The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gay Rebellion, by Robert W. Chambers
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Title: The Gay Rebellion
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Illustrator: Edmund Frederick
Release Date: March 4, 2009 [EBook #28244]
Language: English
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[Illustration]
THE GAY REBELLION
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: "She looked at him almost insolently. . . .
'Presently,' she said."
[Page 82]]
_The_
GAY REBELLION
_By_ ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATED BY
EDMUND FREDERICK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON: MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Copyright, 1911, by the COLUMBIAN-STERLING PUBLISHING CO.
Printed in the United States of America
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
TO
SUZANNE CARROLL
_Though J. H. jeer
And "Smith" incline to frown,
I do not fear
To write these verses down
And publish them in town.
The solemn world knows well that I'm no poet;
So what care I if two gay scoffers know it?
Buck up, my Muse!
Wing high thy skyward way,
And don't refuse
To let me say my say
As bravely as I may.
To praise a lady fair I father verses,
Which Admiration cradles, Homage nurses._
_For you, Suzanne,
Long since have won my heart;
You break it, too,
And leave the same to smart full sore
Whenever you depart for Baltimore.
You're charming;--and in metre I endeavour
To say you are as winsome as you're clever._
_Winsome and wise,
Subtle in maiden's lore,
With wondrous eyes--
Alas for Baltimore,
That grows this rose no more!
As for Manhattan, that benign old vulture
Wins one more prize in fancy horticulture._
_So now to you
I dedicate this tale;
It's neither new
Nor altogether stale,--
Nor can completely fail,
For your bright name as sponsor for my story
Assures the author of reflected glory._
_R. W. C._
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PREFACE
THESE stories, mademoiselle, as your intuition tells you, are for
old-fashioned young people only; and should be read in the Golden Future,
some snowy evening by the fire after a home dinner à deux. Your
predestined husband, mademoiselle, is to extend his god-like figure upon
a sofa, with an ash-tray convenient. You are to do the reading, curled up
in the big velvet wing-chair, with the lamp at your left elbow and the
fender under your pretty feet. As for me, I shall venture to smile at you
now and then from the printed page--but with discretion, mademoiselle,
not inconveniencing your party à deux. For, to be rid of me, you have
merely to close this book.
[Illustration]
FOREWORD
The attention of the civilized world is, at present, concentrated upon
The Science of Eugenics. The author sincerely trusts that this important
contribution to the data now being so earnestly nosed out and gathered,
may aid his fellow students, scientifically, politically and
anthropologically.
* * * * *
Miris modis Di ludos faciunt hominibus!
R. W. C.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"Facta canam; sed erunt qui me finxisse loquantur."--OVID.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
"She looked at him almost insolently . . .
'Presently,' she said" _Frontispiece_
"'To begin,' he said, 'I came here fishing'" 46
"Only one fleet-footed young girl remained at his heels" 184
"'Pray, observe my unmatched eyes'" 246
[Illustration]
I
THE year had been, as everybody knows, a momentous and sinister year for
the masculine sex; marriages and births in the United States alone had
fallen off nearly eighty per cent.; the establishment of Suffragette
Unions in every city, town, and village of the country, their obedience
to the dictation of the Central National Female Franchise Federation; the
financial distress of the florists, caterers, milliners and modistes
incident to the almost total suspension of social functions throughout
the great cities of the land, threatened eventually to paralyse the
nation's business.
Clergymen were in a pitiable condition for lack of fees and teas; the
marriage license bureau was open only Mondays and Saturdays; the social
columns of the newspapers were abolished. All over the Union young men
were finding time hanging heavy on their hands after business hours
because there was little to do now that every town had its Franchise
Clubs magnificently fitted with every requisite that a rapidly advancing
sex could possibly demand.
The pressure upon the men of the Republic was becoming tremendous; but,
as everybody knows, they held out with a courage worthy, perhaps, of a
better cause, and women were still denied the franchise in the face of
impending national disaster.
But the Central Federation of Amalgamated Females was to deliver a more
deadly blow at man than any yet attempted, a blow that for cruelty and
audacity remains unparalleled in the annals of that restless sex.
As everybody now knows, this terrible policy was to be inaugurated in
secret; a trial was to be made of the idea in New York State; neither
the state nor federal governments had the faintest suspicion of what
impended; not a single newspaper had any inkling.
Even Augustus Melnor, owner and editor of that greatest of New York daily
newspapers, the _Morning Star_, continued to pay overwhelming attention
to his personal appearance, confident that the great feminine revolt was
on its last shapely legs, and that once more womankind would be kind to
any kind of mankind, and flirt and frivol and marry, and provide progeny,
and rock the cradle as in the good old days of yore.
So it happened one raw, windy day in May, Mr. Melnor entered his private
office in the huge _Morning Star_ building, in an unusually cheerful
frame of mind and sent for the city editor, Mr. Trinkle.
"An exceedingly pretty girl smiled at me on my way down town, Trinkle,"
he said exultantly. "That begins to look as though the backbone of this
suffragette strike was broken. What?"
"You've got a dent in your derby; it may have been that," said Mr.
Trinkle.
Mr. Melnor hastily removed his hat and punched out the dent.
"I'm not so sure it was that," he said, flushing up.
Mr. Trinkle gazed gloomily out of the window.
For an hour they talked business; then Mr. Melnor was ready to go.
"How are my nephews getting on?" he asked.
"Something rotten," replied Mr. Trinkle truthfully.
"What's the matter with 'em?"
"Everything--except a talent for business."
"You mean to say they exhibit no aptitude?"
"Not the slightest."
Mr. Melnor seized his overcoat from the hook.
Mr. Trinkle offered to hold it for him. The offer irritated the wealthy
owner of the _Star_, who suspected that the city editor meant to intimate
that he, Mr. Melnor, was too old to get into his own overcoat without
assistance.
"Never mind!" he said ungratefully. He fussed at the carnation in his
buttonhole, picked up his doggy walking stick, glanced over his carefully
pressed trousers and light coloured spats, strolled across to the mirror,
and leisurely drew on his new gloves.
"Mr. Trinkle," he began more complacently, "what I want you to always
bear in mind is that my pup nephews require a thorough grilling! I want
you to bully 'em! Suppress 'em! Squelch, nag, worry, sit on 'em!"
"I have," said the city editor with satisfaction. "They loathe me."
"Do it some more, then! I won't permit any nepotism in this office! If
you don't keep after 'em they'll turn into little beastly journalists
instead of into decent, self-respecting newspaper men! Have either of my
nephews attempted to write any more poetry for the Saturday supplement?"
"Young Sayre got away with some verses."
"Wha' d'ye do with 'em?" growled Mr. Melnor.
"Printed 'em."
"_Printed_ them! Are--you--craz-y?"
"Don't worry. Sayre got no signature out of me."
"But _why_ did you print?"
"Because those verses were too devilish good to lose. You must have read
them. It was that poem _Amourette_."
"Did _he_ do _that_?"
"Yes; and the entire sentimental press of the country is now copying it
without credit."
"My nephew wrote _Amourette_?" repeated Mr. Melnor with mingled emotions.
"He sure did. That poem seemed to deal a direct blow at this suffragette
strike. Several women subscribers sent in mash notes. I had a mind to
take advantage of one or two myself."
Pride and duty contended in the breast of Augustus Melnor; duty won.
"That's what I told you!" he snapped; "those pups will begin to write for
the magazines if you don't look out!"
"Well _I_ tell _you_ that they've no nose for news--no real instinct--and
they might as well write for the backs of the magazines."
"They've got to acquire news instinct! Bang it into 'em, Trinkle! Rub
their noses in it! I'll have those pups understand that if ever they
expect to see any inheritance from me they'll have to prepare themselves
to step into my shoes! They'll have to know the whole business--from
window-washer to desk!--and they've got to like it, too--every bit of it!
You keep 'em at it if it kills 'em, Trinkle. Understand?"
"It'll kill more than those gifted young literary gentlemen," said
Trinkle darkly.
"What do you mean by that?"
"It will kill a few dozen good stories. We're going to murder a big one
now. But it's your funeral."
"That Adirondack story?"
"Exactly. It's as good as dead."
"Trinkle! Listen to me. How are we going to make men of those pups if we
don't rouse their pride? I tell you a man grows to meet the opportunity.
The bigger the opportunity the bigger he grows--or he blows up! Put those
boys up against the biggest job of the year and it's worth five years'
liberal education to them. That's my policy. Isn't it a good one?"
Mr. Trinkle said: "It's your paper. _I_ don't give a damn."
Mr. Melnor glared at him.
"You do what I tell you," he growled. "You start in and slam 'em around
the way they say Belasco slammed Leslie Carter! I'll have no nepotism
here!"
He went out by a private entrance, walking with the jaunty energy that
characterised him. Mr. Trinkle looked after him. "Talk of nepotism!" he
muttered, then struck the desk savagely.
To the overzealous young man who came in with an exuberant step he
snarled:
"Showemin! And don't you go volplaning around this office or I'll destroy
you!"
A moment afterward the youthful nephews of the great Mr. Melnor appeared.
They closed and locked the door behind them as they were tersely bidden,
then stood in a row, politely and attentively receptive--well-bred,
pleasant-faced, expensive-looking young fellows, typical of the
metropolis. Mr. Trinkle eyed them with disfavour.
"So at last you're ready to start, eh?" he rasped out. "I thought perhaps
you'd gone to Newport for the summer to think it over. You are ready, are
you not?"
"Yes, sir, we hope to----"
"Well, dammit! 'yes' is enough! Cut out the 'we hope to'! And try not to
look at me patiently, Mr. Sayre. I don't want anybody to be patient with
me. I dislike it. I prefer to incite impatience in people. Impatience is
a form of energy. I like energy! Energy is important in this business.
The main thing is to get a move on; and then, first you know, you'll
begin to hustle. Try it for a change."
He continued to inspect them gloomily for a few moments; then:
"To successfully cover this story," he continued, "you both _ought_ to be
expert woodsmen, thoroughly inured to hardship, conversant with woodcraft
and nature. Are you?"
"We've been reading up," began Langdon confidently; "we have a dozen
pocket volumes to take into the woods with us."
"Haven't I already warned you that every ounce of superfluous luggage
will weigh a ton in the woods?" interrupted the city editor scornfully.
"Are you two youthful guys under the impression that you can stroll
through the wilderness loaded down with a five-foot shelf of assorted
junk?"
"Sayre arranged that," said Langdon. "He has invented a wonderful
system, Mr. Trinkle. You know that thin, white stuff, which resembles
sheets of paper, that they give goldfish to eat. Well, Sayre and I tasted
it; and it wasn't very bad; so we had them make up twelve thousand sheets
of it, flavoured with vanilla, and then we got Dribble & Co., the
publishers, to print one set of their Nature Library on the sheets and
bind 'em up in edible cassava covers. As soon as we thoroughly master a
volume we can masticate it, pages, binding, everything. William, show Mr.
Trinkle your note-book," he added, turning to Sayre, who hastily produced
a pad and displayed it with pardonable pride.
"Made entirely of fish food, sugar, pemmican, and cassava," he said
modestly. "Takes pencil, ink, stylograph, indelible pencil, crayon,
chalk--"
The city editor regarded the two young men and then the edible pad in
amazement.
"What?" he barked. "Say it again!"
"It's made of perfectly good fish-wafer, Mr. Trinkle. We had it analysed
by Professor Smawl, and he says it is mildly nutritious. So we added
other ingredients----"
"You mean to say that this pad is fit to eat?"
"Certainly," said Langdon. "Bite into it, William, and show him."
Sayre bit out a page from the pad and began to masticate it. The city
editor regarded him with intense hostility.
"Oh, very well," he said. "I haven't any further suggestions to offer.
Your uncle has picked you for the job. But it's my private opinion that
here is where you make good or hunt another outlet for your genius--even
if your uncle does own the _Star_."
Then he rose and laid his hands on their shoulders:
"It's a wild and desolate region," he said, with an irony they did not
immediately perceive; "nothing but woods and rocks and air and earth and
mountains and madly rushing torrents and weird, silent lakes--nothing but
trails, macadam roads, and sign-posts and hotels and camps and tourists,
and telephones. If you find yourself in any very terrible solitudes,
abandon everything and make for the nearest fashionable five-dollar-a-day
igloo. It may be almost a mile away, but try to reach it, and God bless
you."
As the dawning suspicion that they were being trifled with became an
embarrassed certainty, the city editor's grim visage cracked into a
grimmer grin.
"_I_ don't think that you young gentlemen are cut out for a newspaper
career, but _you_ do, and others higher up say to let you try it. So
you're going in to find at least one of those four men, dead or alive.
The police haven't been able to find them, but you will, of course. The
game-wardens, fire-wardens, guides, constables, farmers, lumbermen,
sheriffs, can't discover hair or hide of them; but no doubt you can. The
wild and dismal state forest is now full of detectives, amateur and
professional; it's full of hotel keepers, trout fishermen, and private
camps which are provided with elevators, electric light, squash courts,
modern plumbing, and footmen in knee-breeches; and all of these dinky
ginks are hunting for four young and wealthy men who have, at regular
intervals of one week each, suddenly and completely disappeared from the
face of nature and the awful solitudes of the Adirondacks. I take it for
granted that you have the necessary data concerning their several and
respective vanishings?"
"Yes, sir," said Langdon, who was becoming redder and redder under the
bland flow of the Desk's irony.
"Suppose you run over the main points before you dash recklessly out into
the woods via Broadway."
"William," said Langdon with boyish dignity, "would you be kind enough to
run over your notes for Mr. Trinkle?"
"It will afford me much pleasure to do so," replied Sayre, also very red
and dignified.
Out of his pocket he drew what appeared to be an attenuated ham sandwich.
Opening it with a slight smile of triumph, as Mr. Trinkle's eyes
protruded, he turned a page of fish-wafer paper and read aloud the
pencilled memoranda:
"May 1st, 1910.
"Reginald Willett, a wealthy amateur, author of _Rough Life
Photography_, _Snapshots at Trees_, _Hunting the Wild Bat with the
Camera_, etc., etc., left his summer camp on the Gilded Dome, taking
with him his kodak for the purpose of securing photographs of the wilder
flowers of the wilderness.
"He never returned. His butler and second man discovered his camera in
the trail.
"No other trace of him has yet been discovered. He was young, well built,
handsome, and in excellent physical condition."
Sayre turned the page outward so that Mr. Trinkle could see it.
"Here's his photograph," he said, "and his dimensions."
Mr. Trinkle nodded: "Go on," he said; and Sayre resumed, turning the
page:
"May 8th: James Carrick, a minor poet, young, well built, handsome, and
in excellent physical condition, disappeared from a boat on Dingman's
Pond. The boat was found. It contained a note-book in which was neatly
written the following graceful poem:
"While gliding o'er thy fair expanse
And gazing at the shore beyond,
What simple joys the soul entrance
Evoked by rowing on Dingman's Pond.
The joy I here have found shall be
Dear to my heart till life forsake,
And often shall I think of thee,
Thou mildly beauteous Dingman's Lake."
"Stop!" said Mr. Trinkle, infuriated. Sayre looked up.
"The poem gets the hook!" he snarled. "Go on!"
"The next," continued young Sayre, referring to his edible note-book, "is
the case of De Lancy Smith. On May 16th he left his camp, taking with him
his rod with the intention of trying for some of the larger, wilder, and
more dangerous trout which it is feared still infest the remoter streams
of the State forest.
"His luncheon, consisting of truffled patés and champagne, was found by a
searching party, but De Lancy Smith has never again been seen or heard
of. He was young, well built, handsome, and----"
"In excellent physical condition!" snapped Mr. Trinkle. "That's the third
Adonis you've described. Quit it!"
"But that is the exact description of those three young men----"
"Every one of 'em?"
"Every one. They all seem to have been exceptionally handsome and
healthy."
"Well, does that suggest any clue to you? Think! Use your mind. Do you
see any clue?"
"In what?"
"In the probably similar fate of so much masculine beauty?"
The young men looked at him, perplexed, silent.
Mr. Trinkle waved his hands in desperation.
"Wake up!" he shouted. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that every one of
them so far has been Gibsonian perfection itself? Doesn't that seem
funny? Doesn't it suggest some connection with the present Franchise
strike?"
"It _is_ odd," said Langdon, thoughtfully.
"You notice," bellowed Mr. Trinkle, "that no young man
disappears who isn't a physical Adonis, do you? No thin-shanked,
stoop-shouldered, scant-haired highbrow has yet vanished. You notice
that, don't you, Sayre? Open your mouth and speak! Say anything! Say pip!
if you like--only say _something_!"
The young man nodded, bewildered, and his mouth remained open.
"All right, all right--as long as you _do_ notice it," yelled the city
editor, "it looks safe for you; I guess _you_ both will come back, all
right--in case any of these suffragettes have become desperate and have
started kidnapping operations."
Langdon was rather thin; he glanced sideways at Sayre, who wore glasses
and whose locks were prematurely scant.
"Go on, William," he said, with a crisp precision of diction which
betrayed irritation and Harvard.
Sayre examined his notes, and presently read from them:
"The fourth and last victim of the Adirondack wilderness disappeared very
recently--May 24th. His name was Alphonso W. Green, a wealthy amateur
artist. When last seen he was followed by his valet, who carried a white
umbrella, a folding stool, a box of colours, and several canvases. After
luncheon the valet went back to the Gilded Dome Hotel to fetch some
cigarettes. When he returned to where he had left his master painting a
picture of something, which he thinks was a tree, but which may have been
cows in bathing, Mr. Green had vanished. . . . Hum--hum!--ahem! He was
young, well built, handsome, and----"
"Kill it!" thundered the city editor, purple with passion.
"But it's the official descrip----"
"I don't believe it! I won't! I can't! How the devil can a whole bunch of
perfect Apollos disappear that way? There are not four such men in this
State, anyway--outside of fiction and the stage----"
"I'm only reading you the official----"
Mr. Trinkle gulped; the chewing muscles worked in his cheeks, then
calmness came, and his low and anxiously lined brow cleared.
"All right," he said. "Show me, that's all I ask. Go ahead and find just
one of these disappearing Apollos. That's all I ask."
He shook an inky finger at them impressively, timing its wagging to his
parting admonition:
"We want two things, do you understand? We want a story, and we want to
print it before any other paper. Never mind reporting progress and the
natural scenery; never mind telegraphing the condition of the local
colour or the dialect of northern New York, or your adventures with
nature, or how you went up against big game, or any other kind of game. I
don't want to hear from you until you've got something to say. All you're
to do is to prowl and mouse and slink and lurk and hunt and snoop and
explore those woods until you find one or more of these Adonises; and
then get the story to us by chain-lightning, if," he added indifferently,
"it breaks both your silly necks to do it."
They passed out with calm dignity, saying "Good-bye, sir," in haughtily
modulated voices.
As they closed the door they heard him grunt a parting injury.
"What an animal!" observed Sayre. "If it wasn't for the glory of being on
the _N. Y. Star_----"
"Sure," said Langdon, "it's a great paper; besides, we've got to--if we
want to remain next to Uncle Augustus."
It _was_ a great newspaper; for ethical authority its editorials might
be compared only to the _Herald's_; for disinterested principle the _Sun_
alone could compare with it; it had all the lively enterprise and virile,
restless energy of the _Tribune_; all the gay, inconsequent, and frothy
sparkle of the _Evening Post_; all the risky popularity of the _Outlook_.
It was a very, very great New York daily. What on earth has become of it!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II
LANGDON, very greasy with fly ointment, very sleepy from a mosquitoful
night, squatted cross-legged by the camp fire, nodding drowsily. Sayre
fought off mosquitoes with one grimy hand; with the other he turned
flapjacks on the blade of his hunting-knife. All around them lay the
desolate Adirondack wilderness. The wire fence of a game preserve
obstructed their advance. It was almost three-quarters of a mile to the
nearest hotel. Here and there in the forest immense boulders reared
their prehistoric bulk. Many bore the inscription: "Votes for Women!"
"I tell you I _did_ see her," repeated Sayre, setting the coffee-pot on
the ashes and inspecting the frying pork.
"The chances are," yawned Langdon, rousing himself and feebly sucking at
his empty pipe, "that you fell asleep waiting for a bite--as I did just
now. Now I've got my bite and I'm awake. It was a horse-fly. Aren't those
flapjacks ready?"
"If you're so hungry, help yourself to a ream of fish-wafer," snapped
Sayre. "I'm not a Hindoo god, so I can't cook everything at once."
Langdon waked up still more.
"I want to tell you," he said fiercely, "that I'd rather gnaw circles in
a daisy field than eat any more of your accursed fish-wafer. Do you
realise that I've already consumed six entire pads, one ledger, and two
note-books?"
Sayre struck frantically at a mosquito.
"I wonder," he said, "whether it might help matters to fry it?"
"That mosquito?"
"No, you idiot! A fish-wafer."
"You'd better get busy and fry a few trout."
"Where are they?"
"In some of these devilish brooks. It's up to you to catch a few."
"Didn't I try?" demanded Sayre; "didn't I fish all the afternoon?"
"All I know about it is that you came back here last night with a
farthest north story and no fish. You're an explorer, all right."
"Look here, Curtis! Don't you believe I saw her?"
"Sure. When I fall asleep I sometimes see the same kind--all winners,
too."
"I was _not_ asleep!"
"You said yourself that you were dead tired of waiting for a trout to
become peevish and bite."
"I was. But I didn't fall asleep. I did see that girl. I watched her for
several minutes. . . . Breakfast's ready."
Langdon looked mournfully at the flapjacks. He picked up one which was
only half scorched, buttered it, poured himself a cup of sickly coffee,
and began to eat with an effort.
"You say," he began, "that you first noticed her when you were talking
out loud to yourself to keep yourself awake?"
"While waiting for a trout to bite," said Sayre, swallowing a lump of
food violently. "I was amusing myself by repeating aloud my poem,
_Amourette_:
"Where is the girl of yesterday?
The kind that snuggled up?
In vain I walk along Broadway--
Where is the girl of yesterday,
Whose pretty----"
"All right! Go on with the facts!"
"Well, that's what I was repeating," said Sayre, tartly, "and it's as
good verse as you can do!"
Langdon bit into another flapjack with resignation. Sayre swallowed a cup
of coffee, dodging an immersed June-beetle.
"I was just repeating that poem aloud," he said, shuddering. "The woods
were very still--except for the flies and mosquitoes; sunlight lay warm
and golden on the mossy tree-trunks----"
"Cut it. You're not on space rates."
"I was trying to give you a picture of the scene----"
"You did; the local colour about the mosquitoes convinced me. Go on about
the girl."
An obstinate expression hardened Sayre's face; the breeze stirred a lock
on his handsome but prematurely bald forehead; he gazed menacingly at his
companion through his gold pince-nez.
"I'll blue-pencil my own stuff," he said. "If you want to hear how it
happened you'll listen to the literary part, too."
"Go on, then," said Langdon, sullenly.
"I will. . . . The sunlight fell softly upon the trees of the ancient
wood; bosky depths cast velvety shadows----"
"What is a bosky depth? What _is_ boskiness? By heaven, I've waited years
to ask; and now's my chance? You tell me what 'bosky' is, or----"
"Do you want to hear about that girl?"
"Yes, but----"
"Then you fill your face full of flapjack and shut up."
Langdon bit rabidly at a flapjack and beat the earth with his heels.
"The stream," continued Sayre, "purled." He coldly watched the literary
effect upon Langdon, then went on:
"Now, there's enough descriptive colour to give you a proper mental
picture. If you had left me alone I'd have finished it ten minutes ago.
The rest moves with accelerated rhythm. It begins with the cracking of a
stick in the forest. Hark! A sharp crack is----"
"Every bum novel begins that way."
"Well, the real thing did, too! And it startled me. How did I know what
it might have been? It might have been a bear----"
"Or a cow."
"You talk," said Sayre angrily, "like William Dean Howells! Haven't you
_any_ romance in you?"
"Not what _you_ call romance. Pass the flapjacks."
Sayre passed them.
"My attention," he said, "instantly became riveted upon the bushes. I
strove to pierce them with a piercing glance. Suddenly----"
"Sure! 'Suddenly' always comes next."
"Suddenly the thicket stirred; the leaves were stealthily parted;
and----"
"A naked savage in full war paint----"
"Naked nothing! A young girl in full war paint and a perfectly fitting
gown stepped noiselessly out."
"Out of what? you gink!"
"The bushes, dammit! She held in her hand a curious contrivance which I
could not absolutely identify. It might have been a hammock; it might
have been a fish-net."
"Perhaps it was a combination," suggested Langdon cheerfully. "Good idea;
she to help you catch a trout; you to help her sit in the hammock;
afterward----"
Sayre, absorbed in retrospection, squatted beside the fire, a burnt
flapjack suspended below his lips, which were slightly touched with a
tenderly reminiscent smile.
"What are you smirking about _now_?" demanded Langdon.
"She was _such_ a pretty girl," mused Sayre, dreamily.
"Did you sit in the hammock with her?"
"No, I didn't. I'm not sure it was a hammock. I don't know what it was.
She remained in sight only a moment."
"Didn't you speak to her?"
"No. . . . We just looked. She looked at me; I gazed at her. She was so
unusually pretty, Curtis; and her grave, grey eyes seemed to meet mine
and melt deep into me. Somehow----"
"In plainer terms," suggested Langdon, "she gave you the eye. What?"
"That's a peculiarly coarse observation."
"Then tell it your own way."
"I will. The sunlight fell softly upon the trees of the ancient wood----"
"Woodn't that bark you!" shouted Langdon, furious. "Go on with the dolly
dialogue or I'll punch your head, you third-rate best seller!"
"But there was no dialogue, Curt. It began and ended in a duet of
silence," he added sentimentally.
"Didn't you say anything? Didn't you try to make a date? Aren't you going
to see her again?"
"I don't know. I am not sure what sweet occult telepathy might have
passed between us, Curtis. . . . Somehow I believe that all is not yet
ended. . . . . Pass the pork! . . . I like to think that somehow, some
day, somewhere----"
"Stop that! You're ending it the way women end short stories in the
thirty-five-centers. What I want to know is, why you think that your
encounter with this girl has anything to do with our finding Reginald
Willett."
There was a basin of warm water simmering on the ashes; Sayre used it as
a finger-bowl, dried his hands on his shirt, lighted his pipe, and then
slowly drew from his hip pocket a flat leather pocket-book. "Curt," he
said, "I'm not selfish. I'm perfectly willing to share glory with you.
You know that, don't you?"
"Sure," muttered Langdon. "You're a bum cook, but otherwise moral
enough."
Sayre opened the pocket-book and produced a photograph.
"Everybody who is searching for Willett," he said, "examined the few
clues he left. Like hundreds of others, you and I, when we first entered
these woods, went to his camp on Gilded Dome, prowled all over it, and
examined the camera which had been picked up in the trail, didn't we?"
"We did. It was a sad scene--his distracted old father----"
"H'm! Did you see his distracted old father, Curt?"
"I? No, of course not. Like everybody else, I respected the grief of that
aged and stricken gentleman----"
"_I_ didn't."
"Hey? Why, you yellow dingo----"
"Curt, as I was snooping about the Italian Garden I happened to glance up
at the mansion--I mean the camp--and I saw by the window a rather jolly
old buck with a waxed moustache and a monocle, smoking a good cigar and
perusing his after-breakfast newspaper. A gardener told me that this
tranquil old bird was Willett Senior, who had arrived the evening before
from Europe via New York. So I went straight into that house and I
disregarded the butler, second man, valet, and seven assorted servants;
and Mr. Willett Senior heard the noise and came to the dining-room door.
'Well, what the devil's the matter?' he said. I said: 'I only want to
ask you one question, sir. Why are you not in a state of terrible mental
agitation over the tragic disappearance of your son?'
"'Because,' he replied, coolly, 'I know my son, Reginald. If the
newspapers and the public will let him alone he'll come back when he gets
ready.'
"'Are you not alarmed?'
"'Not in the least.'
"'Then why did you return from Europe and hasten up here?'
"'Too many newspaper men hanging around.' He glanced insultingly at the
silver.
"I let that go. 'Mr. Willett,' I said, 'they found your son's camera on
the trail. Your butler exhibits it to the police and reporters and tells
them a glib story. He told it to me, also. But what I want to know is,
why nobody has thought of developing the films.'
"'My butler,' said Mr. Willett, eyeing me, 'did develop the films.'
"'Was there anything on them?'
"'Some trees.'
"'May I see them?'
"He scrutinised me.
"'After you've seen them will you take your friend and go away and
remain?' he asked wearily.
"'Yes,' I said.
"He walked into the breakfast room, opened a silver box, and returned
with half a dozen photographs. The first five presented as many views of
foliage; I used a jeweller's glass on them, but discovered nothing else."
"Was there anything to jar you on the sixth photograph?" inquired
Langdon, interested.
Sayre made an impressive gesture; he was a trifle inclined toward the
picturesque and histrionic.
"Curt, on the ground under a tree in the sixth photograph lay something
which, until last evening, did not seem to me important." He paused
dramatically.
"Well, what was it? A bandersnatch?" asked Langdon irritably.
"Examine it!"
Langdon took the photograph. "It looks like a--a hammock."
"What that girl held in her hand last night resembled a hammock."
"Hey?"
Sayre leaned over his shoulder and laid the stem of his pipe on the
extreme edge of the photograph.
"If you look long enough and hard enough," he said, "you will just be
able to make out the vague outline of a slender human hand among the
leaves, holding the end of the hammock. See it?"
Langdon looked long and steadily. Presently he fished out a jeweller's
glass, screwed it into his eye, and looked again.
"Do you think that's a human hand?"
"I do."
"It's a slim one--a child's, or a young girl's."
"It is. _She_ had be-u-tiful hands."
"Who?"
"That girl I saw last evening."
Langdon slowly turned and looked at Sayre.
"Well, what do you make of it?"
"Nothing yet--except a million different little romances."
"Of course, you'd do that anyway. But what scientific inference do you
draw? Here's a thing that looks like a hammock lying on the ground. One
end seems to be lifted; perhaps that _is_ a hand. Well, what about it?"
"I'm going to find out."
"How?"
"By--fishing," said Sayre quietly, rising and picking up his rod.
"You're going back there in hopes of----"
"In hopes."
After a silence Langdon said: "You say she was unusually pretty?"
"Unusually."
"Shall I--go with you, William?"
"No," said Sayre coldly.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
III
SAYRE had been fishing for some time with the usual result when the
slightest rustle of foliage caught his ear. He looked up. She was
standing directly behind him.
He got to his feet immediately and pulled off his cap. That was too bad;
he was better looking with it on his head.
"I wondered whether you'd come again," he said, so simply and naturally
that the girl, whose grey eyes had become intent on his scanty hair with
a surprised and pained expression, looked directly into his smiling and
agreeable face.
"Did you come to fish this pool?" he asked. "You are very welcome to. _I_
can't catch anything."
"Why do you think that I am out fishing?" she asked in a curiously clear,
still voice--very sweet and young--but a voice that seemed to grow out of
the silence instead of to interrupt it.
"You are fishing, are you not? or at least you came here to fish last
evening?" he said.
"Why do you think so?"
"You had a net."
He expected her to say that it was a hammock which she was trailing
through the woods in search of two convenient saplings on which to hang
it.
She said: "Yes, it was a net."
"Did my being here drive you away from your favourite pool?"
She looked at him candidly. "You are not a sportsman, are you?"
"N--no," he admitted, turning red. "Why?"
"People who take trout in nets are fined and imprisoned."
"Oh! But you _said_ you had a net."
"It wasn't a fish net."
He waited. She offered no further explanation. Sometimes she looked at
him, rather gravely, he thought; sometimes she looked at the stream.
There was not the slightest hint of embarrassment in her manner as she
stood there--a straight, tall, young thing, grey-eyed, red-lipped, slim,
with that fresh slender smoothness of youth; clad in grey wool, hatless,
thick burnished hair rippling into a heavy knot at the nape of the
whitest neck he had ever seen.
The stiller she stood, apparently wrapped in serious inward
contemplation, the stiller he remained, as though the spell of her serene
self-absorption consigned him to silence. Once he ventured, stealthily,
to smack a mosquito, but at the echoing whack there was, in her slowly
turned face, the calm surprise of a disturbed goddess; and he felt like
saying "excuse me."
"Do they bite you?" she asked, lifting her divine eyebrows a trifle.
"Bite me! Good heavens, don't they bite you? But I don't suppose they
dare----"
"What?"
"I didn't mean 'dare' exactly," he tried to explain, feeling his ears
turning a fiery red, and wondering why on earth he should have made such
a foolish remark.
"What _did_ you mean?"
"N--nothing. I don't know. I say things and--and sometimes," he added in
a burst of confidence, "they don't seem to _mean_ anything at all." To
himself he groaned through ground teeth: "What an ass I am. What on earth
is the matter with me?"
She considered him in silence, candidly; and redder and redder grew his
ears as he saw that she was quietly inspecting him from head to foot with
an interest perfectly unembarrassed, innocently intent upon her
inspection.
Then, having finished him down to his feet, she lifted her eyes, caught
his, looked a moment straight into them, then sighed a little.
"Do you know," she said, "I ought not to have come here again."
"Why?" he asked, astonished.
"There's no use in my telling you. There was no use in my coming. Oh, I
realise that perfectly well now. And I think I'd better go----"
She lingered a moment, glanced at the stream running gold in the
afternoon light, then turned away, bidding him good-bye in a low voice.
"Are you g-going?" he blurted out, not knowing exactly what he was
saying.
She moved on in silence. He looked after her. A perfectly illogical
feeling of despair overwhelmed him.
"For Heaven's sake, don't go away!" he said.
She moved on a pace, another, more slowly, hesitated, halted, leisurely
looked back over her shoulder.
"What did you say?" she asked.
"I said--I said--I said----" but he began to stammer fearfully and could
get no farther.
Perhaps she thought he was threatened with some kind of seizure; anyway,
something about him apparently interested her enough to slowly retrace
her steps.
"What is the matter, Mr. Sayre?" she asked.
"Why, _that's_ funny!" he said; "you know my name?"
"Yes, I know your name."
"Could--would--should--might----" he could get no farther.
"What?"
"M-might I--would it be--could you----"
"Are you trying to ask me what is _my_ name?"
"Yes," he said; "did you think I was reciting a lesson in grammar?"
Suddenly the rare smile played delicately along the edges of her upcurled
mouth.
"No," she said, "I knew you were embarrassed. It wasn't nice of me. But,"
and her face grew grave, "there is no use in my telling you my name."
"Why?"
"Because we shall not meet again."
"Won't you ever let me--give me a chance--because--you know,
somehow--seeing you yesterday--and to-day--this way----"
"Yes, I know what you mean."
"Do you?"
"Yes. _I_ came back, too," she said seriously.
A strange, inexplicable tingling pervaded him.
"You came--came----"
"Yes. I should not have done it, because I saw you perfectly plainly
yesterday. But--somehow I hoped--somehow----"
"What!"
"That there had been a mistake."
"You thought you knew me?"
"Oh, no. I knew perfectly well I had never before seen you. That made no
difference. It wasn't that. But I thought--hoped--I had made a mistake.
In fact," she said, with a slight effort, "I was dishonest with myself. I
knew all the time that it was useless. And as soon as I saw you with your
cap off----"
"W-what!" he faltered.
A slight blush, perfectly distinct in her creamy skin, grew, then waned.
"I am sorry," she said. "Of course, you do not understand what I am
saying; and I can not explain. . . . And I think I had--better--go."
"Please don't."
"That is an added reason for my going."
"What is?"
"Your saying 'please don't.'"
He looked at her, bewildered, and slowly passed his hand across his eyes.
"Somehow," he said, "this is all like magic to me. Here in the wilderness
I hear a stick crack----"
"I meant you to hear it. I could have moved without a sound."
"And, looking up, I see the most beautif--I see--you. Then I dream of
you."
"_Did_ you?"
"Every moment--between mosquitoes! And then to-day I returned, hoping."
She lost a trifle of her colour.
"Hoping--what?"
"T-t-to s-s-see you," he stammered.
"I _must_ go," she said under her breath, almost hurriedly; "this must
stop _now_!"
"Won't you--can't you--couldn't I----"
"No. No--no--no--Mr. Sayre."
He said: "I've simply got to see you again. I know what I'm
asking--saying--hoping--wishing--isn't usual--conventional--advisable,
b-b-but I can't help it."
Standing there facing him she slowly shook her head.
"There is no use," she said. "It is perfectly horrid of me to have come
back. I somehow was afraid--from the expression of your face
yesterday----"
"Afraid of what?"
She hesitated; then, lifting her grey eyes, fearlessly:
"Afraid that you might wish to see me again. . . . Because I felt the
same way."
"Do you mean," he cried, "that I--that you--that we--Oh, Lord! I'm not
eloquent, but every faltering, stuttering, stammering, fool of a word I
_do_ say means a million things----"
"Oh, I know it, Mr. Sayre. I know it. I have no business here; I _must_
not remain----"
"If you go, you know I'll do some absurd thing--like poking my head under
water and holding it there, or walking backward off that ledge. Do you
know--if you should suddenly go away now, and if that ended it----"
"Ended--what?"
"You know," he said.
She may have known, for she stood very still, with head lowered and
downcast eyes. As for Sayre, what common sense he possessed had gone. The
thrilling unreality of it all--the exquisite irrational, illogical
intoxication of the moment--her beauty--the mystery of her--and of the
still, sunlit woods, had made of them both, and the forest world around
them, an enchanted dream which he was living, every breath a rapture,
every heart-beat an excited summons from the occult.
"Mr. Sayre," she said, with an effort, "I shall not tell you my name; but
if you ever again should happen to think of me, think of my name as the
name of the girl in that poem which I heard you reciting yesterday."
"Amourette?"
"Yes. That was the name of the poem and of the girl. You may call me
Amourette--when you are thinking of me alone by yourself."
"Did you like that poem?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because--I wrote it."
"You!" She lost a little of her colour.
"Yes," he said, "I wrote it--Amourette."
"Then--then I had better go away as fast as I can," she murmured.
With an enraptured smile verging perilously upon the infatuated, if not
fatuous, he repeated her name aloud; and she looked at him out of soft
grey eyes that seemed at once fascinated and distressed.
"Please let me go," she said.
He was not detaining her.
"Won't you?" she asked, pitifully.
"No, I won't," said William Sayre, suddenly invaded by an instinct that
he possessed authority in the matter. "We must talk this thing over."
"Oh, but there isn't any use--really, truly there isn't! Won't you
believe me?"
"No," he said as honestly as he could through the humming exaltation that
sang in him until, to himself, he sounded like a beehive.
There was a fallen log all over moss behind her.
"We ought to be seated to properly consider this matter," he said.
"I must not think of it! I must go instantly."
When they were seated, and he had nearly twisted his head off trying to
meet her downcast eyes, he resumed a normal and less parrot-like posture,
and folded his arms portentously.
"To begin," he said, "I came here fishing. I heard a stick crack----"
She looked up.
"_That_ was my fault. It was all my fault. I don't know how I ever came
to do it. I never did such a thing in my life. We merely heard that you
and Mr. Langdon were in the woods----"
"_Who_ heard?"
"We. Never mind the others. I'll say that _I_ heard you were here.
And--and I took my--my net and came to--to----"
"To what?"
"To--investigate."
"Investigate what? _Me_?"
"Y-yes. I can't explain. But I came, honestly, naturally, unsuspiciously.
And as soon as I saw you I was quite sure that you were not what--what
certain people wanted, even if you were the author of _Amourette_----"
[Illustration: "'To begin,' he said, 'I came here fishing.'"]
"_I_ was not what _you_ wanted?" he repeated, bewildered.
"I mean that--that you were not what--what _they_ required----"
"They? Who are _they_? And what, in Heaven's name, did 'they' require?"
"I don't want to tell you, Mr. Sayre. All I shall say is that I knew
immediately that they didn't want _you_, because you are not up to the
University standard. And you won't understand that. I ought to have gone
quietly away. . . . I don't know why I didn't. I was so interested in
listening to you recite, and in looking at you. I loved your poem,
_Amourette_. . . . And two hours slipped by----"
"You stood there in the bushes looking at _me_ for two hours, _and_
listening to my poem--and _liking_ it?"
"Yes, I did. . . . I don't know why. . . . And then, somehow, without any
apparent reason, I wanted you to see _me_ . . . without any apparent
reason . . . and so I stepped on a dry stick. . . . And to-day I came
back . . . without any apparent reason. . . . I don't know what on earth
has happened to make me--make me--forget----"
"Forget what?"
"Everything--except----"
"Except what?"
She looked up at him with clear grey eyes, a trifle daunted.
"Forget everything except that I--like you, Mr. Sayre."
He said: "That is the sweetest and most fearless thing a woman ever said.
I am absurdly happy over it."
She waited, looking down at her linked fingers.
"And," he said, "for the first time in all my life I have cared more for
what a woman has said to me than I care for anything on earth."
There was a good deal of the poet in William Sayre.
"Do you mean it?" she asked, tremulously.
"I mean more."
"I--I think you had better not say--more."
"Why?"
"Because of what I told you. There is no use in your--your finding
me--interesting."
"Are you married?" he asked, so guilelessly that she blushed and denied
it with haste.
His head was spinning in a sea of pink clouds. Harps were playing
somewhere; it may have been the breeze in the pines.
"Amourette," he repeated in a sort of divine daze.
"I am--going," she said, in a low voice.
"Do you desire to render me miserable for life?" he asked so seriously
that at first she scarcely realised what he had said. Then blush and
pallor came and went; she caught her breath, looked up at him,
beseechingly.
"Everything is wrong," she said in the ghost of a voice. "Things are
hurrying me--trying to drive me headlong. I must go. Let me go, now."
And she sat very still, and closed her eyes. A second later she opened
them.
"Why did you come?" she asked almost fiercely. "There was no use in it!
Why did you come into these woods for that foolish newspaper? By this
time the Associated Press, the police, and the families of the men you
are looking for have received letters from every one of the four missing
young men, saying that they are perfectly well and happy and expect to
return--after their honeymoons."
Flushed, excited, beautiful in her animation, she faced the astounded
young man who stared at her wildly through his eye-glasses.
After a while he managed to ask whether she wished him to believe that
these four young men had each eloped with their soul mates.
She bit her lip. "To be accurate," she said in a low voice, "somebody
eloped with each one of them."
"How? I don't understand!"
"I don't wish you to. . . . Good-bye."
"You mean," he demanded, incredulously, "that four girls ran away with
these four big, hulking young men?"
"Practically."
"That's ridiculous! Besides, it's impossible! Besides--women don't run
men off like cattle rustlers. Man is the active agent in elopements,
woman the passive agent."
She did not answer.
"Isn't she?"
She made no reply.
He said: "Amourette, shall I illustrate what I mean--with you as the
passive agent?"
The girl bent over a little, then with a sudden movement she dropped her
head in her hands. A moment later he saw a single tear fall between her
fingers.
He looked east, west, north, south, and finally up into the sky. Seeing
nobody, the silly expression left his otherwise interesting face; a
graver, gentler light grew in his eyes. And he put one arm around her
supple waist.
"Something is dreadfully wrong," he said; "all this must be
explained--our strange encounter, our speaking, our talking at cross
purposes, our candid interest in each other--the sudden, swift, unfeigned
friendship that was born the instant that our eyes encountered----"
"I know it. It _was_ born. Oh, I know it. I _know_ it, and I could not
help it--somehow--somehow----"
"It--it was almost like--like--love at first sight," he whispered.
"It was--something like it--I am afraid----"
"Do you think it _was_ love?"
"I don't know. . . . Do you?"
"I don't know. . . . You mustn't cry. Put your head down--here. You
mustn't be distressed."
"I am, dreadfully."
"You mustn't be."
"I can't help it--now."
"Could you help it if you--loved me?"
"Oh, no! Oh, no! It would distress me beyond measure to--to love you. Oh,
it must not be--it must not happen to me----"
"It is already happening to _me_."
"Don't let it! Don't let it happen to either of us! Please--please----"
"But--it _is_ happening all the while, Amourette."
She drew a swift, startled sigh.
"Is _that_ what it is that is happening to me, too, Mr. Sayre?"
"Yes. I think so."
"Oh, oh, _oh_!" she sobbed, hiding her face closer to his shoulder.
"Amourette! Darling! Dea----"
"L-listen. Because now I've got to tell you all about the disappearance
of those perfectly horrid young specimens of physical perfection. And
after that you will abhor me!"
"Abhor _you_! Dearest--dearest and most divine of women!"
"Wait!" she sobbed. "I've got myself and you into the most awful scrape
you ever dreamed of by falling in love with you at first sight!"
And she turned her face closer to his shoulder and slipped one desperate
little hand into his.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV
ABOUT two o'clock that afternoon Sayre rushed into camp with his scanty
hair on end.
Langdon, who had been attempting to boil a blank-book for dinner, gazed
at him in consternation.
"What is it? Bears, William?" he asked fearfully. "D-d-don't be
f-f-frightened; I'll stand by you."
"It isn't bears, you simp! I've just unearthed the most colossal
conspiracy of the century! Curtis, things are happening in these woods
that are incredible, abominable, horrible----"
"_What_ is happening?" faltered Langdon, turning paler. "Murder?"
"Worse! They've got Willett and the others! She admitted it to me----"
"Hey?"
"Willett and Carrick and the others!" shouted Sayre, gesticulating.
"They've caught 'em all! She said so! I----"
"They? She? Who's caught what? Who's 'they'? What it is? Who's 'she'?
What are you talking about, anyway?"
"Amourette told me----"
"Amourette? Who the deuce is Amourette?"
"I don't know. Shut up! My head's spinning like a gyroscope. All I know
is that I want to marry her and she won't let me--and I believe she would
if I had a reliable hair-restorer and wasn't near-sighted--but she ran
away and got inside the fence and locked the gate."
"Are you drunk?" demanded Langdon, "or merely frolicsome?"
"_I_ don't know. I guess I am. I'm about everything else. What do I know
about anything anyway? Nothing!"
He began to run around in circles; Langdon, having seen similar symptoms
in demented cats, regarded him with growing alarm.
"I tell you it's an outrageous social condition which tolerates such
doings!" shouted Sayre. "It's a perfectly monstrous state of things! Nine
handsome men out of ten are fatheads! I told her so! I tried to point out
to her--but she wouldn't listen--she wouldn't listen!"
Langdon stared at him, jaw agape. Then:
"Quit that ghost-dancing and talk sense," he ventured.
"Do you think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving
his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you
and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women--if
these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such
programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else--like those
wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette
that, too; but she wouldn't listen--she wouldn't lis--My God! _Why_ am I
bald?"
He swung his arms like a pair of flails and advanced distractedly upon
Langdon, who immediately retreated.
"Come back here," he said. "I want to picture to you the horrors that are
going on in your native land! You ought to know. You've got to know!"
"Certainly, old man," quavered Langdon, keeping a tree between them. "But
don't come any closer or I'll scream."
"Do you think I'm nutty?"
"Oh, not at all--not _at_ all," said Langdon soothingly. "Probably the
wafers disagreed with you."
"Curtis, wouldn't it rock any man's equilibrium to fall head over heels
in love with a girl inside of ten minutes? I merely ask you, man to man."
"It sure would, dear friend----"
"And then to see that divine girl almost ready to love you in return--see
it perfectly, plainly? And have her tell you that she could learn to care
for you if your hair wasn't so thin and you didn't wear eye-glasses? By
Jinks! That was _too_ much! I'll leave it to you--_wasn't_ it?"
Langdon swallowed hard and watched his friend fixedly.
"And then," continued Sayre, grinding his teeth, "_then_ she told me
about Willett!"
"Hey?"
"Oh, the whole thing is knocked in the head from a newspaper standpoint.
They've all written home. They're married--or on the point of it----"
"What!"
"But that isn't what bothers me. What do I care about this job, or any
other job, since I've seen the only girl on earth that I could ever stay
home nights for! And to think that she ran away from me and I'm never to
see her again because I'm near-sighted and partly bald!"
He waved his arms distractedly.
"But, by the gods and demons!" he cried, "I'm not going to stand for her
going hunting with that man-net! If she catches any insufferable pup in
it I'll go insane!"
Langdon's eyes rolled and he breathed heavily.
"Old man," he ventured, kindly, "don't you think you'd better lie down
and try to take a nice little nap----"
Sayre instantly chased him around the tree and caught him.
"Curt," he said savagely, "get over the idea that there's anything the
matter with me mentally except love and righteous indignation. I _am_ in
love; and it hurts. I'm indignant, because those people are treating my
sex with an outrageous and high-handed effrontery that would bring the
blush of impotent rage to any masculine cheek!"
"What people?" said the other warily. "You needn't answer till you get
your wits back."
"They're back, Curt; that twelve-foot fence of heavy elephant-proof wire
which we noticed in the forest day before yesterday isn't the fencing to
a game park. It encloses a thousand acres belonging to the New Race
University. Did you know that?"
"What's The New Race University?" asked Langdon, astonished.
"You won't believe it--but, Curtis, it's a reservation for the--the
p-p-propagation of a new and s-s-symmetrically p-p-proportioned race of
g-g-god-like human beings! It's a deliberate attempt at cold-blooded
scientific selection--an insult to every bald-headed, near-sighted,
thin-shanked young man in the United States!"
"William," said the other, coaxingly, "you had better lie down and let me
make some wafer soup for you."
"You listen to me. I'm getting calmer now. I want to tell you about these
New Race women and their University and Amourette and Reginald Willett
and the whole devilish business."
"Is there--is there really such a thing, William? You would not tell me a
bind like that just to make a goat of me, would you?"
"No, I wouldn't. There _is_ such a thing."
"Did you see it?"
"No, I----"
"How do you know?"
"Amourette told me--shamelessly, defiantly, adorably! It was organised in
secret out of the most advanced and determined as well as the most
healthy, vigorous, and physically beautiful of all the suffragettes in
North America. One of their number happened to own a thousand acres here
before the State took the rest for its park. And here they have come,
dozens and dozens of them--to attend the first summer session of the New
Race University."
"Is--is there actually a University in these woods?"
"There is."
"Buildings?" demanded Langdon, amazed.
"No, burrows. Isn't that the limit? Curt, believe me, they live in caves.
It's their idea of being vigorous and simple and primitive. Their cult is
the cave woman. They have classes; they study and recite and exercise and
cook and play auction bridge. Their object is to hasten not only
political enfranchisement, but the era of a physical and intellectual
equality which will permit them to mate as they choose and people this
republic with perfect progeny. Every girl there is pledged to mate only
with the very pick of physical masculine perfection. Their pledge is to
build up a new, god-like race on earth, which ultimately will dominate,
crush out, survive, and replace all humanity which has become
degenerate. Nothing mentally or physically or politically imperfect is
permitted inside that wire fence. My eye-glasses bar me out; your shanks
exclude you--also your politics, because you're a democrat."
"That's monstrous!" exclaimed Langdon, indignantly.
"More monstrous still, these disciples of the New Race movement are
militant! Their audacity is unbelievable! Certain ones among them, adepts
in woodcraft, have now begun to range this forest with nets. What do you
think of that! And when they encounter a young fellow who agrees with the
remorseless standard of perfection set up by the University, they stalk
him and net him! They've got four so far. And now it's Amourette's turn
to go out!"
Langdon's teeth chattered.
"W-w-what are they g-going to do with their captures?"
"Marry them!"
"Willett? And Carrick and----"
"Yes. Isn't it awful, Curt?"
"Was she the girl with the net in the photo? I mean, was that her hand?"
"No; that was a friend of her's who bagged Willett. Amourette started out
yesterday for the first time after--well, I suppose you'd call it 'big
game.' She saw me, stalked me, got near enough to see my glasses, and let
me go. And to-day, thinking that she might have been mistaken and that
perhaps I only wore sun-glasses, she came back. But I was ass enough to
take off my cap to her, and she saw my hair--saw where it wasn't--and
that settled it."
"What a mortifying thing to happen to you, William."
"I should think so. There's nothing unusual the matter with me. Cæsar was
bald. It's idiotic to bar a man out because he has fewer hairs than the
next man. And the exasperating part of it is that I believe I could win
her if I had half a chance."
"Of course you could. If she's any good as a sport, she'd rather have
you, hairless myopiac that you are, than a tailor's dummy."
Sayre said: "Isn't it a terrible thing, Curtis, to think of that sweet,
lovely young girl pledged to a scientific life like that? P-pledged to
p-p-propagate p-p-perfection?"
"What a mean-spirited creature that fellow Willett must be," observed
Langdon in disgust; "and the other three--Ugh!"
"Why?"
"To tamely submit to being kidnapped and woo'd and wed that way--endure
the degradation of a captivity among all those young girls----"
Sayre said: "Would _you_ call for help if kidnapped?"
Langdon gazed into space: "I wonder," he murmured.
Sayre looked at him searchingly.
"I don't believe you'd make the welkin ring with your yelps. It's
probably the same with those four men."
"Probably."
"I don't suppose those suffragettes of the New Race University really
require any fence there to keep those men in."
"No; only to keep the rest of us out."
"The chances are that Willett and that poet Carrick and De Lancy Smith
and Alphonso W. Green couldn't be chased out of that University."
"Those _are_ the chances. How I hate those four men. It's curious,
William, that no man can ever tolerate the idea of any other man ever
getting solid with any looker. I always did dislike to see another man
with a pretty girl. . . . William?"
"What?"
"Think of the concentrated beauty in that University! Think of that rich
round-up of creamy dreams! Consider that mellifluous marmalade! And--we
can't have any--because _you_ are slightly bald and near-sighted and _I_
am thin and scholarly!" He ran at the camp-kettle and kicked it.
After a painful silence Sayre said timidly: "Don't laugh, but _is_ there
any known substance which will bring in hair?"
"You mean bring it out?"
"Well, dammit, grow it! Is there?"
"There are too many bald monarchs and millionaires to prove the contrary.
Nor is there anything that can make my thin shanks fatter."
"--I'd be willing to go about without glasses," said Sayre humbly. "I
told her so."
"Couldn't you deceive her with a wig? It wouldn't matter afterward. After
you're once married let her shriek."
"Amourette _saw_ my head." And he hung it in bitter dejection.
"Come on," said Langdon cheerily. "Let's peek through their fence and see
what happens. Much has been done with a merry eye in this world of
haughty ladies."
As they turned away into the woods Sayre clenched his fists.
"I'd like to knock the collective blocks off those four young men inside
that fence. And--to think--to _think_ of Amourette going out again
to-morrow, man hunting, with her net! I can't endure it, Curt--I simply
can't."
Langdon looked at his friend in deep commiseration.
"I wish I could help you, William--but I don't
see--I--don't--exactly--see----" He hesitated. "Of course I _could_ go to
Utica and pay a wig-maker and costumer to make me up into the kind of
Charlie-Gussie they're looking for at that University. . . . And when
your best girl goes out hunting, she'll see me and net me, and you can be
in hiding near by, and rush out and net her."
In their excitement they seized each other and danced.
"Why not?" exclaimed Langdon. "Shall I try? Trust me to come back a
specimen of sickening symmetry--the kind of man women write about and
draw pictures of--pink and white and silky-whiskered! Shall I? And I'll
bring you a net to catch her in! Is it a go, William?"
Sayre broke down and began to cry.
"Heaven bless you, friend," he sobbed. "And if ever I get that girl
inside a net she'll learn something about natural selection that they
p-p-probably forgot to teach in their accursed New Race University!"
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
V
ONE week later Curtis Langdon sat on the banks of a trout stream fishing,
apparently deeply absorbed in his business; but he was listening so hard
that his ears hurt him.
A few yards away, ambushed behind a rock on which was painted "Votes for
Women," lurked William Sayre. A net lay on the ground beside him,
fashioned with ring and detachable handle like a gigantic butterfly net.
He, too, tremendously excited, was listening and watching the human
bait--Langdon being cast for the bait.
Perfect and nauseating beauty now marked that young gentleman. Features
and figure were symmetrical; his eyebrows had been pencilled into exact
arcs, his mouth was a Cupid's bow, his cheeks were softly rosy, and a
silky and sickly moustache shadowed his rosy lips. Under his fashionable
outing shirt he wore a rubber chest improver; his cunningly padded
shoulders recalled the exquisite sartorial creations of Mart, Haffner,
and Sharx; his patent puttees gave him a calf to which his personal
shanks had never aspired; thick, golden-brown hair, false as a woman's
vows, was tossed carelessly from a brow, snowy with pearl powder. And he
wore a lilac-edged handkerchief in his left cuff.
Both young men truly felt that if any undergraduate of the New Race
University was out stalking she'd have at least one try at such a bait.
Nothing feminine and earnest could resist that glutinous agglomeration of
charms.
But they had now been there since before dawn; nothing had broken the
sun-lit quiet of forest and water, not even a trout; and they listened
in vain for the snapping of the classical twig.
Lunch time came; they ate a pad apiece. Neither dared to smoke, Sayre
because it might reveal his hiding place, Langdon because smoking might
be considered an imperfection in the University.
Sunlight fell warm on the banks of the stream, the leaves rustled, big
white clouds floated in the blue above. Nothing came near Langdon except
a few mosquitoes, who couldn't bite through the make-up; and a small and
inquisitive bird that inspected him with disdain and said,
"cheep--che-ep!" so many times that Langdon took it as a personal comment
and almost blushed.
He thought to himself: "If it wasn't that William is actually becoming
ill over his unhappy love affair I'm damned if I'd let even a dicky-bird
see me in this rig. Ugh! What a head of hair! The average girl's ideal is
what every healthy man wants to kick. I wouldn't blame any decent fellow
for booting me into the brook on sight."
He bit into his pad and sat chewing reflectively and dabbling his line in
the water.
"Poor old William," he mused. "This business is likely to end us both. If
we stay here we lose our jobs; if we go back William is likely to
increase the nut crop. I never supposed men took love as seriously as
that. I've heard that it sometimes occurred--what is it Shakespeare says:
'How Love doth make nuts of us all!'"
He chewed his pad and swung his feet, philosophically.
"Why the devil doesn't some girl come and try to steal a kiss?" he
muttered. "It might perhaps be well to call their attention to my
helpless presence and unguarded condition."
So he sang for a while, swinging his legs: "Somebody's watching and
waiting for me!" munching his luncheon between verses; and, as nobody
came, he bawled louder and louder the refrain: "Somebody's darling,
darling, dah-ling!" until a hoarse voice from behind the rock silenced
him:
"Shut up that hurdy-gurdy voice of yours! A defect like that will count
ten points against you! Can it!"
"Oh, very well," said Langdon, offended; "but everybody doesn't feel the
way you do about music."
Silence resumed her classical occupation in the forest; the stream
continued to sparkle and make its own kind of music; the trout, having
become accustomed to the queer thing on the bank and the baited hook
among the pebbles, gathered in the ripples stemming the current with
winnowing fins.
A very young rabbit sat up in a fern patch and examined Langdon with
dark, moist eyes. He sat there for several minutes, and might have
remained for several more if a sound, unheard by Langdon and by Sayre,
had not set the bunch of whiskers on his restless nose twitching, and
sent him scurrying off over the moss.
The sound was no sound to human ears; Langdon heard it not; Sayre, drowsy
in the scented heat, dozed behind his rock.
A shadow fell across the moss; then another; two slim shapes moved
stealthily among the trees across the brook.
For ten minutes the foremost figure stood looking at Langdon.
Occasionally she used an opera glass, which, from time to time, she
passed back over her shoulder to her companion.
"Ethra," she whispered at last, "he seems to be practically perfect."
"I'm wondering about those puttees, dear--shanks in puttees are
deceptive."
"Those are exquisite calves," said Amourette sadly. "I'm sure they'll
measure up to regulation. And his chest seems up to proof."
"What beautiful eyebrows," murmured Ethra.
But Amourette found no pleasure in them, nor in the golden-brown hair,
nor the bloom of youth and perfect health pervading their unconscious
quarry. Perhaps she was thinking of a certain near-sighted, thin-haired
young man--and how she had slammed the gate of the wire fence in his
face--_after_ their first kiss.
She drew a deep, painful breath and lifted her head resolutely.
"I suppose I'd better begin to stalk him, Ethra," she said.
"Yes; he's a very good specimen. Be careful, dear. Strike a circle and
come up behind him. When you're ready, mew like a cat-bird and I'll let
him catch a glimpse of me. And as soon as he begins to--to rubber," she
said, with a haughty glance at the unconscious angler, "steal up and net
him, and I'll come across and help tie him up."
Amourette sighed, standing there irresolute. Then she straightened her
drooping shoulders, seized her net very firmly, and, with infinite
caution, began to stalk her quarry.
Once the stalking had fairly begun, the girl became absorbed in the game.
All memory of Sayre, if there indeed had been any to make her falter in
her purpose, now departed. She was a huntress pure and simple, silent,
furtive, adroit, intent upon her quarry. There came a kind of fierceness
into her concentration; the joy of the chase thrilled her as she crept
noiselessly through the woods, describing a circle, crossing the stream
far above the sleepy fisherman, gliding, stealing nearer, nearer, until
at length she stood in the thicket behind him.
For a moment she waited silently, freeing her net and gathering it in her
right hand ready for a deadly cast. Then, pursing up her red lips, she
mewed like a cat-bird, three times.
Instantly, across the stream, she saw Ethra step out of the willows into
plain view; saw Langdon wake up, stare, get up, and regard the beautiful
vision across the stream with concentrated and delighted attention.
Then Amourette stole swiftly forward over the moss, swinging the heavy
silken net in her right hand, closer, closer. Suddenly the net whistled
in the air, glistened, lengthened, and fell, enmeshing Langdon; and, at
the same instant something behind her whistled and fell slap; and she
found herself struggling in the folds of an enormous butterfly net.
"Ethra! Help!" she cried, terrified, trying to keep her balance in the
web which enveloped her, striving to tear a way free through the meshes;
but she was only wrapped up the tighter; two brutal masculine arms lifted
her, held her cradled and entangled, freed the handle from the net, and
bore her swiftly away.
"Darling," whispered William Sayre, "d-don't kick."
"_You_!" she gasped, struggling frantically.
"The real thing, dearest of women! The old-fashioned, original cave man.
Will you come quietly? There's a license bureau in the next village. Or
shall I be obliged to keep right on carrying you?"
"Oh, oh, _oh_!" she sobbed; "what disgrace! what humiliation; what shame!
Oh, Ethra! Ethra! What in the world am I to do?"
"That's where the mistake arose," said William gently; "_you_ don't have
to do anything--except put both arms around my neck and--be careful not
to knock off my glasses."
"_Glasses_! Ethra! Ethra! Where are you? Don't you see what is becoming
of me? You--you had b-better hurry, too," she added with a sob, "because
the man who is carrying me off is the man I told you about. _Ethra_!
Where are you?"
A convenient echo replied in similar terms. Meanwhile Sayre was walking
faster and faster through the woods.
For a while she lay motionless and silent, cradled in his arms. And after
a long, long time she tried feebly to adjust the disordered ondulations
on her hair.
Then a very small, still voice said:
"Mr. Sayre?"
"Darling!"
She seemed to recognise this as her name.
"Mr. Sayre, w-what are you going to do with me?"
"Marry you."
"B-b-by f-f-force?"
"That is up to you, darling."
"Against my will?"
"That also is up to you."
"And--and my inclination?"
"No, not against that, Amourette."
"Do you dare believe I love you?"
"I should worry."
"Do you know you are hurting me, physically, spiritually, mentally?"
"I suppose I am."
"Do you realise that you are a brute?"
"I sure do. We're all of us a little in that line, Amourette."
After a long silence she turned her face so that it rested against his
shoulder--nestled closer, and lay very still.
[Illustration]
VI
ALL over the United States conditions were becoming terrible, hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of militant women, wives, widows, matrons,
maidens, and stenographers had gone on strike. Non-intercourse with man
was to be the punishment for any longer withholding the franchise;
husbands, fathers, uncles, fiancés, bachelors, and authors held frantic
mass meetings to determine what course to pursue in the imminence of
rapidly impending industrial, political, and social disaster.
But, although men's sufferings threatened to be frightful; although for
months now nobody of the gentler sex had condescended to pay them the
slightest attention; although their wives replied to them only with
monosyllables and scornful smiles, and their sweethearts were never at
home to them, let it be remembered to their eternal credit that not one
thought of surrender ever entered their limited minds.
And so it was with young Langdon, who was left in a condition neither
dignified nor picturesque--a martyr to friendship and a victim to his own
rather frivolous idea of practical humour.
Hopelessly entangled in the net which enveloped him from head to foot, he
flopped about among the dead leaves on the bank of the stream, struggling
and kicking like a fly in a cobweb. This he considered humorous.
The lithe figure across the brook continued to view his gyrations with
mingled emotions.
She was a boyish young thing with a full-lipped, sensitive mouth, eyes
like bluish-black velvet, and clipped hair of a dull gold colour that
curled thickly all over a small and beautifully shaped head in little
burnished _boucles d'or_--which description ought to hold the reader for
a while.
She wore gray wool kilts, riding breeches laced in about the knee, suede
puttees and tan shoes; and she carried a Russian game pouch beautifully
embroidered across her right shoulder.
For a minute or two she watched the entangled young man, eyes still wide
with the excitement of the chase, full delicate lips softly parted; and
her intent and earnest face reflected modest triumph charmingly modified
by an involuntary sympathy--the natural tribute of a generous sportswoman
to the quarry successfully stalked and bagged.
Cautiously, now, but without hesitation she advanced to the edge of the
stream, picked her way cleverly across it on the stones, and, leaping
lightly to the bank, stood looking down at Langdon, who had ceased his
contortions and now lay flat on his back, gazing skyward, a grin on his
otherwise attractive countenance.
He smiled up at her through the meshes of the net when he encountered her
curious eyes, expecting immediate release.
There was no answering smile from her as she coolly examined his
symmetrical features and perfect physical proportions through the folds
of the net.
No, there could be no longer any doubt in her mind that this young man
was what the New Race University required for breeding purposes.
No such specimen as this could hope to escape instant marriage. Here were
features so mathematically flawless that they became practically
featureless; here was bodily balance so ideal that the ultimate standards
of Greek perfection seemed lop-sided in comparison. No, there could be no
doubt about it; this young man was certainly required for the purpose of
scientific propagation; willy-nilly he was destined to be one of the
ancestors of that future and god-like race which must, one day, people
the earth to replace the bigoted and degenerate population which at
present encumbered it.
She regarded him without the slightest personal interest now. His
symmetry wearied her profoundly.
"When are you going to let me out?" he asked cheerfully.
She looked at him almost insolently under slightly lifted brows.
"Presently," she said; and began to fumble in her satchel. In a few
moments she produced two bottles, a roll of antiseptic cotton, and a
hypodermic needle.
"Will you come with me voluntarily?" she inquired, stepping nearer and
looking down at him, "or must I use force?"
He might have been humorously willing to go; he really desired to see
this amusing adventure to the finish. But man resents coercion.
"Force?" he repeated.
"Exactly," she replied, displaying her pocket pharmacy.
"What are those things you have in your hand?" he asked, trying to see.
"Chloroform and a hypodermic needle. If you do not wish to come with me
voluntarily you may take your choice."
He laughed long and loud and derisively.
"That's ridiculous," he said. "Be kind enough to undo this net. I might
have been willing to go with you and look 'em over--your friends, you
know; but I don't care for your idea of humour."
"Your reply is typically man-like and tyrannical. For centuries man has
enjoyed and abused the option of doing what he pleased. Now men are going
to do what _we_ please, whether or not it suits them."
"So I've understood," he said, laughing; "but this revolt has been on for
a year and I haven't noticed any men doing what they did not wish to do."
"We have four who are doing it. They are in training for their
honeymoons. You are to be the fifth to begin training," she said coolly.
He laughed again derisively, and lay watching her. She walked up close
beside him and seated herself on the rock marked "Votes for Women."
"I suppose," she said, tauntingly, "that you were rather astonished to
wake up from your fishing nap, and find yourself----" she considered the
effect of her words, gazing at him insolently from under slightly
lowered lashes--"find yourself all balled up in a fish net."
He only grinned at her.
"What are you laughing at?" she demanded, unsmiling.
"Lying here flat on my back, I am smiling at Woman! at every individual
woman on earth! at this ridiculous feminine uprising, this suffragette
revolution--at your National Female Federation Committee; the thousands
of local unions; this strike of your entire sex; this general boycott of
my sex! What has it accomplished?" He tried to wave his hand.
"You parade and make speeches in the streets, throw bricks, slap the
faces of a few State Congressmen, and finally proclaim a general strike
and boycott.
"And what's the result? All social functions and ceremonies are
suspended; caterers, florists, confectioners, cabmen, ruined; theatres,
restaurants, department stores, novelists, milliners, in financial
throes; a falling off of over eighty per cent. in marriages and
births--and you are no nearer a vote than you were before the great
strike paralysed the business of this Republic."
The young lady had been growing pinker and pinker.
"Oh! . . . And is that why you are laughing?" she asked.
"Yes. It's the funniest strike that ever happened to a serious-minded
sex. Because you know your sex, as a sex, is a trifle destitute of a
sense of humour----"
"That expression," she cut in with bitter satisfaction, "definitely
determines _your_ intellectual and social limits, Mr. Langdon. You are
what you appear to be--one of those dreary bothers whose stock phrase is
'a sense of humour'--the kind of young man who has acquired a florid
imitation of cultivation, a sort of near-polish; the type of person who
uses the word 'brainy' for 'capable,' and 'mentality' for 'intelligence';
the dreadful kind of person who speaks of a subject as 'meaty' instead of
properly employing the words 'substance' or 'material'; the sort of----"
Langdon, red and wrathful, sat up on the ground, peering at her through
the enveloping net.
"Never in my life," he said, "have I been spoken to in such terms of
feminine contempt. Stop it! Can't you appreciate a joke?"
"Mr. Langdon, the day is past when women will either countenance or take
part in any disrespectful witticisms, slurs, or jests at the expense of
their own sex. Once--and that not very long ago--they did it. Comic
papers made my sex the subject of cartoons and witticisms; the stage
dared to spread the contemptible misinformation; women either smiled or
remained indifferent. The impression became general and fixed that women
were gallinaceous, that a hen-like philosophy characterised the sex; that
they were, at best, second-rate humans, tagging rather gratefully at the
heels of the Lords of Creation, unconcerned with the greater and vital
questions of the world.
"Now your sex has discovered its mistake. After countless centuries of
intellectual and physical bondage Woman has calmly risen to assert
herself--not as the peer of man, _but as his superior_!"
"What!" exclaimed Langdon, angrily.
"Certainly. Since prehistoric times man has attempted to govern and
shape the destinies of all things living on this earth. He has made of
his reign a miserable fizzle. It is our turn now to try our hands.
"And so, at last, woman steps forward, tipping the symbols of despotic
power--sceptre and crown--from the nerveless hand and dishonoured brow of
her recent lord and master! And down he goes under her feet--where he
belongs."
Langdon, unable to endure such language, attempted to sit up, but the net
interfered and he lay clawing at the meshes while the girl calmly
continued:
"The human race, as it is at present, is a disgrace to the world it
inhabits. We women have now decided to repeople the earth scientifically
with a race as wholesome in body as our instruction shall render it in
mind. Those among us women who are adjudged physically and mentally
perfect for this great and sacred work have pledged ourselves to the
sacrifice--_pro bono publico_.
"We shall pick out, from your degenerate sex, such physically perfect
individuals as chance to remain; we shall regard our marriages with them
as purely scientific and cold-blooded affairs; we have begun, for the
purposes of re-populating the world by capturing four symmetrical young
men. You are the fifth. The Regents of the New Race University will
select for you several girls who, theoretically, are best qualified to
become the mothers of your----"
"Stop!" shouted Langdon, tearing violently at the net. "I don't want you
to talk that way to me!"
"What way?"
"You know perfectly well," he retorted, blushing vividly. "I won't stand
it!"
"What a slave to prudery and smug convention you are," she observed with
amused contempt. "Nobody in the University is going to shock your
modesty."
"Well, what _are_ they going to do?"
"Turn you loose in the preserve after the Regents have inspected you."
"And then?"
"Oh, I suppose two or three girls will be selected."
"To do w-what?"
"To pay you marked attention."
"M-m-marked _what_?"
"Attention. Two or three girls will begin to court you."
"How?"
"Oh, the usual way--by sending you flowers and books and bon-bons, and
asking permission to call on you in your cave," she said carelessly.
There was an embarrassed pause, then:
"Will _you_ be one of those--those aspirants to my hand?" he inquired.
She said indifferently: "I hope not. I'm sure I don't desire to be the
mother of----"
"Stop! I tell you to stop conversing on such topics!" he yelled,
struggling and squirming and finally rolling over, all fours in the air.
"I want to get up!" he shouted. "My position is undignified! Anybody'd
think I was a prize animal. I don't like this poultry talk! I'm a _man_!
I'm no bench-winner. And if ever I marry and p-p-produce p-p-progeny, it
will be somebody _I_ select, not somebody who selects _me_!"
The girl looked at him sternly.
"No," she said. "For centuries man has mated from sentiment and filled
the earth with mental and physical degeneracy. Now woman steps in. It is
her turn. And she flings aside precedent, prejudice, and sentiment--for
the good of the human race! and joining hands with Science marches
forward inexorably toward the millennium!"
The girl was so earnest, so naïve, so emotionally stirred by the picture
evoked that she enacted in pretty gestures the allegory of womanhood
trampling upon sentimental emotion and turning toward Science with arms
outstretched.
Langdon, who had managed to sit up, regarded her with terrified interest.
"Would you be amiable enough to remove this net?" he asked, shivering.
"I shall take you before the Board of Regents of the New Race University.
They will assign you a cave."
"This joke has gone far enough," he said. "Please take off this net."
"No. I am going to show the Regents what I caught."
"_Me?_"
"Certainly."
"But, my poor child," he said, "I am not what I seem. The joke is
entirely on woman--poor, derided, deluded, down-trodden, humourless
woman! Why, all this symmetry of mine--all these endearing young charms,
are--are----"
He hesitated, looked at her, reflected, wavered. She was _so_
pretty--somehow he didn't want to tell her. He felt furtively of his
rubber chest improver, his flexible pneumatic calves, his golden brown
wig, his pencilled brows, silky moustache, and carefully fashioned
rosebud mouth. . . . A sudden and curious distaste for confessing to her
that all the beauties were unreal came over him.
Meanwhile, paying him no further attention for the moment, she was trying
hard to uncork the bottle of chloroform.
When she succeeded, she soaked the roll of antiseptic cotton, folded it
in a handkerchief, and re-corked the bottle. Then, eyeing him coldly,
holding the saturated handkerchief with one hand, her pretty nose with
the other, she said with nasal difficulty:
"Dow, Bister Lagdod, bake up your bind dot to struggle----"
"Are you actually going to do it?" he asked, incredulously.
"I ab!" she replied firmly.
"Nonsense! _You_ are not accustomed to give chloroform!"
"Do; but I've read up od the subject----"
"What!" he exclaimed, horrified. "Look out what you're doing, child!
Don't you dare try that on me!"
"I've got to," she insisted. "Please dod bake be dervous or we bay have
ad accidend----"
"Take that stuff away!" he yelled. "You'll give me too much and then I
won't wake up at all!"
"I'll be as careful as I cad," she promised him. "Dow be still----"
"But this is monstrous!" he retorted, flopping about in the leaves like a
stranded fish and frantically endeavouring to dodge the wet and reeking
handkerchief.
"Let go of my nose! Help! He--he--hah--h--um! bz-z-z-z----" and he
suddenly relaxed and fell back a limp, loose-limbed mass among the
leaves.
Pale and resolute the girl knelt beside him, freed him from the net, and,
bending nearer, gazed earnestly into his unconscious features. Still
gazing, she drew a postman's whistle from her satchel, set it to her
lips, and was about to summon the student on duty at the distant gate to
help bring in the quarry, when something about the features of the
recumbent young man arrested her attention.
The postman's whistle fell from her pretty lips; her startled eyes
widened as she bent closer to examine the perfections which had
captivated her from a scientific standpoint.
At that instant consciousness began to return; he gave a sudden spasmodic
and comprehensive flop; there was a report like a pistol. His chest
improver had exploded.
Terrified, trembling, she dropped on her knees beside him; never before
had she heard of a young man being blown to pieces by chloroform. Then,
almost hysterical, she ran to the stream, filled her leather satchel with
water, and, running back again, emptied it upon his upturned
countenance.
Horror on horror! His golden brown hair--his very scalp seemed to be
parting from his forehead--eyebrows, silky moustache, lips--his entire
face seemed to be coming off; and, as she shrieked and tottered to her
feet, he began to sputter and kick so violently that both pneumatic
calves blew up like the reports of a double-barreled shotgun.
And Ethra reeled back against a tree and cowered there, covering her
shocked eyes with shaking fingers.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VII
IT is a surprising and trying moment for a girl who throws water upon a
young man's face to see that face begin to dissolve and come off, feature
by feature, in polychromatic splendour.
She did not faint; her intellect reeled for a moment; then she dropped
her hands from her eyes and saw him sitting up on the ground, blinking at
her gravely from a streaked and gaudy countenance. His wig was tilted
over one eye; rouge and pearl powder made his cheeks and chin very gay;
and his handsome, silky moustache hung by one corner from his upper lip.
It was too much. She sat down limply on a mossy log and wept.
His senses returned gradually; after a while he got up and walked down to
the edge of the brook with all the dignity that unsteady legs permitted.
Fascinated, she watched him at his ablutions where he squatted by the
water's edge, scrubbing away as industriously as a washer-racoon. It did
not occur to her to flee; curiosity dominated--an overpowering desire to
see what he really resembled in _puris naturalibus_.
After a while he stood up, hurled the damp wig into the woods, wiped his
hands on his knickerbockers and his face on his sleeve, and, bending
over, examined his collapsed calves.
And all the while, as the fumes of the chloroform disappeared and he
began to realise what had been done to him, he was becoming madder and
madder.
She recognised the wrath in his face as he swung on his heel and came
toward her.
"It is your own fault!" she said, resolutely, "for playing a silly trick
like----" But she observed his advance very dubiously, straightening up
to her full slender height to confront him, but not rising to her feet.
Her knees were still very shaky.
He halted close in front of her. Something in the interrogative yet
fearless beauty of her upward gaze checked the torrent of indignant
eloquence under which he was labouring, and, presently, left him even
mentally mute, his lips parted stupidly.
She said: "According to the old order of things a well-bred man would ask
my pardon. But a decently-bred man, in the first place, wouldn't have
done such a thing to me. So your apology would only be a paradox----"
"What!" he exclaimed, stung into protest. "Am I to understand that after
netting me and chloroforming me and nearly drowning me----"
"My mistake was perfectly natural. Do you suppose that I would even dream
of trailing _you_ as you really are?"
He gazed at her bewildered; passed his unsteady hand over his
countenance, then sat down abruptly beside her on the mossy log and
buried his head in his hands.
She looked at him haughtily, sitting up very straight; he continued
beside her in silence, face in his hands as though overwhelmed. Nothing
was said for several minutes--until the clear disdain of her gaze
changed, imperceptibly; and the rigidity of her spinal column relaxed.
"I am very sorry this has happened," she said. There was, however, no
sympathy in her tone. He made no movement to speak.
"I am sorry," she repeated after a moment. "It is hard to suffer
humiliation."
"Yes," he said, "it is."
"But you deserved it."
"How? I didn't fashion my face and figure."
She mistook him: "_Somebody_ did."
"Yes; my parents."
"What!"
"Oh, I don't mean that silly make-up," he said, raising his head.
"What _do_ you mean?"
"I mean my own face and figure. What you did to me--your netting me,
doping me, and all that wasn't a patch on what you said afterward."
"What do you mean? What did I say?"
"You asked me if I supposed that you would dream of netting a man with a
face and f-figure like----"
"Mr. Langdon!"
"Didn't you?"
"I--you--we----"
"You did! And can any man suffer any humiliation to compare with words
like those? I merely ask you."
With eyes dilated, breath coming quickly, she stared at him, scarcely yet
comprehending the blow which her words had dealt to one of the lords of
creation.
"Mr. Langdon," she said, "do you suppose that I am the sort of girl to
deliberately criticise either your features or your figure?"
"But you did."
"I merely meant that you should infer----"
"I inferred it all right," he said bitterly.
Perplexed, not knowing how to encounter such an unexpected reproach,
vaguely distressed by it, she instinctively attempted to clear herself.
"Please listen. I hadn't any idea of mortifying you by explaining that
you are not qualified by nature to interest the modern woman in----"
He turned a bright red.
"Do you suppose such a condemnation--such a total ostracism--is agreeable
to a man? . . . Is there anything worse you can say about a man than to
inform him that no woman could possibly take the slightest interest in
him?"
"I didn't say that. I said the modern woman----"
"You're all modern."
"It is reported that there are still a few women sufficiently
old-fashioned to----"
"They don't interest me." He looked up at her. "What _you've_ said
has--simply--and completely--spoiled--my life," he said slowly.
"What _I_ said?"
"Yes."
"What have--what could--what I--how--where--who is----" and she checked
herself, eyes on his.
"Yes," he repeated with a curious sort of satisfaction, "you have spoiled
my entire life for me."
"What an utterly--what a wildly absurd and impossible----"
"And you _know_ it!" he insisted, with gloomy triumph.
"Know what?"
"That you've spoiled----"
"Stop! Will you explain to me how----"
"Is it necessary?"
"Necessary? Of course it is! You have made a most grave and serious
and--and heartless charge against a woman----"
"Yes, a heartless one--against you!"
"I? _Heartless?_"
"Cold, deliberate, cruel, unfeeling, merciless, remorseless----"
"Mr. Langdon!"
"Didn't you practically tell me that no woman could endure the sight of a
face and figure like mine?"
"No, I did not. What a--a cruel accusation!"
"What _did_ you mean, then?"
"That--that you are not exactly--qualified to--to become an ancestor of
the physically perfect race which----"
"What _is_ wrong with me, then?"
She looked at him helplessly. "What do you mean?"
"I mean where am I below proof? Where am I lacking? What points count me
out?"
Her sensitive underlip began to tremble.
"I--I don't want to criticise you----" she faltered.
"Please do. I beg of you. There are beauty doctors in town," he added
earnestly. "They can fix up a fellow--and I can go to a gymnasium, and
take up deep-breathing and----"
"But, Mr. Langdon, do _you_ want to--to be--captured----"
He looked into her bright and melting eyes.
"Yes," he said. "I'd like to give you another chance at me."
"Me? After what I did to you?"
"Will you?"
"Why, what a perfectly astonishing----"
"Not very. Look me over and tell me what points count against me. I know
I'm not good-looking, but I'd like to go into training for the bench--I
mean----"
"Mr. Langdon," she said slowly, "surely _you_ would not care to develop
the featureless symmetry and the--the monotonous perfection necessary
to----"
"Yes, I would. I wish to become superficially monotonous. I'm too varied;
I realise that. I want to resemble that make-up I wore----"
"That! Goodness! What a horrid idea----"
"Horrid? Didn't you like it well enough to net me?"
"I--there was nothing expressive of my personal taste in my capturing
you--I mean the kind of a man you appeared to be. It was my duty--a
purely scientific matter----"
"I don't care what it was. You went after me. You wouldn't go after me as
I now appear. I want you to tell me what is lacking in me which would
prevent you going after me again--from a purely scientific standpoint."
She sat breathing irregularly, rather rapidly, pretty head bent,
apparently considering her hands, which lay idly in her lap. Then she
lifted her blue eyes and inspected him. And it was curious, too, that,
now when she came to examine him, she did not seem to discover any
faults.
"My nose doesn't suit you, does it?" he asked candidly.
"Why, yes," she said innocently, "it suits me."
"That's funny," he reflected. "How about my ears?"
"They seem to be all right," she admitted.
"Do you think so?"
"They seem to me to be perfectly good ears."
"That's odd. What _is_ there queer about my face?"
She looked in vain for imperfections.
"Why, do you know, Mr. Langdon, I don't seem to notice anything that is
not entirely and agreeably classical."
"But--my legs are thin."
"Not very."
"Aren't they too thin?"
"Not _too_ thin. . . . Perhaps you might ride a bicycle for a few
days----"
"I will!" he exclaimed with a boyish enthusiasm which lighted up his face
so attractively that she found it fascinating to watch.
"Do you know," she said slowly, "the chances are that I would have netted
you anyway. It just occurred to me."
"Without my make-up?" he asked, in delighted surprise.
"I think so. Why not?" she replied, looking at him with growing interest.
"I don't see anything the matter with you."
"My chest improver exploded," he ventured, being naturally honest.
"_I_ don't think you require it."
"Don't you? That is the nicest thing you ever said to me."
"It's only the truth," she said, flushing a trifle in her intense
interest. "And, as far as your legs are concerned, I really do not
believe you need a bicycle or anything else. . . . In fact--in fact--_I_
don't see why you shouldn't go with me to the University if--if you--care
to----"
"You darling!"
"Mr. Langdon! Wh-what a perfectly odd thing to s-say to me!"
"I didn't mean it," he said with enthusiasm; "I really didn't mean it.
What I meant was--you know--don't you?"
She did not reply. She was absorbed in contemplating one small thumb.
"I'm all ready to go," he ventured.
She said nothing.
"Shall we?"
She looked up, looked into his youthful eyes. After a moment she rose, a
trifle pale. And he followed beside her through the sun-lit woods.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VIII
AT the gate of the New Race University and Masculine Beauty Preserve the
pretty gate-keeper on duty looked at Langdon, then at his fair captor, in
unfeigned astonishment.
"Why, Ethra!" she said, "is _that_ all you've brought home?"
"Did you think I was going to net a dozen?" asked Ethra Leslie, warmly.
"Please unlock the gate. Mr. Langdon is tired and hungry, and I want the
Regents to finish with him quickly so that he can have some luncheon."
The gate-keeper, a distractingly pretty red-haired girl, regarded Langdon
with dubious hazel eyes.
"He'll never pass the examination," she whispered to Ethra. "What on
earth are you thinking of?"
"What are _you_ thinking of, Marcella? You must be perfectly blind not to
see that he complies with every possible requisite! The Regents'
inspection is bound to be only a brief formality. Be good enough to unbar
the gates."
Marcella slowly drew the massive bolts; hostile criticism was in the gaze
with which she swept Langdon.
"Well, of all the insignificant looking young men," she murmured to
herself as Ethra and her acquisition walked away along the path, side by
side.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IX
THE collective and individual charms of the Board of Regents so utterly
over-powered Langdon that he scarcely realised what was happening to him.
First, at their request, he sat cross-legged on the ground; and they
walked round and round him, inspecting him. Under such conditions no man
could be at his best; there was a silly expression on his otherwise
attractive face, which, as their attitude toward him seemed to waver
between indifference and disapproval, became unconsciously appealing.
"Kindly rise, Mr. Langdon," said Miss Challis, chairman of the board.
Langdon got up, and his ears turned red with a sudden and burning
self-consciousness.
"Please walk past us two or three times, varying your speed."
He walked in the various styles to which he had been accustomed, changing
speed at intervals and running the entire gamut between a graceful
boulevard saunter and a lost-dog sprint.
"Now," said the beautiful chairman, "be good enough to run past us
several times."
He complied and they studied his kangaroo-like action. Miss Vining even
bent over and felt of his ankles doubtfully, and to his vivid confusion
Miss Darrell strolled up, made him sit down on a log, placed one soft,
white finger on his mouth, and, opening it coolly, examined the interior.
Then they drew together, consulting in whispers, then Miss Challis came
with a stethoscope and listened to his pneumatic machinery, while Miss
Vining carelessly pinched his biceps and tried his reflexes. After which
Miss Darrell pushed a thermometer into his mouth, measured his pulses
and blood pressure, tested his sight and hearing and his sense of smell.
The latter was intensely keen, as he was very hungry.
Then Miss Challis came and stood behind him and examined,
phrenologically, the bumps on his head, while Miss Vining, seated at his
feet, read his palm, and Miss Darrell produced a dream book and a pack of
cards, and carefully cast his horoscope. But, except that it transpired
that he was going to take a journey, that somebody was going to leave him
money, and that a dark lady was coming over the sea to trouble him,
nothing particularly exciting was discovered concerning him.
Miss Challis, relinquishing his head, produced a crystal and gazed into
it. She did not say what she saw there. Miss Vining tried to hypnotise
him and came near hypnotising herself. Which scared and irritated her;
and she let him very carefully alone after that.
And all the while Ethra sat on a tree stump, hands tightly clasped in her
lap, looking on with pathetic eagerness and timidly searching the pretty
faces of the Board of Regents for any hopeful signs.
Presently the Board retired to a neighbouring cave to confer; and Langdon
drew a deep breath of relief.
"Well," he said, smiling at Ethra, "what do you think?"
"It will be horrid of them if they don't award you a blue ribbon," she
said.
"Good heavens!" he faltered, "do they give ribbons?"
"Certainly, first, second, third, and honourable mention. It is the
scientific and proper method of classification."
Fury empurpled his visage.
"That's the limit!" he shouted, but she silenced him with a gesture,
nodding her head toward the surrounding woods; and among the trees he
caught sight of scores and scores of pretty girls furtively observing the
proceedings.
"Don't let them see you display any temper or you'll lose their good
will, Mr. Langdon. Please recollect that there is no sentiment in this
proceeding; it is a scientific matter to be scientifically
recorded--purely a matter of eugenics."
Langdon gazed around him at the distant and charming faces peeping at
him from behind trees and bushes. Everywhere bright eyes met his
mischievously, gaily. An immense sense of happiness began to invade him.
The enraptured and fatuous smile on his features now became almost
idiotic as here and there, among the trees, he caught glimpses of still
more young girls strolling about, arms interlacing one another's waists.
The prospect dazzled him; his wits spun like a humming top.
"Are--are many ladies likely to come and--and court me?" he asked timidly
of Ethra.
A quick little pang shot through her; but she said with a forced smile:
"Why do you ask? Are you a coquette, Mr. Langdon?"
"Oh, no! But, for example, I wouldn't mind being rushed by that willowy
blonde over there. I'd also like to meet the svelte one with store puffs
and sorrel hair. She _is_ a looker, isn't she?"
"She is certainly very pretty," said Ethra, biting her lips with
unfeigned vexation.
He gazed entranced at the distant throng for a while.
"And that little grey-eyed romp--the very young and slim one," he
continued enthusiastically. "Me for a hammock with her in the goosy-goosy
moonlight. . . . And I hope I'm going to meet a lot more--every one of
'em. . . . _What_ on earth is _that_?" he exclaimed, changing countenance
and leaning forward. "By Jinks, it's a _man_!"
"Certainly. There are four men here. You knew that."
"I forgot," he said, glowering at the unwelcome sight of his own sex.
Ethra said: "Oh, yes, there are those first four men we caught--Mr.
Willett, Mr. Carrick, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Green." She added carelessly: "I
have been paying rather marked attention to Alphonso W. Green."
"To whom?" he asked, with a disagreeable sensation drenching out the
sparks of joy in his bosom.
"To Alphonso W. Green. . . . And I've jollied De Lancy Smith with
bon-bons a bit, too. They are having a lot of attention paid them--and
they're rather spoiled. But, of course, any girl can marry any one of
them if she really wants to."
Langdon gazed miserably at her; she seemed to be pleasantly immersed in
her own reflections and paid no further heed to him. Then he cast a
scowling glance in the direction of the young man who was gathering wild
flowers and arranging them in a little basket.
"Ethra," he began--and stopped short under the sudden and unexpected
unfriendliness of her glance. "Miss Leslie," he resumed, reddening, "I
wouldn't have come here unless I thought--hoped--believed--that you would
pay _me_ m-m-marked----"
"_Mr. Langdon!_"
"What?"
"Men do not assume the initiative here. They make no advances; they wait
until a girl pays them attentions so unmistakable that----"
"Well, I _did_ come here because of you!" he blurted out angrily.
"That is an exceedingly indelicate avowal!" she retorted. "If the Regents
hear you talk that way you won't be permitted to receive any girl
unchaperoned."
He gazed at her, bewildered; she stood a moment frowning and looking in
the direction of the cave whither the Board of Regents had retired.
"They're calling me," she exclaimed as a figure appeared at the cave
entrance and beckoned her.
"I won't be long, Mr. Langdon. I am perfectly confident that you have
passed the inspection!" And she walked swiftly across to the edge of the
thicket where the three Regents stood outside their cave.
As she came up one of them put her arm around her.
"My poor child," she said, "that man will never do."
"W-what!" faltered the girl, turning pale.
"Why, no. How in the world could you make such a mistake?"
Ethra looked piteously from one to another.
"What is the matter with him?" she asked. "I can't see anything the
matter with him. If his legs are a trifle--refined in contour--a bicycle
will help----"
"But, Ethra, this is not a hospital, dear. This is not a sanitarium. We
don't want any imperfect living creature inside this preserve."
"W-w-what is your decision?" asked the girl; and her underlip began to
quiver, but she controlled it.
"The first vote," said Miss Challis, "was for his instant eviction, Miss
Vining dissenting. The second vote was for his expulsion with the
privilege of taking another examination in three months--Miss Darrell
dissenting----"
"I think he's the limit," said Miss Darrell.
"Why, Jessica!" exclaimed Ethra, swallowing a sob.
"The next vote," continued Betty Challis, "was whether he might not
remain here a day or two for closer observation. Jessica hasn't voted
yet, but Phyllis Vining and I are willing----"
"Oh, Jessica!" pleaded Ethra, catching her hands and pressing them to her
own breast, "I--I beg you will let him remain--if only for a few days!
Please, please, dear. I _know_ his calves will grow if scientifically
massaged; and if he is hygienically fed he will improve----"
Miss Darrell looked curiously at her; under her hands the girl's heart
was beating wildly.
"Well, then, Betty," she said to Miss Challis, "I vote we keep him under
observation for a day or two. Give him the yellow ribbon." And, bending,
she kissed Ethra lightly on the lips, whispering:
"I'm afraid we won't be able to keep him, dear. But if you'd like to have
a little fun with him and jolly him along, why--why, I was a flirt myself
in the old days of the old regime."
"That is all I want," said Ethra, dimpling with delight. "I want to see
how far I can go with him just for the fun of it."
Miss Darrell smiled tenderly at the girl and strolled off to join the
other Regents; and Ethra, her thoughtful eyes fixed on Langdon, came
slowly back, the yellow ribbon trailing in her hand.
Langdon leaped to his feet to meet her, gazing delightedly at the yellow
ribbon.
"I qualified, of course!" he said joyously. "When is it customary to
begin the courting?"
"You haven't qualified," said the girl, watching the effect of her words
on the young man. "This is merely the probation ribbon."
An immense astonishment silenced him. She drew the big orange-coloured
ribbon through his button-hole, tied it into a bow, patted it out into
flamboyant smartness, and, stepping back, gazed at him without any
particular expression in her dark blue eyes.
"Then, then I may be chased away at any moment?" he asked unsteadily.
"I am afraid so."
Thunderstruck, he stared at her: "What on earth are we to do?" he
groaned.
"_We?_"
"You and I?"
"How does it concern _me_?" asked the girl coldly.
"Doesn't it?"
She looked him calmly in the eye and shook her head.
"No, Mr. Langdon. However, as you are to remain here for a day or two
under observation, no doubt you will receive _some_ attention."
"Ethra! Isn't it possible that you might learn to care----"
"Hush! That is no way to talk!"
"Well--well, I can't wait for you to----"
"You _must_ wait! You have nothing to say about such things until some
girl asks you. And that isn't very likely. Those four perfectly handsome
young men have been here for weeks now, and, although they have received
lots of attention, not one girl has yet made any of them an actual
declaration. The girls here are having too good a time to do anything
more serious than a little fussing--just enough to frisk a kiss now and
then and keep the men amused----"
"_That_ is monstrous!" said Langdon, very red. "When a man's really in
love----"
"Nonsense! Men are flirts--every one of them!"
She laughed, made him a little gesture of adieu, refused to let him
follow her, and coolly sauntered off among the trees, heedless of his
remonstrances at being left to himself.
He watched her until she disappeared, then, with misgivings, walked
toward a tennis court, where the four men were playing a rather dawdling
and indifferent game and keeping a lively eye out for the advent of some
girl.
They appeared to be rather good-looking fellows, not in any way
extraordinary, remarkable neither for symmetry of feature nor of limb.
Langdon stood at the edge of the court looking at them and secretly
comparing their beauty with such charms as he was shyly inclined to
attribute to himself. There could be no doubt that he compared favourably
with them. If he was some, they were not so much.
One, a tall young fellow with blond, closely clipped hair, nodded
pleasantly to him, and presently came over to speak to him.
"I suppose you are a new recruit. Glad to see you. We're all anxious to
have enough men captured to get up two ball nines. My name is Reginald
Willett."
"Mine is Curtis Langdon."
"Come over and meet the others," said Willett pleasantly.
Langdon followed him, and was presently on excellent terms with James
Carrick, De Lancy Smith, and Alphonso W. Green, amiable, clean cut,
everyday young fellows.
To them he related the circumstances of his capture, and they all laughed
heartily. Then he told them that he was here merely on probation for a
day or two, naïvely displaying the yellow ribbon.
Willett laughed. "Oh, that's all right. They usually say that. We all
came in on probation; the Regents couldn't agree, and some girl always
swings the deciding vote as a special favour to herself."
"You don't think they'll kick me out?"
"Not much!" laughed Willett. "First of all, your captor would object--not
necessarily for sentimental reasons, but because she caught you; you are
hers, her game; she says to herself: 'A poor thing, but mine own!' and
hangs to you like grim death. Besides, no woman ever lets any man loose
voluntarily. And women haven't changed radically, Mr. Langdon. Don't
worry; you can stay, all right."
"Here comes Betty Challis," said Carrick, glancing at Alphonso W. Green.
"It's you for a stroll, I guess."
Mr. Green looked conscious; more conscious still when the pretty Miss
Challis strolled up, presented him with a bouquet, and stood for a few
moments conversing with everybody, perfectly at her ease. Other girls
came up and engaged the young men in lively conversation. Presently Miss
Challis made a play for hers:
"Would you care to canoe, Mr. Green?" she asked casually, turning to him
with a slight blush which she could not control.
Green blushed, too, and consented in a low voice.
As they were departing, Miss Vining rode up on horseback, leading another
horse, which De Lancy Smith, at her request, nimbly mounted; and away
they galloped down a cool forest road, everybody looking after them.
Miss Darrell cut out and roped Willett presently and took him to walk in
the direction of a pretty cascade.
A charming girl, a Miss Trenor, arrived with a hammock, book, and
bon-bons, and led Carrick away somewhere by virtue of a previous
agreement, and the remaining girls pretended not to care, and strolled
serenely off in pretty bunches, leaving Langdon standing, first on one
foot, then on the other, waiting to be spoken to.
Abandoned, he wandered about the tennis court, kicking the balls moodily.
Tiring of this, he sat down under a tree and twirled his thumbs.
Once or twice some slender figure passed, glancing brightly at him, and
he looked as shyly receptive as he could, but to no purpose. Gloom
settled over him; hunger tormented him; he gazed disconsolately at the
yellow ribbon in his button-hole, and twiddled his thumbs.
And all the while, from the shadow of a distant cave, Ethra was watching
him with great content. She knew he was hungry; she let him remain so. By
absent treatment she was reducing him to a proper frame of mind.
The word had been passed that he was Ethra's quarry; mischievous bright
eyes glanced at him, but no lips unclosed to speak to him; little feet
strolled near him, even lingered a moment, but trotted on.
His sentiments varied from apathy to pathos, from self-pity to
mortification, from hungry despair to an indignation no longer endurable.
He had enough of it--plenty. Anger overwhelmed him; hunger smothered
sentiment; he rose in wrath and stalked off toward a girl who was
strolling along, reading a treatise on eugenics.
"Will you be good enough to tell me how to get out?" he asked.
"Out?" she repeated. "Have you a pass to go out?"
"No, I haven't. Where do I obtain one?"
"Only the girl who captured you can give you a pass," she said, amused.
"Very well; where can I find her?"
"Who was it netted you?"
"A Miss Leslie," he snapped.
"Oh! Ethra Leslie's cave is over in those rocks," said the girl, "among
those leafy ledges."
"Thanks," he said briefly, and marched off, scowling.
Ethra saw him coming, and his stride and expression scared her. Not
knowing exactly what to do, and not anticipating such a frame of mind in
him, she turned over in her hammock and pretended to be asleep, as his
figure loomed up in the mouth of the cave.
"Miss Leslie!" His voice was stentorian.
She awoke languidly, and did it very well, making a charming picture as
she sat up in her hammock, a trifle confused, sweet blue eyes scarcely
yet unclosed.
"Mr. Langdon!" she exclaimed in soft surprise.
He looked her squarely, menacingly, in the eyes.
"I suppose," he said, "that all this is a grim parody on the past when
women did the waiting until it was men's pleasure to make the next move.
I suppose that my recent appraisement parallels the social inspection of
a debutante--that my present hunger is paying for the wistful
intellectual starvation to which men once doomed your sex; that my
isolation represents the isolation from all that was vital in the times
when women's opportunities were few and restricted; that my probation
among you symbolises the toleration of my sex for whatever specimen of
your sex they captured and set their mark on as belonging to them, and on
view to the world during good behaviour."
He stared at her flushed face, thoughtfully.
"The allegory is all right," he said, "but you've cast the wrong man for
the goat. I'm going."
"Y-you can't go," she stammered, colouring painfully, "unless I give you
a pass."
"I see; it resembles divorce. My sex had to give yours a cause for
escape, or you couldn't escape. And in here you must give me a pass to
freedom, or I remain here and starve. Is that it?"
She crimsoned to her hair, but said nothing.
"Give me that pass," he said.
"If I do every girl here will gossip----"
"I don't care what they say. I'm going."
She sat very still in the hammock, eyes vacant, chin on hand,
considering. It was not turning out as she had planned. She had starved
him too long.
"Mr. Langdon," she said in a low voice, "if it is only because you are
hungry----"
"I'm not; I'm past mere hunger. You disciplined me because I took a human
and natural interest in the pretty inhabitants of this new world. And I
_told_ you that I never would have entered it except for you. But you
made me pay for a perfectly harmless and happy curiosity. Well, I've
starved and paid. Now I want to go. . . . Either I go or there'll be
something doing--because I won't remain here and go hungry much longer."
"S-something--doing?" she faltered.
"Exactly. With the first----"
"You can go if you wish," she said, flushing scarlet and springing out of
the hammock.
He waited, jaws set, while she seated herself at a table and wrote out
the pass.
"Thank you," he said, in such a rage that he could scarcely control his
voice.
She may not have heard him; she sat rigid at the table, looking very hard
into space--sat motionless as he took a curt leave of her, never turning
her head--listened to his tread as he strode off through the ferns, then
laid her brow between snowy hands which matched the face that trembled in
them.
As for him, he swung away along the path by which he had come, unstrung
by turns, by turns violently desiring her unhappiness, and again
anticipating approaching freedom with reckless satisfaction.
Then a strange buoyancy came over him as he arrived in sight of the
gate, where the red-haired girl sat on a camp stool, yawning and knitting
a silk necktie--for eventualities, perhaps; perhaps for herself, Lord
knows. She lifted her grey eyes as he came swinging up--deep, clear, grey
eyes that met his and presently seemed ready to answer his. So his eyes
asked; and, after a long interval, came the reply, as though she had
unconsciously been waiting a long, long while for the question.
"I suppose you will wish to keep this," he said in a low voice, offering
her the pass. "You will probably desire to preserve it under lock and
key."
She rose to her slender height, took it in her childish hands, hesitated,
then, looking up at him, slowly tore the pass to fragments and loosed
them from her palm into the current of the south wind blowing.
"That does not matter," she said, "if you are going to love me."
There was a moment's silence, then she held out her left hand. He took
it; with her right hand, standing on tiptoe, she reached up and unbarred
the gates. And they passed out together into the infernal splendour of
the sunset forest.
[Illustration]
X
THE riots in London culminated in an episode so cataclysmic that it
sobered the civilised world. Young Lord Marque, replying to a question in
the House of Lords, said: "As long as the British peerage can summon
muscular vigour sufficient to keep a monocle in its eye and extract
satisfaction from a cigarette, no human woman in the British Empire shall
ever cast a bally ballot for any bally purpose whatever. What!"
And the House of Lords rose to its wavering legs and cheered him with an
enthusiasm almost loud enough to be heard above ordinary conversation.
But that unwise and youthful and masculine defiance was the young man's
swan-song. A male suffragette rushed with the news to Miss Pondora
Bottomly; Lord Marque was followed as he left the house; and that very
afternoon he was observed fleeing in a series of startled and graceful
bounds through Regent Park, closely pursued by several ladies of birth,
maturity, and fashion carrying solid silver hair-brushes.
_The Queen_, chronicling the somewhat intimate and exclusive affair a
week later, mentioned that: "Among those present was the lovely Lady
Diana Guernsey wearing tweeds, leather spats, and waving a Directoire
Banner embroidered with the popular device, 'Votes for Women,' in bright
yellow and bottle green on an old rose ground;" and that she had far
outdistanced the aged Marchioness of Dingledell, Lady Spatterdash, the
Hon. Miss Mousely, the Duchess of Rolinstone, Baroness Mosscroppe, and
others; and that, when last seen, she and the Earl of Marque were headed
westward. A week later no news of either pursuer or pursued having been
received, considerable uneasiness was manifested in court and suffragette
circles, and it was freely rumoured that Lady Guernsey had made a rather
rash but thoroughly characteristic vow that she would never relinquish
the trail until she had forced Lord Marque to eat his own words, written
in frosting upon a plum cake of her own manufacture.
Marque may have heard of this vow, and perhaps entertained lively doubts
concerning Lady Diana's abilities as a pastry cook. At any rate, he kept
straight on westward in a series of kangaroo-like leaps until darkness
mercifully blotted out the picture.
Remaining in hiding under a hedge long enough to realise that London was
extremely unsafe for him, he decided to continue west as far as the
United States, consoling himself with the certainty that his creditors
would have forced his emigration anyway before very long, and that he
might as well take the present opportunity to pick out his dollar
princess while in exile.
But circumstances altered his views; the great popular feminine upheaval
in America was now in full swing; the eugenic principle had been
declared; all human infirmity and degenerate imperfections were to be
abolished through marriages based no longer upon sentiment and personal
inclination, but upon the scientific selection of mates for the purpose
of establishing the ideally flawless human race.
This was a pretty bad business for Lord Marque. The day after his arrival
he was a witness of the suffragette riots when the Mayor, the Governor,
and every symmetrical city, county, and State official was captured and
led blushing to the marriage license bureau. He had seen the terrible
panic in Long Acre, where thousands of handsome young men were being
chased in every direction by beautiful and swift-footed suffragettes.
From his window in the Hotel Astor he had gazed with horror upon this
bachelors' St. Bartholomew, and, distracted, had retired under his bed
for the balance of the evening, almost losing consciousness when a
bell-hop knocked at his door with a supply of towels.
Only one thought comforted him; the ocean rolled majestically between the
Lady Diana, her pastry, and the last of the house of Marque.
Never should that terrible and athletic young woman discover his
whereabouts if he had to remain away from London forever; never, never
would he eat that pastry!
As he lay under his bed, stroking his short moustache and occasionally
sneezing, he remembered with a shudder his flight from those solid silver
hair-brushes through Regent's Park; he recalled how, behind him, long
after the heavier feminine aristocracy had given up the chase, one
youthful, fleet, supple, and fearsome girl had hung to his trail--a tall,
lithe, incarnation of her goddess namesake.
She had been too far away for him to distinguish her features; only in
Liverpool, where one dark night he ventured out to buy a copy of the
_Queen_ and eagerly read the details of the function, did he learn the
name of his closest pursuer.
Later, furtively haunting the smoking room on the _Caramania_, he learned
from the gossip there of Lady Diana's vow that she would never rest until
Lord Marque had eaten her plum cake with its frosted inscription--this
inscription consisting of the flippant words of his own rash speech
delivered in the upper house of Parliament.
Now, lying on his back under the bed, while outside in Long Acre the
dreadful work was going on, he lighted a cigarette and pondered the
situation. He didn't believe that Lady Diana would attempt to trail him
to America. That was one comfort. But, in view of the suffragette
disturbances going on outside his windows, he saw little prospect of a
dollar princess for the present. Meanwhile, how was he to exist?
The vague and British convictions concerning the rapid accumulation of
wealth on a "ranch" of any kind comforted Marque. He also believed them.
And three months later he had managed to survive a personal acquaintance
with the following episodes:
First, one large revolver bullet through hat with request to answer
affably when addressed by white men.
Second, one infuriated cow.
Third, one indigestion incubated by cumulative series of pie and
complicated by attentions from one large centipede.
Fourth, one contusion from a Montana boot with suggestion concerning
monocle.
Fifth, one 45-70 Winchester projectile severing string of monocle,
accompanied by laughter and Navajo blanket.
Sixth, comprehensive corporal casualties incident upon international
altercation concerning relative importance of Guy Fawkes and July 4th.
Seventh, physical debility due to excessive local popularity following
personal encounter with one rustler.
Eighth, complete prostration in consequence of frequent attempts to
render thanks for toasts offered him at banquet in celebration of his
impending departure for the East.
Ninth, general collapse following bump of coal and forcible ejection from
freight train near Albany, New York.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XI
THE duties of young Lord Marque, the new man on the Willett estate at
Caranay, left him at leisure only after six o'clock, his day being almost
entirely occupied in driving a large lawn mower.
Life, for John Marque--as he now called himself--had become exquisitely
simple; eating, sleeping, driving a lawn mower--these three manly sports
so entirely occupied the twenty-four hours that he had scarcely time to
do much weeding--and no time at all to sympathise with himself because he
was too busy by day and too sleepy at night.
Sundays he might have taken off for the purpose of condoling with
himself, had it not been for the new telephone operator.
She was a recent incumbent at the railroad station--a tall,
clear-skinned, yellow-haired girl of twenty-five who sat at her
desk all day saying in a low, prettily modulated voice,
"hello--hello--hello--hello" to unseen creatures of whom John Marque
wotted not.
Three things concerning her he had noticed: She wore pink gingham; she
never seemed to see him when he came down to the little sunburnt platform
and seated himself on the edge, feet dangling over the rails; he had
never seen her except when she was seated at the pine table which was
ornamented by her instrument and switchboard. She had a bed-room and
kitchen in the rear. But he never saw her go into them or emerge; never
saw her except seated at her switchboard, either reading or sewing, or,
with the silvery and Greek-like band encircling her hair and supporting
the receiver close to her small ears, repeating in her low, modulated
voice: hello--hello--hello--hello.
He wondered how tall she might be. He had never seen her standing or
walking. He wondered what her direct gaze might be like. Only her
profile had he yet beheld--a sweet, youthful, profile nobly outlined
under the gold of her hair; but under the partly lowered lashes as she
sat sewing or reading or summoning centrals from the vast expanses of
North America, he divined eyes of a soft lilac-blue. And he chewed his
pipe-stem and kicked his feet and thought about them.
Few trains stopped at Caranay except for water; the station, an old-time
farm house of small dimensions, overlooking the track and Willow Brook,
contained ticket office, telephone, and telegraph in one--all presided
over by the telephone operator. Sometimes as many as two people in a week
bought railroad tickets; sometimes a month would pass without anybody
either sending or receiving a telegram. Telephone calls were a little
more frequent.
So the girl had little to do there at her sunny open window, where
mignonette and heliotrope and nasturtiums bloomed in pots, and the big
bumble bees came buzzing and plundering the little window garden. And,
except on Sundays, Marque had little leisure to observe her, although in
the long late June evenings it was still light at eight o'clock, and he
had, without understanding how or why, formed the habit of coming down to
the deserted station platform to smoke his pipe and sometimes to fish in
the shallow waters of Willow Brook, and watch the ripples turn from gold
to purple, and listen to a certain bird that sat singing every day at
sunset on the tip of a fir-balsam across the stream--a black and white
bird with a rosy pink chest.
So lovely the evening song of this bird that Marque, often watching the
girl askance, wondered that the surprising beauty of the melody never
caused her to lift her head from book or sewing, or even rise from the
table and come out to the doorway to listen.
But she never did; and whether or not the bird's singing appealed to her,
he could not determine.
Nobody in the little gossiping hamlet of Caranay seemed to know
more than her name; he himself knew only a few people--men who,
like himself, worked on the Willett place with hoe and rake and
spraying cart and barrow--comrades of roller and mower and weed-fork and
mole-trap--dull-witted cullers of dandelion and rose-beetle. And mostly
their names were Hiram.
These had their own kind in the female line to "go with"--Caranay being
far from the metropolis, and as yet untroubled by the spreading feminine
revolution. Only stray echoes of the doings had as yet penetrated to
Caranay daisy fields; no untoward consequences had as yet ensued except
that old Si Dinglebat's wife, after reading the remains of a New York
paper found on the railroad track, had suddenly, and apparently in a fit
of mental aberration, attacked Si with a mop, accompanying the onslaught
with the reiterated inquiry: "Air wimmen to hev their rights?"
That was the only manifestation of the welt-weh in Caranay--that and the
other welt on Si's dome-like and knobby forehead.
He encountered Marque that evening after supper as that young man, in
clean blue jeans, carrying a fish-pole and smoking his pipe, was
wandering in circles preparatory to a drift in the general direction of
the railroad station.
"Evenin', neighbour!" he said.
"Good evening," said the young man.
"Goin' sparkin'?" inquired Si, overflowing with natural curiosity and
tobacco.
"What?"
"Be you goin' a-sparkin'?"
"Nonsense!" said Marque, reddening. "I don't know any girls in Caranay."
"Waal, I cal'late you know that gal down to the depot, don't ye?"
"No, I don't."
"Hey? I'm a leetle deef."
"No!" shouted Marque, "I don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't know her, dammit!"
"Aw, quit yer cussin'," said Si, with a gummy wink. "Folks has been
talkin' ever since the fustest time you set onto that there platform and
that Eden gal fooled ye with her lookin' glass."
"What are you talking about?" said Marque impatiently.
"Issy Eden and her pretendin' not to see nobody--an' her a lookin' into
the leetle glass behind her table and a seein' of ye all the time! I know
she kin see because she ketched Hi Orville's boy a-hookin' apples outen
the bar'l that--"
"You mean she is able to see _anybody_ on the platform," said Marque,
confused and astounded.
"You bet she kin. I know because I peeked in the winder an' I seen her
a-lookin' at you when you was fishin'----"
But the young fellow had recovered himself: "All right," he interrupted;
"that isn't your business or mine. Who gave you that crack on the lid?"
"By gum," he said, "Hetty done it. I was that took! Forty year, and she
ain't never throwed s'much as a dish pan at me. I wa'n't lookin' for no
sech thing at my time o' life, young man. So when I come in to wash up
for supper, I sez to my woman, 'Hello, Het,' sez I, an' she up an'
screeched an' fetched me a clip.
"'Lord a'mighty!' sez I. 'Look out what ye doin',' sez I. 'Air wimmen to
hev their rights?' sez she, makin' for me some more. 'Is wimmen to be
free?' she sez.
"'Yew bet,' sez I, grabbin' onto her. 'I'll make free with ye,' sez I.
An' I up an' tuk an' spanked Hetty--the first time in forty year, young
man! An' it done her good, I guess, for she ain't never cooked like she
cooked supper to-night. God a'mighty, what biscuits them was!"
Marque listened indifferently, scarcely following the details of the
domestic episode because his mind was full of the girl at the station and
the amazing discovery that all these days she could have seen him
perfectly well at any moment if she had chosen to take the trouble,
without moving more than her dark, silky lashes. Had she ever taken that
trouble? He did not know, of course. He would like to have known.
He nodded absently to the hero of the welt-weh clash, and, pipe in one
hand, pole in the other, walked slowly down the road, crossed the track,
and seated himself on the platform's edge.
She was at her desk, reading. And the young man felt himself turning red
as he realised that, if she had chosen, she could have seen him sitting
here every evening with his eyes fixed--yes, sentimentally fixed upon the
back of her head and her pretty white neck and the lovely contour of her
delicately curved cheek.
All by himself he sat there and blushed, head lowered, apparently fussing
with his line and hook and trying to keep his eyes off her, without much
success.
His angling methods were simple; he crossed the grass-grown track, set
his pole in position, and returned to seat himself on the platform's
edge, where he could see his floating cork and--her. Then, as usual, he
relapsed into meditation.
If only just once she had ever betrayed the slightest knowledge of his
presence in her vicinity he might, little by little, cautiously, and by
degrees, have ventured to speak to her.
But she never had evinced the slightest shadow of interest in anything as
far as he had noticed.
Now, as he sat there, the burnt out pipe between his teeth, watching
alternately his rod and his divinity, the rose-breasted grosbeak began to
sing in the pink light of sunset. Clear, pure, sweet, the song rang
joyously from the tip of the balsam's silver-green spire. He rested his
head on one hand and listened.
The song of this bird, the odour of heliotrope, the ruddy sunlight
netting the ripples--these, for him, must forever suggest her.
He had curious fancies about her and himself. He knew that, if she ever
did turn and look at him out of those lilac-tinted eyes, he must fall in
love with her, irrevocably. He admitted to himself that already he was in
love with all he could see of her--the white neck and dull gold hair, the
fair cheek's curve, the glimpse of her hand as she deliberately turned a
page in the book she was reading.
But that evening passed as had the others; night came; she lowered her
curtain; a faint tracery of lamplight glimmered around the edges; and, as
always, he lighted his pipe and took his fish, and shouldered his pole
and went home to die the little death we call sleep until the sun of toil
should glitter above the eastern hills once more.
A few days later he decided to make an ass of himself, having been sent
with a wagon to Moss Centre, a neighbouring metropolis.
First he sent a telegram to himself at Caranay, signing it William Smith.
Then he went to the drug store telephone, and called up Caranay.
"Hello! What number, please?" came a far, sweet voice; and Marque
trembled: "No number. I want to speak to Mr. Marque--Mr. John Marque."
"He isn't here."
"Are you sure?"
"Perfectly. I saw him driving one of Mr. Willett's wagons across the
track this morning."
"Oh, that's too bad. Could I--might I--ask a little information of you?"
"Certainly."
"What sort of a fellow is this John Marque? He doesn't amount to much I
understand."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I might want to employ him, but I don't believe he is the sort of
man to trust----"
"You are mistaken!" she said crisply.
"You mean he is all right?"
"Absolutely."
"Honest?"
"Of course."
"Capable?"
"Certainly."
"Sober?"
"Perfectly."
"M-moral?"
"Unquestionably!" she said indignantly.
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"How do you know?"
"I have means of information which I am not at liberty to disclose. Who
is this speaking?"
"William Smith of Minnow Hollow."
"Are you going to take Mr. Marque to Minnow Hollow?"
"I may."
"You can't. Mr. Willett employs him."
"Suppose I offer him better wages----"
"He is perfectly satisfied here."
"But I----"
"No! Mr. Marque does not care to leave Caranay."
"But----"
"I am sorry. It is useless to even suggest it to him. Good-bye!"
With cheeks flushed and a slightly worried expression she resumed her
sewing through the golden stillness of the afternoon. Now and then the
clank of wagon wheels crossing the metals caused her to glance swiftly
into her mirror to see what was going on behind her. And at last she saw
Marque drive up, cross the track, then, giving the reins to the boy who
sat beside him, turn and walk directly toward the station. And her heart
gave a bound.
For the first time he came directly to her window; she saw and heard him,
knew he was waiting behind the mignonette and heliotrope, and went on
serenely sewing.
"Miss Eden?"
She waited another moment--time enough to place her sewing leisurely on
the table. Then, very slowly she turned in her chair and looked at him
out of her dark lilac-hued eyes.
He heard himself saying, as in a dream:
"Is there a telegram for me?"
And, as her delicate lifted brows questioned him:
"I am John Marque," he said.
She picked up the telegram which lay on her table and handed it to him.
"Thank you," he said. After he had gone she realised that she had not
spoken.
[Illustration]
XII
WHENEVER he went to Moss Centre with the wagon he telephoned and
telegraphed to himself, and about a month after he had begun this idiot
performance he ventured to speak to her.
It occurred late in July, just before sunset. He had placed his rod,
lighted his pipe, and seated himself on the platform's edge, when, all of
a sudden, and without any apparent reason, a dizzy sort of recklessness
seized him, and he got up and walked over to her window.
"Good evening," he said.
She looked around leisurely.
"Good evening," she said in a low voice.
"I was wondering," he went on, scared almost to death, "whether you would
mind if I spoke to you?"
After a few seconds she said:
"Well? Have you decided?"
Badly frightened, he managed to find voice enough to express his
continued uncertainty.
"Why did you care to speak to me?" she asked.
"I--we--you----" and he stuck fast.
"Had you anything to say to me?" she asked in a lower--and he thought a
gentler--voice.
"I've a lot to say to you," he said, finding his voice again.
"Really? What about?"
He looked at her so appealingly, so miserably, that the faintest possible
smile touched her lips.
"Can I do anything for you, Mr. Marque?"
"If--if you'd only let me speak to you----"
"But I am letting you."
"I mean--to-morrow, too----"
"To-morrow? To-morrow is a very, very long way off. It is somewhere
beyond those eastern hills--but a very, very long way off!--as far as
the East is from the West. No; I know nothing about to-morrow, so how can
I promise anything to anybody?"
"Will your promise cover to-day?"
"Yes. . . . The sun has nearly set, Mr. Marque."
"Then perhaps when to-morrow is to-day you will be able to promise----"
"Perhaps. Have you caught any fish?"
After a moment he said: "How did you know I was fishing? You didn't turn
to look."
She said coolly: "How did you know I didn't?"
"You never do."
She said nothing.
At her window, elbows on the sill, the blossoms in her window-box
brushing his sunburnt face, he stood, legs crossed, pipe in hand, the
sunset wind stirring the curly hair at his temples.
"Did you hear the bird this evening?" he asked.
"Yes. Isn't he a perfect darling!"
Her sudden unbending was so gracious, so sweet that, bewildered, he
remained silent for a while, recovering his breath. And finally:
"I never knew whether or not you noticed his singing," he said.
"How could you suppose any woman indifferent to such music?" she asked
indignantly. She was beginning to realise how her silence had starved her
all these months, and the sheer happiness of speech was exciting her.
Into her face came a faint glow like a reflection from the pink clouds
above the West.
"That little bird," she said, "sings me awake every morning. I can hear
his happy, delicious song above the rushing chorus of dawn from every
thicket. He dominates the cheery confusion by the clear, crystalline
purity of his voice."
It scarcely surprised him to find himself conversing with a cultivated
woman--scarcely found it unexpected that, in her, speech matched beauty,
making for him a charming and slightly bewildering harmony.
Her slim hands lay in her lap sometimes; sometimes, restless, they
touched her bright hair or caressed the polished instruments on the table
before her. But, happy miracle! her face and body remained turned toward
him where he stood leaning on her window-sill.
"There is a fish nibbling your hook, I think," she said.
He regarded his bobbing cork vaguely, then went across the track and
secured the plump perch. At intervals during their conversation he caught
three more.
"Now," she said, "I think I had better say good-night."
"Would you let me give you my fish?"
She replied, hesitating: "I will let you give me two if you really wish
to."
"Will you bring a pan?"
"No," she said hastily; "just leave them under my window when you go."
Neither spoke again for a few moments, until he said with an effort:
"I have wanted to talk to you ever since I first saw you. Do you mind my
saying so?"
She shook her head uncertainly.
He lingered a moment longer, then took his leave. Far away into the dusk
she watched him until the trees across the bridge hid him. Then the
faint smile died on her lips and in her eyes; her mouth drooped a little;
she rested one hand on the table, rose with a slight effort, and lowered
the shade. Listening intently, and hearing no sound, she bent over and
groped on the floor for something. Then she straightened herself to her
full height and, leaning on her rubber-tipped cane, walked to the door.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XIII
HE came every day; and every day, at sundown, she sat sewing by the
window behind her heliotrope and mignonette waiting.
Sometimes he caught perch and dace and chub, and she accepted half, never
more. Sometimes he caught nothing; and then her clear, humorous eyes
bantered him, and sometimes she even rallied him. For it had come to pass
in these sunset moments that she was learning to permit herself a
friendliness and a confidence for him which was very pleasant to her
while it lasted, but, after he had gone, left her with soft lips drooping
and gaze remote.
Because matters with her, with them both, she feared, were not tending
in the right direction. It was not well for her to see him every
day--well enough for him, perhaps, but not for her.
Some day--some sunset evening, with the West flecked gold and the zenith
stained with pink, and the pink-throated bird singing of Paradise, and
the brook talking in golden tones to its pebbles--some such moment at the
end of day she would end all of their days for them both--all of their
days for all time.
But not just yet; she had been silent so long, waiting, hoping, trusting,
biding her time, that to her his voice and her own at eventide was a
happiness yet too new to destroy.
That evening, as he stood at her window, the barrier of mignonette
fragrant between them, he said rather abruptly:
"Are you ill?"
"No," she said startled.
"Oh, I am relieved."
"Why did you ask?"
"Because every Tuesday I have seen the doctor from Moss Centre come in
here."
In flushed silence she turned to her table and, folding her hands, gazed
steadily at nothing.
Marque looked at her, then looked away. The big, handsome young physician
from Moss Centre had been worrying him for a long while now, but he
repeated, half to himself: "I am very much relieved. I was becoming a
little anxious--he came so regularly."
"He is a friend," she said, not looking at him.
He forced a smile. "Well, then, there is no reason for me to worry about
you."
"There never was any reason--was there?"
"No, no reason."
"You don't say it cheerfully, Mr. Marque. You speak as though it might
have been a pleasure for you to worry over my general health and
welfare."
"I think of little else," he said.
There was a silence. Between them, along the barrier of heliotrope and
mignonette, the little dusk moths came hovering on misty wings; the sun
had set, but the zenith was bright crimson. Perhaps it was the reflection
from that high radiance that seemed to tint her face with a softer
carmine.
She looked out into the West across the stream, thinking now that for
them both the end of things was drawing very near. And, to meet fate half
way with serenity--nay, to greet destiny while still far off, with a
smile, she unconsciously straightened in her chair and lifted her proud
little head.
"Lord Marque," she said quietly, "why do you not go back to England?"
For a moment what she had said held no meaning for him. Then
comprehension smote him like lightning; and, thunderstruck, he remained
as he was without moving a muscle, still resting against her window-sill,
his lean, sun-browned face illuminated under the zenith's fiery glory.
"Who are you?" he said, under his breath.
"Only an English girl who happened to have seen you in London."
"When?"
She turned deliberately and, resting one arm across the back of her
chair, looked him steadily in the eyes.
"I am twenty-five. Since I was twenty your face has been familiar to
me."
They exchanged a long and intent gaze.
"I never before saw you," he said.
"Perhaps."
"_Have_ I?"
"Who can know what a fashionable young man really looks at--through a
monocle."
"I don't wear it any more. I lost it out West," he said, reddening.
"You lost your top hat once, too," she said.
He grew red as fire.
"So you've heard of that, too?"
"I saw it."
"You! Saw me attacked?" he demanded angrily, while the shame burnt hotter
on his cheeks.
"Yes. You ran like the devil."
For a moment he remained mute and furious; then shrugged: "What was I to
do?"
"Run," she admitted. "It was the only way."
He managed to smile. "And you were a witness to that?"
She nodded, eyes remote, her teeth nipping at the velvet of her underlip.
He, too, remained lost in gloomy retrospection for a while, but finally
looked up with a more genuine smile.
"I wonder whatever became of that fleet-footed girl who hung to my heels
long after the more solidly constructed aristocracy gave up?"
"Lady Diana Guernsey?"
"That's the one. What became of her?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because she gave me the run of my life. She was a good sport, that girl.
I couldn't shake her off; I took to a taxi and she after me in another;
my taxi broke down in the suburbs and I started across country, she after
me. And the last I saw of her was just after I leaped a hedge and she was
coming over it after me--a wonderful athletic young figure in midair
silhouetted against the sky line. . . . That was the last I saw of her. I
fancy she must have pulled up dead beat--or perhaps she came a cropper."
"She did," said the girl in a low voice.
"Is that so?" he said, interested. "Hope it didn't damage her."
"She broke her thigh."
"Oh, that's too bad!" he exclaimed. "If I'd guessed any such thing I'd
have come back. . . . The poor little thing! I mean that, though she was
nearly six feet, I seem to think of her as little--and, of course, I'm
six--two and a half. . . . Good little sport, that Diana girl! She got
over it all right, I hope."
"It lamed her for life, Lord Marque."
Shocked, for a moment he could find no words to characterise his
feelings. Then:
"Oh, dammitall! I say, it's a rotten shame, isn't it? And all on account
of me--that superb young thing taking hedges like a hunter! Oh, come now,
you know I--it hurts me all the way through. I wish I'd let her catch me!
What would she have done to me? I wouldn't mind being pulled about a
bit--or anything--if it would have prevented her injury. By gad, you
know, I'd even have eaten her plum cake, frosting and all, to have saved
her such a fate."
The girl's eyes searched his. "That was not the most tragic part of it,
Lord Marque."
"God bless us! Was there anything more?"
"Yes. . . . She was in love with you."
"With--with _me_?" he repeated, bewildered.
"Yes. As a young, romantic girl she fell in love with you. She was a
curious child--like all the Guernseys, a strange mixture of impulse and
constancy, of romance and determination. If she had fallen in love with
Satan she would have remained constant. But she only fell in love with
young Marque. . . . And she loves him to this day."
"That--that's utterly impossible!" he stammered. "Didn't she become a
suffragette and carry a banner and chase me and vow to make me eat my own
words frosted on a terrible plum cake?"
"Yes. And all the while she went on loving you."
"How do you know?" he demanded, incredulously.
"She confided in me."
"In _you_!"
"I knew her well, Lord Marque. . . . Not as well as I thought I did,
perhaps; yet, perhaps better than--many--perhaps better than anybody. . .
. We were brought up together."
"You were her governess?"
"I--attempted to act in a similar capacity. . . . She was difficult to
teach--very, very difficult to govern. . . . I am afraid I did not do my
best with her."
"Why did you leave her to come here?" he asked.
She made no reply.
"Where is she now?"
She looked out into the cinders of the West, making no answer.
He gazed at her in silence for a long time; then:
"Is she really lame?"
"Yes."
"Very?"
"It is hip disease."
"But--but that can be cured!" he exclaimed. "It is now perfectly curable.
Why doesn't she go to Vienna or to New York----"
"She is going."
"She ought to lose no time!"
"She is going. She only learned the nature of her trouble very recently."
"You mean she has been lame all this time and didn't know what threatened
her?"
"She was--too busy to ask. Finally, because she did not get well, she
called in a physician. But she is a very determined girl; she refused to
believe what the physician told her--until--very recently----"
"See here," he said, "are you in constant communication with her?"
"Constant."
"Then tell her you know me. Tell her how terribly sorry I am. Tell--tell
her that I'll do anything to--to--tell her," he burst out excitedly,
"that I'll eat her plum cake if that will do her any good--or amuse
her--or anything! Tell her to bake it and frost it and fill it full of
glue, for all I care--and express it to you; and I'll eat every crumb of
that silly speech I made----"
"Wait!" she exclaimed. "Do you realise what you're saying? Do you realise
what you're offering to do for a girl--a lame girl--who is already in
love with you?"
His youthful face fell.
"By gad," he said, "do you think I ought to marry her? How on earth can I
when I'm--I'm dead in love with--somebody myself?"
"You--in love?" she said faintly.
He gazed across the brook at the darkening foliage.
"Oh, yes," he said with a pleasant sort of hopelessness, "but I fancy she
cares for another man."
"W-why do you think so?"
"He comes to see her."
"Is that a reason?"
"She won't talk about him."
"When a woman won't talk about a man is it always because she cares for
him in _that_ way?"
"Isn't it?"
"No."
They had lifted their heads now, facing each other in the violet dusk.
Between them the scent of heliotrope grew sweeter. He said:
"I've been all kinds of a fool. For all I know women have as many rights
on earth as men have. All I wish is that the plucky girl who took that
hedge, banner in hand, were well and happy and married to a really decent
fellow."
"But--she loves you."
"And I"--he looked up, encountering her blue eyes--"am already hopelessly
in love. What shall I do?"
She said under her breath: "God knows. . . . I can not blame you for not
wishing to marry a lame girl----"
"It isn't that!"
"But you wouldn't anyhow----"
"I would if I loved her!"
"You _couldn't_--love a--a cripple! It would not be love; it would be
pity----"
He said slowly: "I wish that _you_ were that lame girl. Then you'd
understand me."
For a while she sat bolt upright, clasped hands tightening in her lap.
Then, turning slowly toward him, she said:
"I am going to say good-night. . . . And thank you--for Diana's sake. . .
. And I am going to say more--I am going to say good-bye."
"Good-bye! Where are you going?"
"To New York."
"When?"
"Before I see you again."
"There is no train until----"
"I shall drive to Moss Centre."
"Where that--that doctor lives----"
"Yes. I am going to New York with him, Lord Marque."
He stood as though stunned for a moment; then set his teeth, clenched his
hands, and pulled himself together.
"I think I understand," he said quietly. "And--I wish you--happiness."
She stretched out her hand to him above the heliotrope.
"I--wish it--to you----" suddenly her voice broke; again her teeth caught
at her underlip like a child who struggles with emotion. "You--_don't_
understand," she said. "Wait a little while before you--come to
any--unhappy--conclusions."
After a moment she made a slight effort to disengage her
hand--another--then turned in her chair and dropped her head on the
table, her right hand still remaining in his. Presently he released it;
and she placed both hands on the edge of the table and her forehead upon
them.
"I am coming in," he said.
She straightened up swiftly at his words.
"Please don't!" she said in a startled voice, still tremulous.
But he was gone from the dark window, and, frightened, she bent over,
caught up her walking stick, and took one impulsive step toward the door.
And stood stock still in the middle of the floor as he entered.
His eyes met hers, fell on the supporting cane; and she covered her face
with her left arm, standing there motionless.
"Good God!" he breathed. "_You!_"
She began to cry like a child.
"I didn't want you to know," she wailed. "Oh, I didn't want you to know.
I thought there was no use--no hope--until yesterday. . . . I--wanted to
go to New York with the doctor and be made all sound and well again
b-before--before I let you love me----"
"Oh, Diana--Diana!" he whispered, with his arms around her. "Oh,
Diana--Diana--my little girl Diana!"
Which was silly enough, she being six feet--almost as tall as he.
"Turn your back," she whispered. "I want to go to my desk--and I can't
bear to have you see me walk."
"You darling----"
"No, no, no! Please let them cure me first. . . . Turn your back."
He kissed her hands, held her at arm's length a second, then turned on
his heel and stood motionless.
He heard her move almost noiselessly away; heard a desk open and close;
heard the chair by the window move as she seated herself.
"Come here," she said in a curious, choked voice.
He turned, went swiftly to her side.
"Great heavens!" he said. "When did you bake that cake?"
"Y-yesterday."
"Why?"
"B-because I was going away to New York and would never perhaps see you
again unless I was entirely cured. And I meant to leave this for you--so
you would know that I had followed you even here--so you would know I had
made a plucky try at you--through all these months--"
"You--you corker!"
"D-do you really mean it?"
"Mean it! I tell you, Diana, you women put it all over the lords of
creation--or any lord ever created! Mean it! You bet I do, sweetness!
I'll take back everything I ever said about women. They're _the_ real
thing in the world! And the best thing for the world is to let them run
it!"
"But--dear----" she faltered, lifting her beautiful eyes to him, "if men
are going to feel _that_ way about it, we won't want to run anything at
all. . . . It was only because you wouldn't let us that we wanted to."
He said in impassioned tones:
"Let the bally world run itself, Diana. What do we care--you and I?"
"No," she said, "we don't care now."
Then that rash and infatuated young man, losing his head entirely, drew
from his jeans a large jack-knife, and, before she could prevent him, he
had sliced off an enormous hunk of plum cake heavily frosted with his own
words.
"Don't, dear!" she begged him. "I couldn't ask _that_ of you----"
"I will!" he said, and bit into it.
"Don't!" she begged him; "please don't! I haven't had much experience
with pastry. It may give you dreadful dreams!"
"Let it!" he said. "What do I care for dreams while you remain real!
Diana--Diana--huntress of bigger game than ever fled through the age of
fable!"
And he bolted a section of frosting and began to chew vigorously upon
another, while she slipped both hands into his, regarding him with tender
solicitude.
"Have no fears for me, dearest," he said indistinctly; "fortified by
months of pie I dread no food ever prepared by youth and beauty. Even the
secret dishes of the Medici----"
"John!"
"W-what, darling?"
"After all--I don't cook so badly."
So, in the gloaming, he swallowed the last crumb and gathered her into
his strong young arms, and drew her golden head down close to his.
"Take it from me," he whispered, relapsing into the noble idioms of his
adopted country, "you're all to the mustard, Diana; your eats were bully
and I liked 'em fine!"
[Illustration]
XIV
THE situation in Great Britain was becoming deplorable; the Home
Secretary had been chased into the Serpentine; the Prime Minister and a
dozen members of Parliament had taken permanent refuge in the vaults of
the Bank of England; a vast army of suffragettes was parading the streets
of London, singing, cheering, and eating bon-bons. Statues, monuments,
palaces were defaced with the words "Votes for Women," and it was not an
uncommon sight to see some handsome young man rushing distractedly
through Piccadilly pursued by scores of fleet-footed suffragettes of the
eugenic wing of their party, intent on his capture for the purposes of
scientific propagation.
No young man who conformed to the standard of masculine beauty set by the
eugenist suffragettes was safe any longer. Scientific marriage between
perfectly healthy people was now a firmly established principle of the
suffragette propaganda; they began to chase attractive young men on sight
with the avowed determination of marrying them to physically qualified
individuals of their own sex and party, irrespective of social or
educational suitability.
This had already entailed much hardship; the young Marquis of Putney was
chased through Cadogan Place, caught, taken away in a taxi, and married
willy-nilly to a big, handsome, strapping girl who sold dumb-bells in the
new American department store. No matter who the man might be
professionally and socially, if he was young and well-built and athletic
he was chased on sight and, if captured, married to some wholesome and
athletic young suffragette in spite of his piteous protests.
"We will found," cried Mrs. Blinkerly Dank-some-Hankly triumphantly, "a
perfect human race and teach it the immortal principles of woman's
rights. So, if we can't persuade Parliament to come out for us, we'll
take Parliament by the slack of its degraded trousers, some day, and
throw it out!"
This terrible menace delivered in Trafalgar Square was cabled to the
_Outlook_, which instantly issued its first extra; and New York, already
in the preliminary throes of a feminine revolution, went wild.
That day the handsome young Governor of New York, attended by his
ornamental young Military Secretary in full uniform, had arrived at the
Waldorf-Astoria to confer with the attractive young Mayor of the
metropolis concerning a bill to be introduced into the legislature,
permitting the franchise to women under certain conditions. And on the
same day a monster suffragette parade was scheduled.
Some provisions of the proposed measure, somehow or other, had become
known to the National Federation of Women; and as the Governor, his
Military Secretary, and the Mayor sat in earnest conference in a private
room at the Waldorf, the most terrible riot that New York ever saw began
on Fifth Avenue just as the head of the parade, led by the suffragette
band of 100 pieces, arrived at the hotel.
The Governor, Mayor, and Secretary rushed to the windows; acres of
banners waved wildly below; cheer after cheer rent the raw March
atmosphere; in every direction handsome young men were fleeing, pursued
by eugenists. Under their very windows the shocked politicians beheld an
exceedingly good-looking youth seized by several vigorous and beautiful
suffragettes, dragged into a taxi, and hurried away toward a scientific
marriage, kicking and struggling. This was nothing new, alas. More than
one attractive young man had already been followed and spoken to in
Manhattan.
Mr. Dill, president of the Board of Aldermen, and the handsomest
incumbent of the office that the city ever beheld, had been courted so
persistently that, fearful of being picked up, he remained in hiding
disguised as a Broadway fortune teller, where the Mayor came at intervals
to consult him on pretense of having his palms read.
But now the suffragettes threw off all restraint; men, frightened and
confused, were being not only spoken to on Fifth Avenue, but were being
seized and forcibly conducted in taxicabs toward the marriage license
bureau.
It was a very St. Bartholomew for bachelors.
"John," said the Governor to his capable young Military Secretary, "take
off that uniform. I'm going to flee in disguise."
"What does your excellency expect me to flee in--dishabille?" stammered
the Military Secretary.
"I don't care what you flee in," said the Governor bluntly; "but I will
not have it said that the Governor of the great State of New York was
seized by a dozen buxom eugenists and hurried away to become the founder
of a physically and politically perfect race of politicians. Get out of
those gold-laced jeans!"
"I'll flee disguised as a chambermaid," muttered the handsome,
rosy-cheeked young Mayor. And he rang for one.
While the Governor and his Secretary were exchanging clothes they heard
the Mayor in the hallway arguing with a large German chambermaid in an
earnest and fatherly manner, punctuated by coy screams from the maid.
By and by he came back to the room, perspiring.
"I bought her clothes," he said; "she'll throw them over the transom."
The clothing arrived presently by way of the transom; the Governor and
the Secretary tried to aid the Mayor to get into the various sections of
clothing, but as they all were bachelors and young they naturally were
not aware of the functions of the various objects scattered over the
floor.
The Governor picked up a bunch of curls attached to a cup-shaped turban
swirl.
"Good heavens!" he said. "The girl has scalped herself for your sake,
John!"
"I bought that, too," said the Mayor, sullenly. "Do you know which way it
goes on, George?"
They fixed it so that two curls fell down and dangled on either side of
his Honour's nose.
Meanwhile the unfortunate Military Secretary had dressed in the top hat
and cutaway of the Governor.
He said huskily, "If I can't outrun them they'll catch me and try to
start raising statesmen."
"It's your duty to defend me," observed the Governor.
"Yes, with my life, but not with my p-progeny--"
"Then you'd better run faster than you've ever run in all your life,"
said the Governor coldly.
At that moment there came a telephone call.
"Lady at the desk to speak to the Governor," came a voice.
"Hello, who is it?" asked his excellency coyly.
"Professor Elizabeth Challis!" came a very sweet but determined voice.
At the terrible name of the new President of the National Federation of
American Women the Governor jumped with nervousness. Anonymous letters
had warned him that she was after him for eugenic purposes.
"What do you want?" he asked tremulously.
"In the name of the Federation I demand that you instantly destroy the
draft of that infamous bill which you are preparing to rush through at
Albany."
"I won't," said the Governor.
"If you don't," she said, "the committee on eugenics will seize you."
"Let 'em catch me first," he replied, boldly; and rang off.
"Now, John," he said briskly, "as soon as they catch sight of you in my
top hat and cutaway they'll start for you. And I advise you to leg it if
you want to remain single."
The unfortunate Military Secretary gulped with fright, buttoned his
cutaway coat, crammed his top hat over his ears, and gazed fearfully out
of the window, where in the avenue below the riot was still in lively
progress. Terrified young men fled in every direction, pursued by
vigorous and youthful beauty, while the suffragette band played and
thousands of suffragettes cheered wildly.
"Isn't it awful!" groaned the Mayor, arranging the lace cap on his
turban-swirl and shaking out his skirts. "The police are no use. The
suffragettes kidnap the good-looking ones. Are you ready for the sortie,
Governor?"
The Governor in the handsome uniform of his Military Secretary adjusted
his sword and put on the gold-laced cap. Then, thrusting the draft of the
obnoxious bill into the bosom of his tunic, he strode from the room,
followed by his Secretary and the unfortunate Mayor, who attempted in
vain to avoid treading on his own trailing skirts.
"George," said the Mayor, spitting out a curl that kept persistently
getting into his mouth every time he opened it, "I'll be in a pickle
unless I can reach Dill's rooms. . . . Wait! There's a pin sticking into
me----"
"Too late," said the Governor; "it will spur you to run all the faster. .
. . Where is Dill's?"
The Mayor whispered the directions, spitting out his curl at intervals
when it incommoded him; the Governor walked faster to escape.
Down in the elevator they went, gazed at by terror-stricken bell-hops and
scared porters.
As the cheering and band playing grew louder and more distinct the
Secretary quailed, but the Governor admonished him:
"You've simply _got_ to save me," he said. "_Pro_ _bono publico!_ Come
on now. Make a dash for a taxi and the single life! One--two--three!"
The next moment the Secretary's top hat was carried away by a brick; the
Mayor's turban-swirl went the same way, amid showers of confetti and a
yell of fury from a thousand suffragettes who saw in his piteous attempt
to disguise himself, by aid of a turban-swirl, an insult to womanhood the
world over.
A perfect blizzard of missiles rained on the terrified politicians; the
Secretary and the Mayor burst into a frantic canter up Thirty-fourth
Street, pursued by a thousand strikingly handsome women. The Governor ran
west.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XV
THE Governor of the great State of New York was now running up Broadway
with his borrowed sword between his legs and his borrowed uniform covered
with confetti--footing it as earnestly as though he were running behind
his ticket with New York County yet to hear from.
After him sped bricks, vegetables, spot-eggs, and several exceedingly
fashionable suffragettes, their perfectly gloved hands full of
horsewhips, banners, and farm produce.
But his excellency was now running strongly; one by one his eager and
beautiful pursuers gave up the chase and fell out, panting and flushed
from the exciting and exhilarating sport, until, at Forty-second Street,
only one fleet-footed young girl remained at his heels.
The order of precedence then shifted as follows: First, the young and
handsome Governor running like a lost dog at a fair and clutching the
draft of the obnoxious bill to his gold-laced bosom; second, one
distractingly lovely young girl, big, wholesome-looking, athletic, and
pink of cheeks, swinging a ci-devant cat by the tail as menacingly as
David balanced the loaded sling; third, several agitated policemen
whistling and rapping for assistance; fourth, the hoi polloi of the Via
Blanca; fifth, a small polychromatic dog; sixth, the idle wind toying
carelessly with the dust and refuse and hats and skirts of all Broadway.
[Illustration: "Only one fleet-footed young girl remained at his
heels."]
This municipal dust storm, mingling with the brooding metropolitan
gasoline fog, produced a sirocco of which no Libyan desert needed to be
ashamed; and it alternately blotted out and revealed the interesting
Marathonian procession, until one capricious and suffocating flurry,
full of whirling newspapers and derbies, completely blotted out the
Governor and the young lady at his heels.
And when, a moment later, the miniature tornado had subsided into a
series of playful sidewalk eddys, only the policemen, the hoi polloi, and
the dog were still going; the Governor and the beautiful suffragette had
completely disappeared.
They had, it is true, chosen a very good time and place for such an
occult performance; Long Acre at its busiest.
Several mounted policemen had now joined in the frantic festivities. They
galloped hurriedly in every direction. The crowd cheered and pursued the
police, the small dog barked in eddying circles till he resembled an
expiring pinwheel.
Meanwhile a curious thing had occurred; the youthful Governor was now
chasing the suffragette. It occurred abruptly, and in the following
manner:
No sooner had the dust cloud spread a momentary fog around the radiant
young man--like a hurricane eclipse of the sun--than he darted into the
narrow and dark hallway of an old-fashioned office building devoted to
theatrical agencies, all-night lawyers, and "astrologists," and started
up the stairs. But his unaccustomed sword tripped him up, and as he fell
flat with a startling outcrash of accoutrements, there came a flurry of
delicately perfumed skirts, the type-written papers were snatched from
his gloved hands, and the perfumed skirts went scurrying away through the
dusky corridor which ought to have opened on the next cross street. And
didn't.
After her ran the Governor, now goaded to courage by the loss of his
papers, and she, finding herself in a cul-de-sac, turned at bay, launched
the cat at his head, and attempted to spring past him. But he caught the
whirling feline in one white-gloved hand and barred her way with the
other; and she turned once more in desperation to seek an egress which
did not exist.
A flight of precipitate and rickety stairs led upward into an obscurity
rendered deeper by a single gas jet burning low on the landing above.
Up this she sprang, two at a time, the young man at her heels; up, up,
passing floor after floor, until a dirty skylight overhead warned her
that the race was ending.
On the top corridor there was a door ajar; she sprang for it, opened it,
tried to slam and lock it behind her, then, exhausted, she shrank
backward into the room and sank into a red velvet chair, holding the
bunch of papers tightly to her heaving breast.
There was another chair--a gilt one. Into it fell his excellency,
gasping, speechless, his spurred and booted legs trailing, his borrowed
uniform all over confetti and dust from his tumble on the stairs.
Minute after minute elapsed as they lay there, fighting for breath,
watching each other.
She was the first to stir; and instantly he dragged himself to his feet,
staggered over to the door, locked it, dropped the key into his pocket,
returned to his chair, and collapsed once more.
After a few moments he glanced down at the cat which he was still
clutching. A slight shiver passed over him, then, as he inspected it more
closely, over his features crept an ironical smile.
For the cat was not even a ci-devant cat; it had never been a cat; it
was only an imitation of a defunct one made out of floss and chenille,
like a teddy-bear; and he smiled at her scornfully and dangled it by its
black and white tail.
"Pooh," he panted; "I suppose even your bricks and vegetables and eggs
were cotillion favours full of confetti."
"They were," she admitted defiantly. "Which did not prevent their serving
their purposes."
"As what?"
"As symbols!"
"Symbols?" he retorted in derision.
"Yes, symbols! The three most ancient symbols of an insulted people's
fury--the egg, the turnip, and the cat."
"_Mala gallina, malum ovum_," he laughed, adjusting his sword and picking
several streamers of confetti from his tunic. "Did they hurl spot-eggs in
ancient Rome, fair maid?"
"They did; and cats--_ex necessitate rei_," she observed with composure.
"_Ex nihilo felis fit_--a cat-fit for nothing," he retorted, flippantly.
Half disdainfully she straightened out the slight disorder of her own
apparel, still breathing fast, and keeping tight hold of the bundle of
papers.
"How soon are you going to let me have them?" he asked good-humouredly.
"Never."
"I can't permit you to leave this room until you hand them to me."
"Then I shall never leave this room."
"You certainly shall not leave it until I have those papers."
"Then I'll remain here all my life!" she said defiantly.
"What do you expect to do when the people who live here return?"
She shrugged her pretty shoulders, and presently cast an involuntary and
uneasy glance around the room.
It was not a place to reassure any girl; gilt stars were pasted all over
walls and ceilings, where also a tinsel sun and moon appeared. The
constellations were interspersed with bats.
The remaining decorations consisted of a cozy corner, some pasteboard
trophies, red cotton velvet hangings, several plaster casts of human
hands, and a frieze of half-burnt cigarettes along the mantel-edge.
"Are you going to give me those papers?" he repeated, secretly amused.
"No."
"What do you expect to do with them?"
"Deliver them to Professor Elizabeth Challis, President of the National
Federation of Independent Women of America."
"Is this a private enterprise of yours," he asked curiously, "or just
a--a playful impulse, or the militant fruition of a vast and feminine
conspiracy?"
She smiled slightly.
"I suppose you mean to be impertinent, but I shall not evade answering
you, Captain Jones. I am acting under orders."
"Betty's?" he inquired, flippantly.
"The orders of Professor Elizabeth Challis," she said, with heightened
colour.
"Exactly. It _is_ a conspiracy, then, complicated by riot, assault,
disorderly conduct, and highway robbery--isn't it?"
"You may call it what you choose."
"Oh, I'll leave that to the courts."
She said disdainfully: "We recognize no laws in the making of which we
have had no part."
"There's no use in discussing that," said the Governor blandly; "but I'd
like to know what you suffragettes find so distasteful in that proposed
bill which the Mayor and--and the Governor of New York have had drafted."
"It is reactionary--a miserable subterfuge--a treacherous attempt to
return to the old order of things! A conspiracy to re-shackle, re-enslave
American womanhood with the sordid chains of domestic cares! To drive her
back into the kitchen, the laundry, the nursery--back into the dark ages
of dependence and acquiescence and non-resistance--back into the degraded
epochs of sentimental relations with the tyrant man!"
She leaned forward in her excitement and her sable boa slid back as she
made a gesture with her expensive muff.
"Once," she said, "woman was so ignorant that she married for love! Now
the national revolt has come. Neither sentiment nor impulse nor emotion
shall ever again play any part in our relations with man!"
He said, trying to speak ironically: "That's a gay outlook, isn't it?"
"The outlook, Captain Jones, is straight into a glorious millennium.
Marriage, in the future, is to mean the regeneration of the human race
through cold-blooded selection in mating. Only the physically and
mentally perfect will hereafter be selected as specimens for scientific
propagation. All others must remain unmated--_pro bono publico_--and so
ultimately human imperfection shall utterly disappear from this world!"
Her pretty enthusiasm, her earnestness, the delicious colour in her
cheeks, began to fascinate him. Then uneasiness returned.
"Do you know," he said cautiously, "that the Governor of New York has
received anonymous letters informing him that Professor Elizabeth Challis
considers him a proper specimen for the--the t-t-terrible purposes of
s-s-scientific p-p-propagation?"
"Some traitor in our camp," she said, "wrote those letters."
"It--it isn't true, then, is it?"
"What isn't true?"
"That the Governor of the great State of New York is in any danger of
being seized for any such purpose?"
She looked at him with a curious veiled expression in her pretty eyes, as
though she were near-sighted.
"I think," she said, "Professor Challis means to seize him."
The Governor gazed at her, horrified for a moment, then his political
craft came to his aid, and he laughed.
"What does she look like?" he inquired. "Is she rather a tough old lady?"
"No; she's young and--athletic."
"Barrel-shaped?"
"Oh, she's as tall as the Governor is--about six feet, I believe."
"Nonsense!" he exclaimed, paling.
"Six feet," she repeated carelessly; "rowed stroke at Vassar; carried off
the standing long jump, pole vault, and ten-mile swimming----"
"This--this is terrible," murmured the young man, passing one gloved
hand over his dampening brow. Then, with a desperate attempt at a smile,
he leaned forward and said confidentially:
"As a matter of fact, just between you and me, the Governor is an
invalid."
"Impossible!" she retorted, her clear blue eyes on his.
"Alas! It is only too true. He's got a very, very rare disease," said the
young man sadly. "Promise you won't tell?"
"Y-yes," said the girl. Her face had lost some of its colour.
"Then I will confide in you," said the young man impressively. "The
Governor is threatened with a serious cardiac affection, known as
Lamour's disease."
She looked down, remained silent for a moment, then lifted her pure gaze
to him.
"Is that true--Captain Jones?"
"As true as that I am his Military Secretary."
Her features remained expressionless, but the colour came back as though
the worst of the shock were over.
"I see," she said seriously. "Professor Challis ought to know of this
sad condition of affairs. I have heard of Lamour's disease."
"Indeed, she ought to be told at once," he said, delighted. "You'll
inform her, won't you?"
"If you wish."
"Thank you! _Thank_ you!" he said fervently. "You are certainly the most
charmingly reasonable of your delightful sex. The Governor will be
tremendously obliged to you----"
"Is the Governor--are his--his affections--to use an obsolete
expression--fixed upon any particular----"
"Oh, no!" he said, smiling; "the Governor isn't in
love--except--er--generally. He's a gay bird. The Governor never, in all
his career, saw a single specimen of your sex which--well, which
interested him as much--well, for example," he added in a burst of
confidence, "as much even as you interest me!"
"Which, of course, is not at all," she said, laughing.
"Oh, no--no, not at all----" he hesitated, biting his moustache and
looking at her.
"I'll tell you one thing," he said; "if the Governor ever did get
entirely well--er--recovered--you know what I mean?"
"Cured of his cardiac trouble?--this disease known as Lamour's disease?"
"Exactly. If he ever did recover, he--I'm quite sure he would be----" and
here he hesitated, gazing at her in silence. As for her, she had turned
her head and was gazing out of the window.
"I wonder what your name is?" he said, so naïvely that the colour tinted
even the tip of the small ear turned toward him.
"My name," she said, "is Mary Smith. Like you, I am Militant Secretary to
Professor Elizabeth Challis, President of the Federation of American
Women."
"I hope we will remain on pleasant terms," he ventured.
"I hope so, Captain Jones."
"Non-combatants?"
"I trust so."
"Even f-friends?"
She bent her distractingly pretty head in acquiescence.
"Then you'll give me back the papers?"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry for taking them?"
"No, sorry for keeping them."
"You don't mean to say that you are going to keep them, Miss Smith?"
"I'm afraid I must. My duty forces me to deliver them to Professor
Challis."
"But why does this terrible and strapping young lady desire to swipe the
draft of this bill?"
"Because it contains the evidence of a wicked conspiracy between the
Governor of New York, the Mayor of this city, and an abandoned
legislature. The women of America ought to know what threatens them
before this bill is perfected and introduced. And before they will permit
it to be debated and passed they are determined to march on Albany, half
a million strong, as did the heroines of Versailles!"
She stretched out her white gloved hand with an excited but graceful
gesture; he eyed her moodily, swinging the chenille cat by its fluffy
tail.
"What do they suspect is in that bill?" he said at last.
"We are not yet perfectly sure. We believe it is an insidious attempt to
sow dissension in the ranks of our sex--a bill cunningly devised to
create jealousy and unworthy distrust among us--an ingenious and inhuman
conspiracy to disorganize the National Federation of Free and Independent
Women."
"Nonsense," he said. "The bill, when perfected, is designed to give you
what you want."
"What!"
"Certainly; votes for women."
"On what terms?" she asked, incredulously.
"Terms? Oh, no particular terms. I wouldn't call them 'terms,'" he said
craftily; "that sounds like masculine dictation."
"It certainly does."
"Of course. There are no terms in it. It's a--a sort of a civil service
idea--a kind of a qualification for the franchise----"
"Oh!"
"Yes," he continued pleasantly, "it a--er--suggests that a vote be
accorded to any woman who, in competition with others of that election
district, passes the examinations----"
"_What_ examinations?"
He twirled the cat carelessly.
"Oh, the examination papers are on various subjects. One is chemistry."
"Chemistry?"
"Yes--that part of organic chemistry which includes the scientific
preparation of--er--food."
Her eyes flashed; he twirled the cat absently.
"Yes," he said, "chemistry is one of the subjects. Physics is
another--physical phenomena."
"What kind?"
"Oh, the--the proposition that nature abhors a vacuum. You're to prove
it--you're given a certain area--say a bed-room full of dust. Then you
apply to it----"
"I see," she said; "you mean we apply to it a vacuum cleaner, don't you?"
"Or," he admitted courteously, "you may solve it through the science of
dynamics----"
"Of course--using a broom." Her eyes were beautiful but frosty.
"Do you know," he said, as pleasantly as he dared, "that you, for
instance, would be sure to pass."
"Because I'm intelligent enough to comprehend the subtleties of
this--bill?"
"Exactly." He swung the cat in a circle.
"Thank you. And what else do these examination papers contain?"
"Physics mostly--the properties of solid bodies. For example, you choose
a button--any ordinary button," he explained frankly, as though taking
her into his confidence; "say, for instance, the plain bone button of
commerce----"
"And sew it onto some masculine shirt," she nodded as he sank back
apparently overcome with admiration at her intelligence. "And that," she
added, "no doubt is intended to illustrate the phenomenon of adhesion."
"You are perfectly correct," he said with enthusiasm.
"What else is there?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing--nothing very much. A few experiments in bacteriology----"
"Sterilizing nursing bottles?"
"How on earth did you ever guess?" he cried, overwhelmed, but perfectly
alert to the kindling anger in her blue eyes. "Why, of course that is
it. It is included in the science of embryotics--"
"What science?"
"Embryotics. For instance, you take an embryo of any kind--say a--a baby.
Then you show exactly how to dress, undress, wash, feed, and finally
bring that baby to triumphant maturity. It's interesting, isn't it, Miss
Smith?"
She said nothing. He twirled the cat furiously until its tail gave way
and it flew into a corner.
"Captain Jones," she said, "as I understand it, this bill is a codified
conspiracy to turn every woman of this State into a--a washer of clothes,
a cleaner of floors, a bearer of children--and a Haus-frau!"
"I--I would not put it _that_ way," he protested.
"And her reward," she went on, not noticing his interruption, "is
permission to vote--to use the inalienable liberty with which already
Heaven has endowed her."
Tears flashed in her eyes; she held her small head proudly and not one
fell.
"Captain Jones," she said, "do you realize what centuries of suppression
are doing to my sex? Do you understand that woman is degenerating into
an immobility--an inertia--a molluskular condition of receptive passivity
which is rendering us, year by year, more unfitted to either think or act
for ourselves? Even in the matter of marriage we are not permitted by
custom to assume the initiative. We may only shake our heads until the
man we are inclined toward asks us, when he is entirely ready to ask.
Then, like a row of Chinese dolls, we nod our heads. I tell you," she
said, tremulously, "we are becoming like that horrid, degenerate,
wingless moth which is born, mates, and dies in one spot--a living
mechanical incubator--a poor, deformed, senseless thing that has through
generations lost not only the use, but even the rudiments of the wings
which she once possessed. But the male moth flies more strongly and
frivolously than ever. There is nothing the matter with the development
of _his_ wings, Captain Jones."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVI
IT was now growing rather dark in the room.
"I'm terribly sorry you feel this way," he said.
She had averted her eyes and was now seated, chin in hand, looking out of
the window.
"Do you know," he said, "this is a rotten condition of affairs."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"This attitude of women."
"Is it more odious than the attitude of men?"
"After all," he said, "man is born with the biceps. He was made to do the
fighting."
"Not all of the intellectual fighting."
"No, of course not. But--you don't want him to rock the cradle, do you?"
"Cradles are no longer rocked, Captain Jones. I don't think _you_ would
be qualified to pass this examination with which you menace us."
He began to be interested. She turned from the window, saw he was
interested, hesitated, then:
"I wish I could talk to you--to such a man as you seem to be--sensibly,
without rancour, without personal enmity or prejudice----"
"Can't you?"
"Why, yes. _I_ can. But--I am not sure what _your_ attitude----"
"It is friendly," he said, looking at her. "I am perfectly hap--I mean
willing to listen to you. Only, sooner or later, you must return to me
those papers."
"Why?"
"The Governor entrusted them to me officially----"
She said smiling: "But you--your Governor I mean--can frame another
similar bill."
"I'm a soldier in uniform," he said dramatically. "My duty is to guard
those papers with my life!"
"I am a soldier, too," she said proudly, "in the Army of Human Progress."
"Very well," he said, "if you regard it that way."
"I do. Only brute violence can deprive me of these papers."
"That," he said, "is out of the question."
"It is no more shameful than the mental violence to which you have
subjected us through centuries. Anyway, you're not strong enough to get
them from me."
"Do you expect me to seize you and twist your arm until you drop those
papers?"
"You can never have them otherwise. Try it!"
He sat silent for a while, alternately twisting his moustache and the
cat's tail. Presently he flung the latter away, rose, inspected the stars
on the wall, and then began to pace to and fro, his gloved hands behind
his back, spurs and sword clanking.
"It's getting late," he said as he passed her. Continuing his promenade
he added as he passed her again. "I've had no luncheon. Have you?"
He poked around the room, examining the fantastic furnishings in all
their magnificence of cotton velvet and red cheesecloth.
"If this is Dill's room it's a horrible place," he thought to himself,
sitting down by a table and shuffling a pack of cards.
"Shall I cast your horoscope?" he asked amiably. "Here's a chart."
"No, thank you."
Presently he said: "It's getting beastly cold in this room."
"Really!" she murmured.
He came back and sat down in the gilded chair. It was now so dusky in the
room that he couldn't see her very plainly.
So he folded his arms and abandoned himself to gloomy patience until the
room became very dark. Then he got up, struck a match, and lighted the
gas.
"By Jupiter!" he muttered, "I'm hungry."
For nearly five minutes she let the remark go apparently unnoticed. But
the complaint he had made is the one general and comprehensive appeal
that no woman ever born can altogether ignore. In the depths of her
something always responds, however faintly. And in the soul of this young
girl it was answering now--the subtle, occult response of woman to the
eternal and endless need of man--hunger of one kind or another.
"I'm sorry," she said, so sincerely that the sweetness in her voice
startled him.
"Why--why, do you know I believe you really are!" he said in grateful
surprise.
"I am a great many things that you have no idea I am," she said, smiling.
"What is one of them?"
"I'm afraid I'm a--a fool."
She came forward and stood looking at him.
"I've been thinking," she said, "that I can do you no kinder service than
to destroy those papers and let you go home."
For a moment he thought she was joking, then something in her expression
changed his opinion and he took a step forward, eyes fixed on her face.
"Yes," he said, "it would be the kindest thing you can do for me. Shall I
tell you why? It's because I'm hopelessly near-sighted. I wear glasses
when I'm alone in my study, where nobody can see me."
"What in the world has _that_ to do with my leaving you?" she asked,
colouring up.
"Suffragettes would never marry a near-sighted man, would they?"
"They ought not to."
"_You_ wouldn't, would you?"
"Why do you ask--such a thing?"
"I want to know."
"But how does your myopia concern _me_?" she said faintly.
"_Couldn't_ it--ever?" he asked, reddening.
"No," she said, turning pale.
"Then we'd better not stay here; and I'm going to be as generous as you
are," he said, advancing toward her. "I'm going to let you go home."
She backed away, thrusting the papers behind her; his arm slipped around
her, after them, strove to grasp them, to hold and restrain her, but
there was a strength in her tall, firm young body which matched his own;
she resisted, turned, twisted, confronted him with high colour, and lips
compressed, and they came to a deadlock, breathing fast and irregularly.
Again, coolly, dexterously, he pitted his adroitness, then his sheer
strength against hers; and it came again to a deadlock.
Suddenly she crook'd one smooth knee inside of his; her arms slid around
him like lightning; he felt himself rising into the air,
descending--there came a crash, a magnificent display of ocular
fireworks, and nothing further concerned him until he discovered himself
lying flat on the floor and heard somebody sobbing incoherencies beside
him.
He was mean enough to keep his eyes shut while she, on her knees beside
him, slopped water on his forehead and begged him to speak to her, and
told him her heart was broken and she desired to die and repose in
mortuary simplicity beside him forever.
Certain terms she employed in addressing what she feared were only his
mortal remains caused him to prick up his ears. He certainly was one of
the meanest of men.
"Dear," she sobbed, "I--I have l-loved you ever since your lithographs
were displayed during the election! Only speak to me! Only open those
beloved eyes! I don't care whether they are near-sighted! Oh, please,
please wake up!" she cried brokenly. "I'll give you back your papers.
What do I care about that old bill? I'm p-perfectly willing to do all
those things! Oh, oh, oh! How conscience does make Haus-fraus of us all!"
His meanness now became contemptible; he felt her trembling hands on his
brow; the fragrant, tearful face nearer, nearer, until her hot, flushed
cheeks and quivering lips touched his. And yet, incredible as it seems,
and to the everlasting shame of all his sex, he kept eyes and mouth shut
until a lively knocking on the door brought him bolt upright.
She uttered a little cry and shrank away from him on her knees, the tears
glimmering in her startled and wide open eyes.
"Good heavens, darling!" he said seriously; "how on earth are we going to
explain this?"
They scrambled hastily to their feet and gazed at each other while kicks
and blows began to rain on the door.
"I believe it's Dill," he whispered; "and I seem to hear the Mayor's
voice, too."
"Help! Help! For heaven's sake!" screamed the Mayor, "let us in, George!
There's a mob of suffragettes coming up the stairs!"
The Governor unlocked the door and jerked it open, just as several
unusually beautiful girls seized Mr. Dill and the Military Secretary.
The Mayor, however, rushed blindly into the room, his turban-swirl was
over one eye, his skirt was missing, his apron hung by one pin.
He ran headlong for a sofa and tried to scramble under it, but lovely and
vigorous arms seized his shins and drew him triumphantly forth.
"Hurrah!" they cried delightedly, "we have carried the entire ticket!"
"Hurrah!" echoed a sweet but tremulous voice, and a firm young arm was
slipped through the Governor's.
He turned to meet her beautiful, level gaze.
"Check!" she said.
"Make it check-mate," he said steadily.
"Mate _you_?"
"Will you?"
She bent her superb head a moment, then lifted her splendid eyes to his.
"Of course I will," she said, as steadily as her quickening heart
permitted. "Why do you suppose I ran after you?"
"Why?" whispered that infatuated man.
"Because," she said, naïvely, "I was afraid some other girl would get
you. . . . A girl never can be sure what another girl might do to a man.
. . . And I wanted you for myself."
"Thank God," he said, "that six-foot Professor Challis will never get me,
anyway."
She bent her adorable face close to his.
"Your excellency," she murmured, "_I_ am Professor Challis!"
At that instant a pretty and excited suffragette dashed up the stairs and
saluted.
"Professor," she cried, "all over the city desirable young men are being
pursued and married by the thousands! We have swept the State, with
Brooklyn and West Point yet to hear from!" Her glance fell upon the
Governor; she laughed glee-fully.
"Shall I call a taxi, Professor?" she asked.
An exquisite and modest pride transformed the features of Professor Betty
Challis to a beauty almost celestial.
"Let George do it," she said tenderly.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVII
A FEW minutes later, amid a hideous scene of riot, where young men were
fleeing distractedly in every direction, where excited young girls were
dragging them, struggling and screaming, into cabs, where even the police
were rushing hither and thither in desperate search for a place to hide
in, the Governor of New York and Professor Elizabeth Challis might have
been seen whirling downtown in a taxicab toward the marriage license
bureau.
Her golden head lay close to his; his moustache rested against her
delicately flushed cheek. A moment later she sat up straight in dire
consternation.
"Oh, those papers! The draft of the bill!" she exclaimed. "Where is it?"
"Did you want it, Betty?" he asked, surprised.
"Why--why, no. Didn't you want it, George?"
"I? Not at all."
"Then why on earth did you keep me imprisoned in that room so long if you
didn't want those papers?"
He said slowly: "Why didn't you give them up to me if _you_ didn't really
want them, Betty?"
She shook her pretty head. "I don't know. . . . But I'm afraid it was
only partly obstinacy."
"It was only partly that with me," he said.
They smiled.
"I just wanted to detain you, I suppose," he admitted.
"George, you wouldn't expect me to match that horrid confession--would
you?"
"No, I wouldn't ask it of you."
He laid his cheek against hers and whispered: "Darling, do you think our
great love justifies our concealing my myopia?"
"George," she murmured, "I think it does. . . . Besides, I'm dreadfully
near-sighted myself."
"You!"
"Dear, every one of us has got _something_ the matter with her. Miss
Vining, who caught the Mayor, wears a rat herself. . . . Do you mean to
say that men believe there ever was a perfect woman?"
He kissed her slowly. "_I_ believe it," he said.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XVIII
AS the extremes of fashionable feminine costume appear first on Fifth
Avenue in late November, and in early December are imitated in Harlem,
and finally in January pervade the metropolitan purlieus, so all the
great cities of the Union, writhing in the throes of a fashionable
suffragette revolution, presently inoculated the towns; and the towns
infected the villages, and the villages the hamlets, and the hamlets
passed the contagion along into the open country, where isolated farms
and dicky-birds alone remained uninfected and receptive.
It was even asserted by enthusiastic suffragettes that flocks of feminine
dicky-birds had begun to assault masculine birds of the same variety;
and that the American landscape was full of agitated male birds, lacking
rear plumage, flying distractedly in every direction or squatting
disconsolately in lonely trees, counting their tail feathers.
Mr. Borroughs and our late great President were excitedly inclined to
believe it, but the most famous and calm of explorers, who had recently
returned from exile to his camp on top of Mt. McKinley, warned the
scientific world on a type-writer not to credit anything that anybody
said until he had corroborated it in the magazines. And he left that week
for another trip to the pole to find out what the attitude of the
polecats might be concerning the matter in question.
Meanwhile the cities were full of trouble and forcibly selected
bridegrooms. From 60,000 marriages recorded in New York City for the
twelve months of the previous year, in the few months of the eugenic
revolution the number of weddings had reached the enormous figures of
180,000, not including Flatbush.
Thousands and thousands of marriageable young men were hiding in their
clubs or in the shrubbery of Central Park, waiting for a chance to make
their escape to the country and remain incognito in hay lofts until the
eugenic revolution had ended itself in a dazzling display of divorce.
Westchester, the Catskills, and even the country farther north were full
of young business men and professional men fleeing headlong from their
jobs in Wall Street, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue, and hiring out to
farmers and boarding house keepers under assumed names. One could jump a
young man out of almost any likely thicket north of the Bronx; they were
as plentiful and as shy as deer in the Catskills; corn field, scrub,
marsh, and almost any patch of woods in the State, if carefully beaten
up, would have yielded at least one or two flocks of skulking young men.
Now, as there was no close season, and marriageable youths in New York
City became scarcer, those militant suffragettes devoted to eugenic
principles began to make excursions into the suburbs in search of bevies
and singles--which had escaped the exciting days of the great Long Acre
drive and the bachelors' St. Bartholomew. And, as the April days turned
into May days, and the May days into June days, parties of pretty,
laughing, athletic girls penetrated farther and farther into the country,
joyously rummaging the woods and routing out and scattering into flight
the lurking denizens. For every den had its denizen, and Diana roamed the
earth once more.
There was excellent sport to be had along the Hudson. Some young ladies
went in automobiles; some in yachts; some by train, to points north,
where the landscape looked more promising and wilder--but probably not as
wild as the startled masculine countenances peering furtively from
hillside thickets as some gay camping party of distractingly pretty girls
appeared, carrying as excess baggage one clergywoman and a bundle of
marriage licenses, with the bridegroom's name represented only by a
question mark.
It was on an unusually beautiful day in early June that two briar-mangled
and weather-beaten young men, bearing every evidence of Wall Street and
excessive fright, might have been seen sitting up like a brace of
startled rabbits in a patch of ferns which grew along the edges of a
brook at the foot of a charmingly wooded slope among the Westchester
hills. In every direction stretched hills, woods, and Italians. The calm
remote sky was blue and unvexed by anything except factory smoke; not a
sound was visible, not a noise was to be seen.
Bacon was frying unctuously in a pan on the coals beside them; their
suit-cases lay near. They sat up in the fern patch, coffee cups
suspended, eyes wild, listening intently.
"Brown," whispered Vance, "did you hear anything except the hum of
automobiles?"
"I sure did," nodded Brown, craning his neck like a turkey in a
briar-patch and glaring around.
"If--if they've got dogs," said Vance, "they'll flush us before--hark!
Great guns! _Look_ at that bench show!"
Brown's hair rose on end. "They _have_ got dogs," he whispered, "a toy
bull, a Mexican, a Chow, two Pomms--and, by Jupiter! they've got a
marmoset! Look at 'em! Hark! You can hear those unnatural girls laughing!
Me for a quick getaway. Come on!"
"They--they may come from some college," faltered Vance; "they may run us
down. Shall we trust to our protective colouring and squat close?"
"Do you want to stay here until that miserable Chow comes poking his
orange-coloured head into the ferns and laughs at us with his blue
tongue?"
Vance wrung his hands, hurling coffee all over Brown in his agonised
indecision.
"Good heavens!" he moaned. "I don't _want_ to be married! I can't afford
it! Do you think those girls can outrun us?"
"If they can," said Brown, "they'll want me more than I want my liberty.
Look out! There's their bat-eared bull! See him sniff! The wretched mutt
has winded the bacon! We've got to make a break for it now! Come on! Beat
it, son!"
Up out of the covert crashed the two young fellows, and went prancing
away through the woods, suit-cases in hand. A chorus of excited yelps and
barks greeted the racket they made in their flight; a shrill whistle rang
out, then a pretty and excited voice:
"Mark! Quick, Gladys! There are two of them! Mark left!"
"Are they any good?" cried Gladys. "Oh, where are they, dear?"
"I only caught a glimpse of them. They looked like fine ones, in splendid
condition. Millicent! Quick, where are you?"
"Here!" came a third voice. "Oh, Constance! one is too perfectly splendid
for anything! Chow-Chow is at his heels! Look out! Mark right!"
"Run!" panted Constance, leaping a fallen log.
The lovely June woodland was now echoing with the happy cries of the
chase, the ki-yi of excited lap-dogs, the breathless voices of the young
girls, the heavy crashing racket of stampeding young men rushing headlong
through bramble and thicket with a noise like a hurricane amid dead
leaves.
Vance's legs, terror weakened, wobbled as he fled; and after ten minutes
he took to a tree with a despairing scream.
Brown, looking back from the edge of a mountain pasture, saw the dogs
leaping frantically at his friend's legs as he shinned rapidly up the
trunk, and disappeared into the clustering foliage; saw three flushed
young girls come running up with cries of innocent delight; saw one of
them release a slender, black, furry, spidery thing which immediately ran
up the tree; heard distracted yells from Vance:
"For heaven's sake, take away that marmoset! I can't bear 'em--I hate
'em, ladies! Ouch! He's all over me! He's trying to get into my pocket!
Take him away, for the love of Mike, and I'll come down!"
But Brown waited to hear no more. Horror now lent him her infernal wings;
he fairly fluttered across the mountain side, sailed down the farther
slope, and into a lonely country road. Along this he cantered, observed
only by surprised cattle, until, exhausted, he slackened his pace to a
walk.
Rickety fences and the remains of old stone walls flanked him on either
hand; the clearings were few, the cultivated patches fewer. He
encountered no houses. On a distant hillside stood a weather-beaten barn,
the sky shining blue through its roof rafters.
Beyond this the road forked; one branch narrowed to a grassy cattle path
and presently ended at a pair of bars. Inside the bars was a stone barn;
beside the barn a house of the century before last--a low, square stone
house, half stripped of its ancient stucco skin, a high-roofed one-story
affair, with sagging dormers peering from the slates and little oblong
loop-holes under the eaves, from which the straw of birds' nests
fluttered in the breeze.
Surely this ancient place, even if inhabited--as he saw it was--must be
sufficiently remote from the outer world to insure his safety. For here
the mountain road ended at the barn-yard bars; here the low wooded hills
walled in this little world of house, barn, and orchard, making a silent,
sunny place under the blue sky, sweet with late lilac bloom and the hum
of bees. No factory smoke was visible, no Italians.
He looked at the aged house. A black cat sat on the porch thoughtfully
polishing her countenance with the back of one paw. Three diminutive
parti-coloured kittens frisked and rolled and toddled around her; and
occasionally she seized one and washed it energetically against the
grain.
Brown looked at the door with its iron knocker, at the delicately spread
fan-light over it, at the side-lights, at the half-pillars with their
Ionic capitals, at the ancient clumps of lilacs flanking the stone
step--great, heavy-stemmed and gnarled old bushes now all hung with
perfumed clusters of palest lavender bloom.
Leaning there on the picket fence he inhaled their freshness, gazing up
into the sunny foliage of the ancient trees, elms, maples, and one oak so
aged and so magnificent that, awed, his eyes turned uneasily again toward
the house to reassure himself that it was still inhabited.
Cat and kittens were comfortable evidence, also a hen or two loitering
near, and the pleasant sound from a dozen bee-hives, and a wild rose in a
china bowl, dimly visible on an inner window-sill.
There were two characters he might assume; he might go to the back door
and request a job; he might bang on the front door with that iron
knocker, shaped like a mermaid, and ask for country board.
Of one thing, somehow or other, he was convincing himself; this crumbling
house and its occupants knew as much about the recent high-jinks in New
York as did the man who built it in the days when loop-holes were an
essential part of local architecture, and the painted Sagamore passed
like a spectre through the flanking forests.
So Brown, carrying his suit-case, opened the gate, walked up the path,
seized the knocker, and announced himself with resolution.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XIX
WHILE he waited the cat looked up at him, curiously but pleasantly.
"Hello, old lady," he said; and she arched her back and rubbed lightly
against his nigh leg while the kittens tumbled over his shoes and played
frantically with the frayed bottoms of his trousers.
This preliminary welcome seemed to comfort him out of all proportion to
its significance; he gazed complacently about at the trees and flowers,
drew in deep breaths of the lilac's fragrance, and waited, listening
contentedly for the coming foot-fall.
He had not heard it when the door opened and a young girl appeared on the
threshold, standing with one hand resting on the inner knob; the other
touching the pocket of her apron, in which was a ball of yarn stuck
through with two needles.
She was slim and red-haired and slightly freckled, and her mouth was
perhaps a shade large, and it curled slightly at the corners; and her
eyes were quite perfectly made, except that one was hazel-brown and the
other hazel-grey.
Hat in hand, Brown bowed; and then she did a thing which interested him;
she lifted the edges of her apron between slender white thumbs and
forefingers and dropped him the prettiest courtesy he had ever seen off
the stage.
"I came to inquire," he said, "whether you ever take summer boarders."
"What are boarders?" she asked. "I never heard of them except in naval
battles."
"Thank heaven," he thought; "this is remote, all right; and I have
discovered pristine innocence in the nest."
"Modern boarders," he explained politely, "are unpleasant people who come
from the city to enjoy the country, and who, having no real homes, pay
farmers to lodge and feed them for a few days of vacation and dyspepsia."
"You mean is this a tavern?" she asked, unsmiling.
"No, I don't. I mean, will you let me live here a little while as though
I were a guest, and then permit me to settle my reckoning in accordance
with your own views upon the subject?"
She hesitated as though perplexed.
"Suppose you ask your father or mother," he suggested.
"They are absent."
"Will they return this morning?"
"I don't know exactly when they expect to return."
"Well, couldn't you assume the responsibility?" he asked, smiling.
She looked at him for a few moments, and it seemed to him as though, in
the fearless gravity of her regard, somehow, somewhere, perhaps in the
curled corners of her lips, perhaps in her pretty and unusual eyes, there
lurked a little demon of laughter. Yet it could not be so; there were
only serenity and a child's direct sweetness in the gaze.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"John Brown 4th."
"Mine is Elizabeth Tennant. Where do you live?"
"In--New York," he admitted, watching her furtively.
"I was there once--at a ball--many years ago," she observed.
"Not _very_ many years ago, I imagine," he said, smiling at her youthful
reminiscence.
"Many, many years ago," she said thoughtfully. "I shall go again some
day."
"Of course," he murmured politely, "it's a thing to do and get done--like
going abroad."
She looked up at him quickly.
"Years ago I knew a boy--with your easy humour and your trick of speech.
He resembled you otherwise; and he wore your name becomingly."
He tried to recall knowing her in his extreme youth, but made no definite
connection.
"You wouldn't remember," she said gravely; "but I think I know you now.
Who is your father?"
"My father?" he repeated, surprised and smiling. "My father is John Brown
3rd."
"And his father?"
"My grandfather?" he asked, very much amused. "Oh, he was John Brown 2nd.
And _his_ father was Captain John Brown of Westchester; but I don't want
to talk D. A. R. talk to you about my great grandfather----"
"He fought at Pound Ridge," said the girl, slowly.
"Yes," said Brown, astonished.
"Tarleton's cavalry--the brutal hussars of the legion--killed him on the
Stamford Road," she said; "and he lay there in the field all day with one
dead arm over his face and his broken pistol in his hand, and the
terrible galloping fight drove past down the stony New Canaan road--and
the smoke from the meeting house afire rolled blacker and blacker and
redder and redder----"
With a quickly drawn breath she covered her face with both hands and
stood a moment silent; and Brown stared at her, astonished, doubting his
eyes and ears.
The next moment she dropped her hands and looked at him with a tremulous
smile.
"What in the world can you be thinking of me?" she said. "Alone in this
old house, here among the remoter hills of Westchester. I live so vividly
in the past that these almost forgotten tragedies seem very real to me
and touch me closely. To me the present is only a shadow; the past is
life itself. Can you understand?"
"I see," he said, intensely relieved concerning her mental stability;
"you are a Daughter of the American Revolution or a Society of Colonial
Wars or--er--something equally--er--interesting and desirable----"
"I am a Daughter of the American Revolution," she said proudly.
"Exactly," he smiled with an inward shudder. "A--a very
interesting--er--and--exceedingly--and--all that sort of thing," he
nodded amiably. "Don't take much interest in it myself--being a broker
and rather busy----"
"I am sorry."
He looked up quickly and met her strange eyes, one hazel-grey, one
hazel-brown.
"I--I'll be delighted to take an interest in anything you--in--er--this
Revolutionary business if you--if you don't mind telling me about it," he
stammered. "Evenings, now, if you have time to spare----"
She smiled, opened the door wider, and looked humorously down at him
where he stood fidgeting on the step.
"Will you come in?" she asked serenely.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XX
HE went, first depositing his suit-case on the step outside by the cats,
and followed her into a large, comfortable sitting room.
"By jove," he said, "you know this is really mighty pretty! What a
corking collection of old furniture! Where in the world did you find--or
perhaps this is the original furniture of the place?"
She said, looking around the room as though slightly perplexed: "This
furniture was made to order for me in Boston."
"Then it isn't genuine," he said, disappointed. "But it's a very clever
imitation of antique colonial. It is really a wonderful copy."
"I don't think it is a copy."
"It certainly doesn't look like it; but it must be if it was made in
Boston for you. They're ingenious fellows, these modern makers of
colonial furniture. Every antique shop in New York is loaded up with
excellent copies of this sort--only not nearly as well done."
She assented, apparently with no very clear understanding of what he
meant.
"What a charming setting this old house makes for such things," he said.
She nodded, looking doubtfully at the rag carpet.
"The Manor House was much finer," she observed. "Come to the window and
I'll show you where it stood. They were fine folk, the Lockwoods, Hunts,
and Fanchers."
They rose and she laid one pretty hand on his sleeve and guided him into
a corner of the window, where he could see.
"Hello," he said uneasily, "there is a main travelled road! I thought
that here we were at the very ends of civilisation!"
"That is the Bedford road," she said. "Over there, beyond those
chestnuts, is the Stamford road. Can you see those tall old poplars?
Beyond the elms I mean--there--where the crows are flying?"
"Yes. Eight tall poplars."
"The Manor House stood there. Tarleton burnt it--set it afire with all
its beautiful furniture and silver and linen! His hussars ran through it,
setting it afire and shooting at the mirrors and slashing the silks and
pictures! And when the Major's young wife entered the smoking doorway to
try to save a pitiful little trinket or two, an officer--never mind who,
for his descendants may be living to-day in England--struck her with the
flat of his sword and cut her and struck her to her knees! That is the
truth!"
He said politely: "You are intensely interested in--er--colonial and
revolutionary history."
"Yes. What else have I to think of--here?"
"I suppose many interesting memories of those times cluster around this
old place," he said, violently stifling a yawn. He had risen early and
run far. Hunger and slumber contended for his mastery.
"Many," she said simply. "Just by the gate yonder they captured young
Alsop Hunt and sent him away to the Provost Prison in New York. In the
road below John Buckhout, one of our dragoons, was trying to get away
from one of Tarleton's dragoons of the 17th Regiment; and the British
trooper shouted, 'Surrender, you damned rebel, or I'll blow your brains
out!' and the next moment he fired a bullet through Buckhout's helmet.
'There,' said the dragoon, 'you damned rebel, a little more and I should
have blown your brains out!' 'Yes, damn you,' replied John, 'and a little
more and you wouldn't have touched me!'"
Brown looked at her amused and astonished to hear such free words slip so
eagerly from a mouth which, as he looked at it, seemed to him the sweet
mouth of a child.
"Where did _you_ ever hear such details?" he asked.
"People told me. Besides, the house is full of New York newspapers. You
may read them if you wish. I often do. Many details of the fight are
there."
"Reading such things out of old newspapers published at the time
certainly must bring those events very vividly before you."
"Yes. . . . It is painful, too. The surprise and rout of Sheldon's 2nd
dragoons--the loss of their standard; the capture, wounding, and death of
more than two score--and--oh! that young death there in the wheat! the
boy lying in the sun with one arm across his face and the broken pistol
in his hand! and his wife--the wife of a month--dragging him back to this
house--with the sunset light on his dead face!"
"To _this_ house?"
She dropped her hand lightly on his shoulder and pointed.
"Tarleton's troopers came stamping and cursing in by that very door after
they had burned Judge Lockwood's and the meeting house--but they left her
alone with her dead, here on the floor where you and I are standing. . .
. She was only seventeen; she died a few months later in child-birth.
God dealt very gently with her."
He looked around him in the pleasant light of the room, striving to
comprehend that such things had happened in such a sleepy, peaceful
place. Sunlight fell through the curtains, casting the wild roses' shadow
across the sill; the scent of lilacs filled the silence.
"It's curious--and sad," he said in a low voice. "How odd that I should
come here to the very spot where that old ancestor of mine died----"
"He was only twenty when he died," she interrupted.
"I know. But somehow a fellow seems to think of any ancestor as a snuffy
old codger----"
"He was very handsome," she said, flushing up.
There was a silence; then she looked around at him with a glint of humour
in her pretty eyes--one hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey; and the
delicious mouth no longer drooped.
"Can't you imagine him as young as you are? gay, humorous, full of
mischievous life, and the love of life? something of a dandy in his
uniform--and his queue tied smartly à la Française!--gallant--oh,
gallant and brave in the dragoon's helmet and jack-boots of Sheldon's
Horse! Why, he used to come jingling and clattering into this room and
catch his young wife and plague and banter and caress her till she fled
for refuge, and he after her, like a pair of school children
released--through the bed-rooms, out by the kitchen, and into the garden,
till he caught her again in the orchard yonder and held her tight and
made her press her palms together and recite:
_I love thee_
_I love thee_
_Through all the week and Sunday_
--until for laughing and folly--I--they----"
To his amazement her voice broke; into her strange eyes sprang tears, and
she turned swiftly away and went and stood by the curtained window.
"Well, by gad!" he thought, "of all morbid little things! affected to
tears by what happened to somebody else a hundred and thirty odd years
ago! Women are sure the limit!"
And in more suitable terms he asked her why she should make herself
unhappy.
She said: "I _am_ happy. It is only when I am here that I am lonely and
the dead past lives again among these wooded hills."
"Are you not--usually--here?" he asked, surprised. "I thought you lived
here."
"No. I live elsewhere, usually. I am too unhappy here. I never remain
very long."
"Then why do you ever come here?" he asked, amused.
"I don't know. I am very happy elsewhere. But--I come. Women do such
things."
"I don't exactly understand why."
"A woman's thoughts return eternally to one place and one person. _One_
memory is her ruling passion."
"What is that memory?"
"_The Place and the Man._"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean that a woman, in spirit, journeys eternally to the old, old
rendezvous with love; makes, with her soul, the eternal pilgrimage back
to the spot where Love and she were first acquainted. And, moreover, a
woman may even leave the man with whom she is happy to go all alone for
a while back to the spot where first she knew happiness because of him.
. . . You don't understand, do you?"
Brown was a broker. He did _not_ understand.
She looked at him, smiling, sighing a little--and, in spite of her fresh
and slender youth--and she was certainly not yet twenty--he felt
curiously young and crude under the gentle mockery of her unmatched
eyes--one hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey.
Then, still smiling wisely, intimately to herself, she went away into an
inner room; and through the doorway he saw her slim young figure moving
hither and thither, busy at shelf and cupboard. Presently she came back
carrying an old silver tray on which stood a decanter and a plate of
curious little cakes. He took it from her and placed it on a tip-table.
Then she seated herself on the ancient sofa, and summoned him to a place
beside her.
"Currant wine," she said laughingly; "and old-fashioned cake. Will you
accept--under this roof of mine?"
He was dreadfully hungry; the wine was mild and delicious, the crisp
cakes heavenly, and he ate and ate in a kind of ecstasy, not perfectly
certain what was thrilling him most deeply, the wine or the cakes or this
slender maid's fresh young beauty.
On one rounded cheek a bar of sunlight lay, gilding the delicate skin and
turning the curling strands of hair to coils of fire.
He thought to himself, with his mouth a trifle fuller than convention
expects, that he would not wish to resist falling in love with a girl
like this. _She_ would never have to chase him very far. . . . In fact,
he was perfectly ready to be captured and led blushing to the altar.
Once, as he munched away, he remembered the miserable fate of his late
companion Vance, and shuddered; but, looking around at the young girl
beside him, his fascinated eyes became happily enthralled, and matrimony
no longer resembled doom.
"What are these strange happenings in New York of which I hear vague
rumours?" she enquired, folding her hands in her lap and looking
innocently at him.
His jaw fell.
"Have _you_ heard about--what is going on in town?" he asked. "I thought
you didn't know."
"They say that the women there are ambitious to govern the country and
are even resolved to choose their own husbands."
"Something of that sort," he muttered uneasily.
"That is a very strange condition of affairs," she murmured, brooding
eyes remote.
"It's a darned sight worse than strange!" he blurted out--then asked
pardon for his inelegant vehemence; but she only smiled dreamily and
sipped her currant wine in the sunshine.
"Shall we talk of something pleasanter?" he said, still uneasy,
"--er--about those jolly old colonial days. . . . That's rather an odd
gown you wear--er--pretty you know--but--_is_ it not in the style
of--er--those days of--of yore--and all that?"
"It was made then."
"A genuine antique!" he exclaimed. "I suppose you found it in the garret.
There must be a lot of interesting things up there behind those flat
loop-holes."
"Chests full," she nodded. "We save everything."
He said: "You look wonderfully charming in the costume of those days. It
suits you so perfectly that--as a matter of fact, I didn't even notice
your dress when I first saw you--but it's a _wonder_!"
"Men seldom notice women's clothes, do they?"
"That is true. Still, it's curious I didn't notice such a gown as that."
"Is it _very_ gay and fine?" she asked, colouring deliciously. "I love
these clothes."
"They are the garments of perfection--robing it!"
"Oh, what a gallant thing to say to me. . . . Do you truly find me so--so
agreeable?"
"Agreeable! You--I don't think I'd better say it----"
"Oh, I beg you!"
"May I?"
[Illustration: "'Pray, observe my unmatched eyes.'"]
Her cheeks and lips were brilliant, her eyes sparkling; she leaned a
trifle toward him, frail glass in hand.
"May not a pretty woman listen without offense if a gallant man praises
her beauty?"
"You _are_ exactly that--a beauty!" he said excitedly. "The most
bewitching, exquisite, matchless----"
"Oh, I beg of you, be moderate," she laughed--and picked up a fan from
somewhere and spread it, laughing at him over its painted edge.
"Pray, observe my unmatched eyes before you speak again of me as
matchless."
"Your eyes _are_ matchlessly beautiful!--more wonderfully beautiful than
any others in all the world!" he cried.
Yet the currant wine was very, very mild.
"Such eyes," he continued excitedly, "are the most strangely lovely eyes
I ever saw or ever shall see. Nobody in all the world, except you, has
such eyes. I--I am going quite mad about them--about you--about
everything. . . . I--the plain fact is that I love--such eyes--and--and
every harmonious and lovely feature that--that b-b-belongs to them--and
to--to _you_!"
She closed her painted fan slowly, slowly left her seat, took from the
blue bowl on the window-sill the wild rose blooming there, turned and
looked back at him, half smiling, waiting.
He sprang to his feet, scarcely knowing now what he was about; she
waited, tall, slender, and fresh as the lovely flower she held.
Then, as he came close to her, she drew the wild rose through the lapel
of his coat, and he bent his head and touched his lips to the blossom.
"When she and you--and Love--shall meet at last, you will first know her
by her eyes," she began; and the next instant the smile froze on her face
and she caught his arm in both hands and clung there, white to the lips.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXI
"LISTEN!" she whispered; "did you hear that?"
"What?" he asked, dazed.
"On the Bedford road! do you hear the horses? Do you hear them running?"
"W-what horses?"
"Tarleton's!" she gasped, pressing her white face between her hands.
"Can't you hear their iron scabbards rattle? Can't you hear their bugle
horn? Where is Jack? _Where_ is Jack?"
A flurry of mellow music burst out among the trees, followed by a loud
report.
"Oh, God!" she whispered, "the British!"
Brown stared at her.
"Why, that's only an automobile horn--and their tire just blew out," he
began, astonished.
But she sprang past him, calling, "Jack! Jack! Where are you?" and he
heard the door fly open and her childish cry of terror outside in the
sunshine.
The next second he followed her, running through the hall and out through
the door to the porch; and at the same moment a big red touring car came
to a standstill before the house; the chauffeur descended to put on a new
tire, and a young girl in motor duster and hood sprang lightly from the
tonneau to the tangled grass. As she turned to look at the house she
caught sight of him.
Brown took an uncertain step forward; and she came straight toward him.
Neither spoke as they met face to face. He looked at her, passed his hand
over his eyes, bewildered, and looked again.
She was slim and red-haired and slightly freckled, and her mouth was
perhaps a shade large, and it curled slightly at the corners, and her
eyes were quite perfectly made except that one was hazel-brown and the
other a hazel-grey.
She looked at him, and it seemed to him as though, in the fearless
gravity of her regard, somewhere, somehow--perhaps in the curled corners
of her lips, perhaps in her pretty and unusual eyes--there lurked a
little demon of laughter. Yet it could not be so--there were only
serenity and a child's direct sweetness in her gaze.
"I suppose you have come to look at this old-time place?" she said.
"People often come. You are perfectly welcome."
And, as he made no answer:
"If you care to see the inside of the house I will be very glad to show
it to you," she added pleasantly.
"Is--is it _yours_?" he managed to say, "or--or your sister's?"
She smiled. "You mistake me for somebody else. I have no sister. This is
the old Brown place--a very, very old house. It belonged to my great
grandmother. If you are interested I will be glad to show you the
interior. I brought the key with me."
"But people--relatives of yours--are living there now," he stammered.
"Oh, no," she said, smiling, "the house is empty. We are thinking of
putting it in shape again. If you care to come in I can show you the
quaint old fireplaces and wainscoting--if you don't mind dust."
She mounted the step lightly and, fitting the key and unlocking the
door--which he thought he had left open--entered.
"Come in," she called to him in a friendly manner.
He crossed the threshold to her side and halted, stunned. An empty house,
silent, shadowy, desolate, confronted him.
The girl beside him shook out her skirts and glanced at her dusty gloves.
"A vacuum cleaner is what this place requires," she said. "But _isn't_ it
a quaint old house?"
He pressed his shaking hands to his closed eyes, then forced them to open
upon the terrible desolation where _she_ had stood a moment since--and
saw bare boards under foot, bare walls, cobwebs, dust.
The girl was tiptoeing around the four walls examining the condition of
the woodwork.
"It only needs electric lights and a furnace in the cellar and some
kalsomine and pretty wall paper----"
She turned to glance back at him, and stood so, regarding him with amused
curiosity--for he had dropped on his knees in the dust, groping in an odd
blind way for a flower that had just fallen from his coat.
"There are millions of them by the roadside," she said as he stumbled to
his feet and drew the frail blossom through his buttonhole with unsteady
fingers.
"Yes," he said, "there are other roses in the world." Then he drew a
deep, quiet breath and smiled at her.
She smiled, too.
"This was her room," she explained, "the room where she first met her
husband, the room into which she came a bride, the room where she died,
poor thing. Oh, I forgot that you don't know who _she_ was!"
"Elizabeth Tennant," he answered calmly.
"Why--how did _you_ know?"
"God knows," he said; and bent his head, touching the petals of the wild
rose with his lips. Then he looked up straight into her eyes--one was
hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXII
AS they left the house an hour later, walking down the path slowly,
shoulder to shoulder, she said:
"Mr. Brown, I _want_ you to like that house."
A sudden and subtly hideous idea glided into his brain.
"_You_ don't believe in suffragettes, do you?" he said, forcing a hollow
laugh.
"Why, I _am_ one. Didn't you know it?"
"_You!_"
"Certainly. Goodness! how you did run! But," she added with innocent
satisfaction, "I think I have secured every bit as good a one as the one
Gladys chased out of a tree with her horrid marmoset."
[Illustration]
XXIII
THE Eugenic Revolution might fairly be said to have begun with the
ignominious weddings of Messrs. Reginald Willett, James Carrick, De Lancy
Smith, and Alphonso W. Green.
Its crisis culminated in the Long Acre riots. But the great suffragette
revolution was now coming to its abrupt and predestined end; the
reaction, already long overdue, gathered force with incredible rapidity
and exploded from Yonkers to Coney Island, in a furious
counter-revolution. The revolt of the Unfit was on at last.
Mobs of maddened spinsters paraded the streets of the five boroughs
demanding spouses. Maidens of uncertain age and attractions who, in the
hysterical enthusiasm of the eugenic revolution, had offered themselves
the pleasures of martyrdom by vowing celibacy and by standing aside
while physically perfect sister suffragettes pounced upon and married all
flawless specimens of the opposite sex, now began to demand for
themselves the leavings among the mature, thin-shanked, and bald-headed.
In vain their beautiful comrades attempted to explain the eugenistic
principles--to point out that the very essence of the entire cult lay in
non-reproduction by the physically unfit, and in the ultimate extinction
of the thin, bald, and meagre among the human race.
But thousands and thousands of the love-maddened rose up and denounced
the Beauty Trust, demanded a return to the former conditions of fair
competition in the open shop of matrimony.
They were timidly encouraged by thousands of middle-aged gentlemen who
denied that either excessive meagreness or baldness was hereditary; they
even dared to assert that the suffragette revolution had been a mistake,
and pointed out that only an average of one in every hundred women had
taken the trouble to exercise her privilege at the polls in the recent
election, and that ninety per cent. of those who voted marked their
ballots wrong or forgot to mark them at all, or else invalidated them by
writing suggestions to the candidates on the backs of the ballots.
A week of terrible confusion ensued, and, in the very midst of it, news
came from London that Miss Pondora Bottomly, who, after throwing bricks
all day through the back windows of Windsor Castle, had been arrested by
a very thin Scotch policeman, had suddenly seized the policeman and
married him in spite of his terrified cries.
A shout of protest arose from every human man in the civilised world; a
groan of dismay burst from every human woman. It was the beginning of the
end; the old order of things was already in sight; men, long hidden,
reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious
"good-mornings" of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially
desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists,
caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl
around the débris of their ruined professions with a view to starting
out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting
was furtively resurrected and resumed in the awaking metropolis.
"Perfection," said America's greatest orator on the floor of the Senate,
"is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that
make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its misfortunes,
and its mutts!"
And within a month after the delivery of this classic the American nation
had resumed its normal, haphazard aspect. The revolution, the riots on
Fifth Avenue and Long Acre, the bachelors' St. Bartholomew were all
forgotten; Tammany Hall and the Republican State Organization yawned,
stretched, rubbed their eyes, awoke, and sat up licking their hungry
chops; the gentlemen in charge of the Bureau of Special Privileges opened
the long-locked drawers of that piece of furniture, and looked over the
ledgers; trusts, monopolies, systems came out of their cyclone cellars;
turf associations dredged the dump-docks for charters, whither a feminine
municipal administration had consigned them; all-night cafés,
dance-halls, gambling houses reopened, and the electric lights sparkled
once more on painted cheeks and tinted lips.
The good old days of yore were returning fast on the heels of the retreat
of woman; capital shook hands with privilege; the prices of staples
soared; joints, dives, and hospitals were fast filling up; jails and
prisons and asylums looked forward to full houses. It was the same old
world again--the same dear old interesting, exciting, grafting,
murdering, diseased planet, spinning along through space--just as far as
usual from other worlds and probably so arranged in order that other
worlds might not suffer from its aroma.
And over it its special, man-designed god was expected to keep watch and
deal out hell or paradise as the man-made regulations which governed the
deity and his abode required.
So once again the golden days of yore began; congregations worshipped in
Fifth Avenue churches and children starved on Avenue A; splendid
hospitals were erected, palatial villas were built in the country; and
department stores paid Mamie and Maud seven dollars a week--but competed
in vain, sometimes, with smiling and considerate individuals who offered
them more, including enough to eat.
The world's god was back in his heaven; the world would, therefore, go
very well; and woman, at last, was returning to her own sphere to mind
her own business--and a gifted husband, especially created as her
physical and mental lord and master by a deity universally regarded as
masculine in sex.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
LEFT OVER
XXIV
SHE knew so little about the metropolis that, on her first visit, a year
before, she had asked the driver of the taxicab to recommend a
respectable hotel for a lady travelling alone; and he had driven her to
the Hotel Aurora Borealis--that great, gay palace of Indiana limestone
and plate glass towering above the maelstrom of Long Acre.
When, her business transacted, she returned to the Westchester farm,
still timid, perplexed, and partly stunned by the glitter and noise of
her recent metropolitan abode, she determined never again to stop at
that hotel.
But when the time came for her to go again the long list of hotels
confused her. She did not know one from the other; she shrank from
experimenting; and, at least, she knew something about the Aurora
Borealis and she would not feel like an utter stranger there.
That was the only reason she went back there _that_ time. And the next
time she came to town that was the principal reason she returned to the
Aurora Borealis. But the next time, she made up her mind to go elsewhere;
and in the roaring street she turned coward, and went to the only place
she knew. And the time after that she fought a fierce little combat with
herself all the way down in the train; and, with flushed cheeks, hating
herself, ordered the cabman to take her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis.
But it was not until several trips after that one--on a rainy morning in
May--that she found courage to say to the maid at the cloak-room door:
"Who _is_ that young man? I always see him in the lobby when I come
here."
The maid cast an intelligent glance toward a tall, well-built young
fellow who stood pulling on his gloves near the desk.
"Huh!" she sniffed; "he ain't much."
"What do you mean?" asked the girl.
"Why, he's a capper, mem."
"A--a what?"
"A capper--a gambler."
The girl flushed scarlet. The maid handed her a check for her rain-coat
and said: "They hang around swell hotels, they do, and pick up
acquaintance with likely looking and lonely boobs. Then the first thing
the lonely boob knows he's had a good dinner with a new acquaintance and
is strolling into a quiet but elegant looking house in the West Forties
or Fifties." And the maid laughed, continuing her deft offices in the
dressing-room, and the girl looked into the glass at her own crimson
cheeks and sickened eyes.
At luncheon he sat at a little table by a window, alone, indolently
preoccupied with a newspaper and a fruit salad. She, across the room,
kept her troubled eyes away. Yet it was as though she saw him--perhaps
the mental embodiment of him was the more vivid for her resolutely
averted head.
Every detail of his appearance was painfully familiar to her--his dark
eyes, his smooth face which always seemed a trifle sun-tanned, the
fastidious and perfect taste of his dress in harmony with his boyish
charm and quiet distinction--and the youth of him--the wholesome and
self-possessed youth--that seemed to her the most dreadful thing about
him in the new light of her knowledge. For he could scarcely be
twenty-five.
Every movement he made had long since fascinated her; his unconscious
grace had been, to her, the unstudied assurance of a man of the world
bred to a social environment about which she knew only through reading.
Never had she seen him but straightway she began to wonder who and what
exalted person in the unknown metropolitan social circle he might be.
She had often wondered, speculated; sometimes dreamily she had endowed
him with name and position--with qualities, too--ideal qualities
suggested by his air of personal distinction--delightful qualities
suggested by his dark, pleasant eyes, and by the slight suspicion of
humour lurking so often on the edges of his smoothly shaven lips.
He was so clean-looking, so nice--and he had the shoulders and the hands
and the features of good breeding! And, after all--after all, he was a
gambler!--a derelict whose sinister living was gained by his wits; a
trailer and haunter and bleeder of men! Worse--a decoy sent out by
others!
She had little appetite for luncheon; he seemed to have less. But she
remembered that she had never seen him eat very much--and never drink
anything stronger than tea.
"At least," she thought with a mental quiver, "he has that to his
credit."
The quiver surprised her; she was scarcely prepared for any emotion
concerning him except the natural shock of disillusion and the natural
pity of a young girl for anything ignoble and hopelessly unworthy.
Hopelessly? She wondered. Was it possible that God could ever find the
means of grace for such a man? It _could_ be done, of course; it were a
sin for her to doubt it. Yet she could not see how.
Still, he was young enough to have parents living somewhere; unmarred
enough to invite confidence if he cared to. . . . And suddenly it struck
her that to invite confidence was part of his business; his charm part of
his terrible equipment.
She sat there breathing faster, thinking.
His charm was part of his equipment--an infernal weapon! She understood
it now. Long since, innocently speculating, she had from the very
beginning and without even thinking, conceded to him her confidence in
his worthiness. And--the man was a gambler!
For a few moments she hated him hotly. After a while there was more
sorrow than heat in her hatred, more contempt for his profession than for
him. . . . And _somebody_ had led him astray; that was certain, because
no man of his age--and appearance--could have deliberately and of his own
initiative gone so dreadfully and cruelly wrong in the world.
Would God pity him? Would some means be found for his salvation? Would
salvation come? It must; she could not doubt it--after she had lifted
her eyes once more and looked at him where he sat immersed in his
newspaper, a pleasant smile on his lips.
A bar of sunlight fell across his head, striping his shoulder; the
scarlet flowers on the table were becoming to him. And, oh! he seemed so
harmless--so delightfully decent; there where the sunlight fell across
his shoulder and spread in a golden net across the white cloth under his
elbows.
She rose, curiously weary; a lassitude lay upon her as she left the room
and went out into the city about her business--which was to see her
lawyer concerning the few remaining details of her inheritance.
The inheritance was the big, prosperous Westchester farm where she
lived--had always lived with her grandfather since her parents' death. It
was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy
for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the
magnificence of the old Patroons.
Outside of her own house and farm she had land to sell to the landed and
republican gentry; and she sold it and they bought it with an avidity
that placed her financial independence beyond doubt.
All the morning she transacted business downtown with the lawyer. In the
afternoon she went to a matinée all by herself, and would have had a most
blissful day had it not been for the unquiet memory of a young man who,
she had learned that morning, was fairly certain of eternal damnation.
That evening she went back to Westchester absent-minded and depressed.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXV
IT was in early June when she arrived in town again. He was in the lobby
as usual; he lunched at the table by the window as usual. There seemed to
be nothing changed about him except that he was a handsomer man than she
had supposed him.
She ate very little luncheon. As usual, he glanced at her once--a
perfectly pleasant and inoffensive glance--and resumed his luncheon and
his newspaper. He was always quiet, always alone. There seemed to be a
curious sort of stillness which radiated from him, laying a spell upon
his environment for a few paces on every side of him. She had felt this;
she felt it now.
Downtown her business was finally transacted; she went to a matinée all
by herself, and found herself staring beyond the painted curtain and the
mummers--beyond the bedizened scenery--out into the world somewhere and
into two dark, boyish eyes that looked so pleasantly back at her. And
suddenly her own eyes filled; she bent her head and touched them with her
handkerchief.
No, she must never again come to the Hotel Aurora Borealis. There were
reasons. Besides, it was no longer necessary for her to come to town at
all. She _must_ not come any more. . . . And yet, if she could only know
what became of him--whether salvation ever found him----
The curtain fell; she rose and pinned on her hat, gathered her trifles,
and moved out with the others into the afternoon sunshine of Broadway.
That evening she dined in her room. She had brought no luggage. About ten
o'clock the cab was announced.
As she walked through the nearly deserted lobby she looked around for
him. He stood near the door, talking to the hotel detective.
Halting a moment to button her gloves, she heard the detective say:
"Never mind the whys and whats! You fade away! Understand?"
"By what authority do you forbid me entrance to this hotel?" asked the
young man coolly.
"Well, it's good enough for you that I tell you to keep out!"
"I can not comply with your suggestion. I have an appointment here in
half an hour."
"Now you go along quietly," said the detective. "We've had our eyes on
you. We know all about you. And when the hotel gets wise to a guy like
you we tip him off and he beats it!"
"We can discuss that to-morrow; I tell you I have an appointment----"
"G'wan out o' here!" growled the detective.
The young man quietly fell into step beside him, but on the sidewalk he
turned on him, white and desperate.
"I tell you I've _got_ to keep that appointment." He stood aside as the
girl passed him, head lowered, and halted to wait for her cab. "I tell
you I've got to go back----"
"Here, you!" The detective seized his arm as he attempted to pass; the
young man wheeled and flung him aside, and the next instant reeled back
as the detective struck him again with his billy, knocking him halfway
into the street.
"You damned dead-beat!" he panted, "I'll show you!"
The young man stood swaying, his hands against his head; porters, cabmen,
and the detective saw him stagger and fall heavily. And the next moment
the girl was kneeling beside him.
"Let him alone, lady," said somebody. "That bum isn't hurt."
The "bum," in fact, was getting to his feet, groping for some support;
and the girl's arm was offered and he leaned on it a moment, clearing his
eyes with a gloved hand. Suddenly he made a movement so quick that she
never understood how she wrenched the short, dull-blue weapon from his
hand.
"Pick up your hat!" she gasped. "Do what I tell you!"
He looked at her, dazed, then the blood blotted his dark eyes again. She
stooped swiftly, caught up his hat, and, holding tightly to his arm,
opened the other door of the taxicab.
"They'll kill you here," she whispered. "Come with me. I've got to talk
to you!"
"Lady--are you crazy?" demanded the tall head-porter, aghast.
But she had got him into the cab. "Drive on," she said through clenched
teeth. And the chauffeur laughed and started east.
In the swaying cab the man beside her sat bent over, his face in his
hands, blood striping the fingers of his gloves. With a shudder she
placed the automatic weapon on the cushion beside her and shrank back,
staring at him.
But his senses seemed to be returning, for presently he sat up, found his
handkerchief, staunched the rather insignificant abrasion, and settled
back into his corner. Without looking at her he said:
"Would you mind if I thank you? You have been very kind."
She could not utter a word.
Presently he turned; and as he looked at her for the first time a faint
flicker of humour seemed to touch his eyes.
"Where are we going--if you don't mind?" he said pleasantly.
Then the breathless words came, haltingly.
"I've got to tell you something; I've _got_ to! I can't stand aside--I
_can't_ pass by on the other side!"
"Thank you," he said, smiling, "but Lazarus is all right now."
"I mean--something else!" Her voice fell to a whisper. "I _must_ speak!"
He looked pleasantly perplexed, smiling.
"Is there anything--except a broken head--that could possibly permit me
the opportunity of listening to you?"
"I--have seen you before."
"And I you."
She leaned against her window, head resting on her hand, her heart a
chaos.
"Where are you going when--when I leave you?" she said.
He did not answer.
"Where?" She turned to look at him. "Are you going back to that hotel?"
And, as he made no reply: "Do you wish to become a murderer, too?" she
said tremulously. "I have your pistol. I ask you not to go back there."
After a moment he said: "No, I won't go back. . . . Where is the pistol?"
"You shall not have it."
"I think perhaps it would be safer with me."
"No!"
"Very well."
"And--I--I ask you to keep away from that man!" She grew unconsciously
dramatic. "I ask you--if you have any memory which you hold sacred--to
promise me on that memory not to--to----"
"I won't shoot him," he said, watching her curiously. "Is that what you
mean?"
"Y-yes."
"Then I promise--on my most sacred memory--the memory of a young girl who
saved me from committing--what I meant to do. . . . And I thank her very
deeply."
She said: "I _did_ save you from--_that_!"
"You did--God knows." He himself was trembling a little; his face had
turned very white.
"Then--then----" she forced her courage--lifted her frightened eyes,
braving mockery and misconstruction--"then--is there a chance of
my--helping you--further?"
For a moment her flushed face and timid question perplexed him; then the
quick blood reddened his face, and he stared at her in silence.
"I--I can't help it," she faltered. "I believe in you--and in--salvation.
. . . Please don't say anything to--hurt me."
"No," he said, still staring, "no, of course not. And--and thank you. You
are very kind. . . . You are _very_ kind. . . . I suppose you heard
somebody say--what I am."
"Yes. . . . But that was long ago."
"Oh, you knew--you have known--for some time?"
"Yes."
He sat thinking for a while.
Presently they both noticed that the cab had stopped--had probably been
standing for some time in front of the station; and that several
red-capped porters were watching them.
"My name is Lily Hollis," she said, "and I live at Whitebrook Farm,
Westchester. . . . I am not coming to New York again--and never again to
that hotel. . . . But I would like to talk to you--a little."
He thought a moment.
"Do you want a gambler to call on you, Miss Hollis?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then he will do it. When?"
"To-morrow."
He passed his hand over his marred young face.
"Yes," he said quietly, "to-morrow."
He looked up and met her eyes, smiled, opened the door, and stepped to
the sidewalk. Then he went with her to her train. She turned at the gates
and held out her hand to him; and, hat in hand, he bent his battered head
and touched her gloves with twitching lips.
"To-morrow?"
"Certainly."
She said, wistfully: "May I trust in you?"
"Yes. Tell me that you trust me."
"I trust you," she said; and laid the pistol in his hands.
His face altered subtly. "I did not mean in that way," he said.
"How could I trust you more?"
"With--yourself."
"That is a--lesser trust," she said faintly. "It is for you that I have
been afraid."
He saw the colour deepen in her cheeks, looked, bit his lip in silence.
"To-morrow?" she said under her breath.
"Yes."
"Good-bye till then."
"Good-bye."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXVI
THE next day he didn't appear, but a letter did.
"I merely lied to you," he wrote. "All gamblers are liars. You should
have passed by on the other side."
Yes, that is what she should have done; she realised it now alone there
in the sunny parlour with his letter.
There was no chance for him; or, if there was, she had not been chosen as
the instrument of his salvation.
Slowly she turned her head and looked around her at her preparations--the
pitiful little preparations for him--the childish stage setting for the
scene of his salvation.
The spotless parlour had been re-dusted, cleaned, rubbed to its old-time
polish. Bible and prayer-book on the mahogany centre-table had been
arranged and re-arranged so many times that she no longer knew whether or
not her art concealed art, and was innocently fearful that he might
suspect the mise-en-scène and fight shy of her preparations for his
regeneration.
Again and again she had re-arranged the flowers and books and rumpled the
un-read morning newspaper to give to the scene a careless and casual
every-day allure; again and again she had straightened the rugs, then
tried them in less symmetrical fashion. She let the kitten in to give a
more home-like air to the room, but it squalled to go out, and she had to
release it.
Also, from the best spare room she had brought Holman Hunt's "Shadow of
the Cross"--and it had taxed her slender strength to hang it in place of
the old French mezzotint of Bacchus and Ariadne.
But the most difficult task was to disseminate among the stiff pieces of
furniture and the four duplicate sofa cushions an atmosphere of pleasant
and casual disorder--as though guests had left them where they were--as
though the rigid chairs were accustomed to much and intimate usage.
But the effect troubled her; every formal bit of furniture seemed to be
arranged as for an ambuscade; the cushions on the carved sofa sat in a
row, like dwarfs waiting; the secretary watched, every diamond pane a
glittering eye. And on the wall the four portraits of her parents and
grand-parents were behaving strangely, for she seemed never to be out of
range of their unwinking painted eyes.
From other rooms she had brought in ornaments, books, little odds and
ends--and the unaccustomed concentration of household gods caused her
much doubt and uncertainty, so fearful was she that his wise dark eyes
might smilingly detect her effort.
There had been much to do in the short time pending his arrival--the
gravel path to be raked, the lawn to be rolled and cut, the carefully
weeded flower beds to be searched for the tiniest spear of green which
did not belong there, the veranda to be swept again, and all the potted
plants to be re-arranged and the dead leaves and blossoms to be removed.
Then there were great sheafs of iris to gather; and that, and the cutting
of peonies and June roses, were matters to go about with thought and
discretion, so that no unsightly spaces in bloom and foliage should be
apparent to those dark, wise eyes of his that had looked on so many
things in life--so many, many things of which she knew nothing.
Also she was to offer him tea; and the baking of old-fashioned biscuits
and sweets was a matter for prayerful consideration. And Hetty, the hired
girl, had spent all the morning on her grand-mother's silver, and William
Pillsbury, executor of chores, had washed the doorstep and polished the
windows and swept the maple-pods and poplar silk from the roof-gutters,
and was now down on his knees with shears, trimming the grass under the
picket-fence.
And _he_ was not coming after all. He was never coming.
For a little while she failed to realise it; there was a numb sensation
in her breast, a dull confusion in her mind. She sat alone in the
parlour, in her pretty new gown, looking straight ahead of her, seeing
nothing--not even his letter in her hand.
And she sat there for a long while; the numbness became painful; the
tension a dull endurance. Fatigue came, too; she rested her head wearily
on the back of the chair and closed her eyes. But the tall clocks ticking
slowly became unendurable--and the odour of the roses hurt her.
Suddenly, through and through her shot a pang of fright; she had just
remembered that she had given him back his pistol.
On her feet now, startled as though listening, she stood, lips slightly
parted, and the soft colour gone from them. Then she went to the window
and looked down the road; and came back to stand by the centre-table, her
clasped hands resting on the Bible.
For a while fear had its way with her; the silent shock of it whitened
her face and left her with fair head bowed above her clasped hands.
Once or twice she opened the Bible and tried to understand, choosing what
she cared for most--reading of Lazarus, too. And she read about
miracles--those symbolic superfluities attributed to a life which in
itself was the greatest of all miracles.
And ever through the word of God glittered the memory of the pistol till
fear made her faint, and she rose, her hands against her breast, and
walked unsteadily out under the trees.
A bird or two had begun its sunset carol; the tree-trunks were stained
with the level crimson light. Far away her gaze rested on the blue hills.
Beyond them lay the accursed city.
The dull reiteration in her brain throbbed on unceasingly; she had given
him his pistol; he had lied to her; she had trusted him; he had lied; and
the accursed city lay beyond those hills--and he was there--with his
pistol; and he had lied to her--lied! lied! God help them both!
Across her clover fields the ruddy sunlight lay in broad undulating
bands, gilding blossom and curling trefoil. On every side of her the farm
stretched away over a rolling country set with woods; sweet came the
freshening air from the hills; she heard her collie barking at the
cattle along the pasture brook; a robin carolled loudly from the
orchard; orioles answered; gusts of twittering martins swept and soared
and circled the chimneys.
Erect, anguished hands clenched, she stood there, wide eyes seeing
nothing, and in her shrinking ears only the terrible reiteration of her
growing fears.
Then the level sun struck her body with a bar of light; all the world
around her smouldered rose and crimson. But after a little the shadows
fell through the fading light; and she turned her head, shivering, and
went back to the house--back to the room she had prepared for him, and
sat there watching the shapes of dusk invade it; the vague grey ghosts
that came crawling from corners and alcoves to gather at her feet and
wait and wait there with her for him who would never come into her life
again.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXVII
"MISS LILY?"
She lifted her head from the sofa cushion in the dark, dazzled by the
sudden lamp-light.
"What is it?" she asked, averting her face.
"There's a gentleman says he'd like to see you----"
The girl turned, still dully confused; then, rigid, sat bolt upright.
"_Who?_"
"A gentleman--said you don't know his name. Shall I show him in?"
She managed to nod; her heart was beating so violently that she pressed
her hand over it.
He saw her sitting that way when he entered.
She did not rise; pain and happiness, mingled, confusing her for a
moment; and he was already seated near her, looking at her with an
intentness almost expressionless.
"You see," he said, "what the honour of a gambler is worth. I have lied
to you twice already."
His words brought her to her senses. She rose with an effort and, as he
stood up, she gave him her hand.
"Don't think me rude," she said. "I was resting--not expecting you--and
the lamp and--your coming--confused me."
"You were not expecting me," he said, retaining her hand an instant. Then
she withdrew it; they seated themselves.
"I don't know," she said, "perhaps I was expecting you--and didn't
realise it."
"Had you thought--much about it?"
"Yes," she said.
Then it seemed as though something sealed her lips, and that nothing
could ever again unseal them. All that she had to say to him vanished
from her mind; she could not recall a single phrase she had prepared to
lead up to all she must somehow say to him.
He talked quietly to her for a while about nothing in particular. Once
she saw him turn and look around the room; and a moment afterward he
spoke of the old-time charm of the place and the pretty setting such a
room made for the old-fashioned flowers.
He spoke about gardens as though he had known many; he spoke of trees and
of land and of stock; and, as he spoke in his pleasant, grave young
voice, he noticed the portraits on the wall; and he spoke of pictures as
though he had known many, and he spoke of foreign cities, and of
old-world scenes. And she listened in silence and in such content that
the happiness of it seemed to invade her utterly and leave her physically
numb.
From time to time his dark eyes wandered from her to the objects in the
room; they rested for a moment on the centre-table with its Book,
lingered, passed on. For a little while he did not look at her--as though
first it were necessary to come to a conclusion. Whatever the conclusion
might have been, it seemed to make his eyes and mouth alternately grave
and amused--but only very faintly amused--as though the subject he was
considering held him closely attentive.
And at last he looked up at her, gently, not all the curiosity yet
quenched.
"You are kind enough to wish to know about me; and too well bred to
ask--now that the time is come. Shall I speak of myself?"
Her voiceless lips found a word.
"Then--_It_ began in college--after my uncle died and left nothing for me
to go on with. . . . I worked my way through--by my wits. . . . Up to
that time it was only luck and card-sense--and luck again--the ability to
hold the best cards at the best time--hold them honestly, I mean. It
happens--I don't know why or what laws govern it. Some men hold
them--always hold them--with intervals of bad fortune--but only
intervals."
He gazed thoughtfully at the rag carpet, passed a well-shaped hand over
his forehead.
"Yes, it is the truth. . . . And so, Fortune linked arms with me . . .
and I drifted into it--gradually--not all at once . . . lower--always a
little lower--until--what _you_ saw occurred."
She would not meet his eyes, perhaps with an idea of sparing him.
He said: "You know nothing of such things, of course. . . . I am--on a
commission basis for doing what--they threw me out of that hotel for
doing. . . . Of course, a man can fall lower--but not much lower. . . .
The business from which I receive commissions is not honest--a square
game, as they say. Some games may be square for a while; no games are
perfectly square all the time. . . . I have heard of honest gamblers; I
never saw one. . . . There may be some; but I'm afraid they're like good
Indians. . . . And that is the way in which Life and I are situated."
After a while she managed to look at him.
"Could you tell me--are you--your circumstances----"
"I am not in want," he said gently.
"Then it is not--not necessity----"
"No. It is easier and more interesting than for me to earn a decent
living."
"Is that the only reason?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Have you no--regrets?"
"Sometimes. . . . I am not immune to shame. . . . I wonder whether you
know what it cost me to come here."
A dull flush mounted to his forehead, but he faced her steadily enough.
"You saw me kicked out of a hotel by an Irish servant because I was not
fit to be tolerated among reputable people. . . . And you did not pass by
on the other side. . . . Under your clear eyes my spirit died a thousand
shameful deaths while I went with you to your destination. . . . The
contempt of the whole world burnt me; and your compassion drove every
flame into me----" He checked himself, swallowed, forced a smile, and
went on in his low, pleasant voice: "I am afraid I have been dramatic. .
. . All I meant to say is that my humiliation, witnessed by you, is a
heavier price to pay--a more painful reckoning with Fate, than I had
really ever looked for."
"I--I had no contempt for you," she faltered.
"You could not escape it; but it is kind of you to say that."
"You don't understand. I had no contempt. I was--it--the dread of harm to
you--frightened me. . . . And afterward I was only so sorry for you--and
wanted to--to help----"
He nodded. "The larger charity," he said. "You may read all about it
there in that Bible, but--the world takes it out in reading about it. . .
. I do not mean to speak bitterly. . . . There is nothing wrong with me
as far as the world goes--I mean _my_ world. . . . Only--in the other and
real world there is--you. . . . You, who did not pass by on the other
side; and to whom the Scriptures there are merely the manual which you
practice--for the sake of Christ."
"You think me better--far better than I am."
"I know what you are. I know what it cost you to even let me lean on you,
there in the glare of the electric light--there where men stood leering
and sneering and misjudging you!--and my blood on your pretty gown----"
"Oh--I did not think--care about that--or the men----"
"You cared about them. It is a growing torture to you. Even in the
generous flush of mercy you thought of it; you said you would never go
back to that hotel. I knew why you said it. I knew what, even then, you
suffered--what of fear and shame and outraged modesty. I know what you
stood for, there in the street with a half-senseless crook hanging to
your arm--tugging for a weapon which would have sent two more mongrels to
hell----"
"You shall not say that!" she cried, white and trembling. "You did not
know what you were doing----"
He interrupted: "'For they know not what they do.' . . . You are right. .
. . We don't really know, any of us. But few, except such as you, believe
it--few except such as you--and the Master who taught you. . . . And that
is all, I think. . . . I can't thank you; I can't even try. . . . It is
too close to melodrama now--not on your side, dear little lady!"
He rose.
"Are you--going?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
He turned unconsciously and looked through the windows into the southern
darkness.
"I--want you to stay," she said.
He turned and bent toward her with his youthful and engaging manner.
"It is sweet and good of you; but you know it is best that I go."
"Why?"
"Because--it might be that some of your friends would know me. . . . It
is for your sake I am going."
"I wish you to stay."
"I know it. It makes me wonderfully happy."
"_Won't_ you?"
"I must not."
"What are you going to do in the city?"
There was a silence; then: "The _same_?" she faltered.
"I am afraid so."
"Why?"
"What else is there?"
"Everything. . . . And I--ask it of you."
He looked at her with troubled eyes.
"I'm afraid you don't know what you are asking----"
"I do know! I ask--your soul of God!"
For a long while he stood there as though turned to stone. Then, as
though rousing from a dream, he walked slowly to the window, looked long
into the south. At last he turned.
She sat on the edge of the sofa, her face in her hands, deathly silent,
waiting.
"Tell me," she whispered, not looking up as he bent over her.
"About that matter of a stray soul?" he said pleasantly. "It's all
right--if you care to--bother with it. . . ."
Her hands dropped, and when she looked up he saw the tears standing in
her grey eyes.
"Do you mean it?" she asked, trembling.
"God knows what I mean," he said unsteadily; "and I shall never know
unless you tell me."
And he sat down beside her, resting his elbows on his knees and his head
between his hands, wondering what he could do with life and with the
young soul already in his dark keeping. And, after a while, the anxiety
of responsibility, being totally new, wearied him; perplexed, he lifted
his head, seeking her eyes; and saw the compassion in her face and the
slow smile trembling on her lips. And suddenly he understood which of
them was better fitted for a keeper of souls.
"Will you be patient?" he said.
"Can you ask?"
He shook his head, looking vacantly at the lamp-light.
"Because I've gone all wrong somehow . . . since I was a boy. . . . You
_will_ be patient with me--won't you?"
"Yes," she said.
[Illustration]
ENVOI
_In all Romances
And poet's fancies
Where Cupid prances,
Embowered in flowers,
The tale advances
'Mid circumstances
That check love's chances
Through tragic hours._
_The reader's doleful now,
The lover's soulful now,
At least a bowlful now
Of tears are poured.
The villain makes a hit,
The reader throws a fit,
The author grins a bit
And draws his sword!_
_Strikes down Fate's lances,
Avoids mischances,
And deftly cans his
Loquacious lore
'Mid ardent glances
And lover's trances
And wedding dances
Forevermore._
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gay Rebellion, by Robert W. Chambers
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