yes, I shall," whispered the girl. "I shall come creeping very humbly, if you want me. And you do want me, don't you? Oh, please advise me. Oh, please play you are my Father or my Big Brother and advise me to—marryyou."
Drew laughed in spite of himself. "Play I was your Father or your Big Brother?" Mimicry was his one talent. "Play I was your Father or your Big Brother and advise you to marry me?"
Instantly his fine, straight brows came beetling down across his eyes in a fierce paternal scrutiny. Then, quick as a wink, he had rumpled his hair and stuck out his chest in a really startling imitation of Big Brother's precious, pompous importance. But before Ruth could clap her hands his face flashed back again into its usual keen, sad gravity, and he shook his head. "Yes," he deliberated, "perhaps if I truly were your Father or your Brother, I really should advise you to marry—me—not because I amount to anything and am worth it, but because I honestly believe that I should be good to you—and I know that Aleck Reese wouldn't be. But if I'm to advise you in my own personal capacity—no, Ruthy, I don't want to marry you!"
"What? What?" Staggering from the desk, she turned and faced him, white as her dress, blanched to her quivering lips.
But Drew's big shoulders blocked her frenzied effort to escape.
"Don't go away like that, Little Girl," he said. "You don't understand. It isn't a question of caring. You know I care. But don't you, don't you understand that a man doesn't like to marry a woman who doesn't love him?"
Her face brightened piteously. "But Iwilllove you?" she protested. "Iwilllove you. I promise. I promise you faithfully—I will love you—if you'll only give me just a little time." The old flicker of mischief came back to her eyes, and she began to count on her fingers. "Let me see," she said. "It's June now—June, July, August, September, October, November—six months. I promise you that I will love you by November."
"I don't believe it." Drew fairly slashed the words into the air.
Instantly the hurt, frightened look came back to her eyes. "Why, Drew," she whispered, "if it were money that I wanted, if I were starving, or sick, or any all-alone anything, you wouldn't refuse to help me just because you couldn't possibly see ahead just how I was ever going to pay you. Drew, I'm very unhappy and frightened and lost-feeling. I just want to borrow your love. I promise you I will pay it back to you. You won't be sorry. You won't. You won't!"
Drew's hand reached up and smothered the words on her lips. "You can't borrow my love," he said sternly. "It's yours, always, every bit of it. But I won't marry you unless you love me. I tell you it isn't fair to you."
Impulsively she took his hand and led him back to the big chair and pushed him gently into it, and perched herself like a little child on a pile of bulky law books at his feet. The eyes that looked up to his were very hopeful.
"Don't you think, Drew," she argued, "that just being willing to marry you is love enough?"
He scanned her face anxiously for some inner, hidden meaning to her words, some precious, latent confession; but her eyes were only blue, and just a little bit shy.
She stooped forward suddenly, and took Drew's hand and brushed it across her cheek to the edge of her lips. "I feel so safe with you, Drew," she whispered, "so safe, and comforted always. Oh, I'm sure I can teach you how to make me love you—and you're the only man in the world that I'm willing to teach." Her chin stiffened suddenly with renewed stubbornness. "Youare the Harbor that was meant for me, and Aleck Reese is nothing but a—Storm. If you know it, and I know it, what's the use of dallying?"
Drew's solemn eyes brightened. "Do you trulythink," he said, "that Aleck Reese is only an accident that happened to you on your way to me?"
She nodded her head. Weakness and tears were only too evidently overtaking her brave little theories.
"And there's something else, too," she confided tremulously. "My head isn't right. I have such hideous dreams when I do get to sleep. I dream of drowning myself, and it feels good; and I dream of jumping off high buildings, and it feels good; and I dream of throwing myself under railroad trains, and it feels good. And I see the garish announcement in the morning papers, and I picture how Uncle Terry would look when he got the news, and I cry and cry and cry, and it feels good. Oh, Drew, I'm so bored with life! It isn't right to be so bored with life. But I can't seem to help it. Nothing in all the world has any meaning any more. Flowers, sunshine, moonlight—everything I loved has gone stale. There's no taste left to anything; there's no fragrance, there's no rhyme. Drew, I could stand the sorrow part of it, but I simply can't stand the emptiness. I tell you Ican'tstand it. I wish I were dead; and, Drew, there are so many, many easy ways all the time to make oneself dead. I'm not safe. Oh, please take me and make me safe. Oh, please take me and make me want to live!"
Driven almost distracted by this final appeal to all the chivalrous love in his nature, Drew jumped up and paced the floor. Perplexity, combativeness, and ultimate defeat flared already in his haggard face.
The girl sensed instantly the advantage that she had gained. "Of course," she persisted, "of course I see now, all of a sudden, that I'm not offering you very much in offering you a wife who doesn't love you. You are quite right; of course I shouldn't make you a very good wife at first—maybe not for quite a long, long time. Probably it would all be too hard and miserable for you—"
Drew interrupted her fiercely. "Great heavens!" he cried out, "my part would be easy, comfortable, serene, interesting, compared to yours. Don't you know it's nothing exceptsadto be shut up in the same house, in the same life, with a person you love who doesn't love you? Nothing but sad, I tell you; and there's no special nervous strain about being sad. But to be shut up day and night—as long as life lasts—with a person who takes the impudent liberty of loving you against your wish to be loved—oh, the spiritual distastefulness of it, and the physical enmity, and the ghastly, ghastly ennui! That's your part of it. Flower or book or jewel or caress, no agonizing,heart-breaking, utterly wholesome effort to please, but just one hideously chronic, mawkishly conscientious effort tobepleased, to act pleased—though it blast your eyes and sear your lips—tolookpleased. I tell you I won't have it!"
"I understand all that," said Ruth gravely. "I understand it quite perfectly. But underneath it all—I would rather—you had taken me in your arms—as though I were a little, little hurt girl—and comforted me—"
But before Drew's choking throat-cry had reached his lips she had sprung from her seat and was facing him defiantly. Across her face flared suddenly for the first time the full, dark flush of one of Life's big tides, and the fear in her hands reached up and clutched at Drew's shoulders. The gesture tipped her head back like a fagged swimmer's struggling in the water.
"I am pleading for my life, Drew," she gasped, "for my body, for my soul, for my health, for my happiness, for home, for safety!"
He snatched her suddenly into his arms. "My God! Ruth," he cried, "what do you want me to do?"
Triumph came like a holiday laugh to her haggard face.
"What do I want you to do?" she dimpled. "Why, I want you to come with me now and geta license. I want to be married right away this afternoon."
"What!" Drew hurled the word at her like a bomb, but it did not seem to explode.
Laughingly, flushingly, almost delightedly, she stood and watched the anger rekindle in his face.
"Do you think I am going to take advantage of you like this?" he asked hotly. "You would probably change your mind to-morrow and be very, very sorry—"
She tossed her head. It was a familiar little gesture. "I fully and confidently expect to be sorry to-morrow," she affirmed cheerfully. "That's why I want to be married to-day, this afternoon, this minute, if possible, before I have had any chance to change my mind."
Then, with unexpected abruptness, she shook her recklessness aside and walked back to him childishly, pulling a long, loose wisp of hair across her face. "See," she said. "Smell the smoke in my hair. It's the smoke from my burned bridges. I sat up nearly all night and burned everything I owned, everything that could remind me of Aleck Reese, all my dresses, all my books, all my keepsakes, all my doll houses that ever grew up into dreams. So if you decide to marry me I shall be very expensive. You'll have to take me just as I am—quite a little bit crumpled, not an extracollar, not an extra hairpin, not anything. Aleck Reese either loved or hated everything I owned. I haven't left a single bridge on which one of my thoughts could even crawl back to him again—"
Half quizzically, half caressingly, Drew stooped down and brushed his lips across the lock of hair. Fragrant as violets, soft as the ghost of a kiss, the little curl wafted its dearness into his senses. But ranker than violets, harsher than kisses, lurked the blunt, unmistakable odor of ashes.
He laughed. And the laugh was bitter as gall. "Burning your bridges," he mused. "It's a good theory. But if I take your life into my bungling hands and sweat my heart out trying to make you love me, and come home every night to find you crying with fear and heartbreak, will you still protest that the sting in your eyes is nothing in the world except thesmudgefrom those burnt bridges? Will you promise?"
With desperate literalness she clutched at the phrase. Everything else in the room began to whirl round and round like prickly stars. "I promise, I promise," she gasped. Then sight—not air, but just sight—seemed to be smothered right out of her, and her brain reeled, and she wilted down unconscious on the floor.
Cursing himself for a brute, Drew snatched her up in a little, white, crumpled heap and started forthe window. Halfway there, the office door opened abruptly and Ruth's Big Brother stood on the threshold. Surprise, anxiety, ultimate relief chased flashingly across the newcomer's face, and in an instant both men were working together over the limp little body.
"Well, old man," said the Big Brother, "I'm glad she was here safe with you when she fainted." His spare arm clapped down affectionately across Drew's shoulders and jarred Drew's fingers brownly against the death-like pallor of the girl's throat. The Big Brother gave an ugly gasp. "Damn Aleck Reese," he said.
Drew's eyes shut perfectly tight as though he was smitten by some unbearable agony. Then suddenly, without an instant's warning, he pulled himself together and burst out laughing uproariously like a schoolboy.
"Oh, what's the use of damning Aleck Reese?" he cried. "Aleck Reese is as stale an issue as yesterday morning's paper. If you've no particular objection to me as a brother-in-law as well as a tennis chum, Ruth and I were planning to marry each other this afternoon. Maybe I was just a little bit too vehement about it."
Three hours later, in a dusty, musty, mid-week church vestry, an extraordinarily white and extraordinarilyvivacious girl was quite busy assuring a credulous minister and a credulous sexton and a credulous Big Brother that she would love till death hushed her the perfectly incredulous bridegroom who stood staring down upon her like a very tall man in a very short dream.