Quick Action
by Robert W. Chambers · English · Gutenberg #37528 · 342,705 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Quick Action
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Illustrator: Edmund Frederick
Release date: September 25, 2011 [eBook #37528]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUICK ACTION ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
QUICK ACTION
[Illustration: "'Are you preaching?' asked Athalie, raising her eyes
from the Green God."]
QUICK ACTION
_By_
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
ILLUSTRATED BY
EDMUND FREDERICK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON: MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Copyright, 1913, by Harper's Bazaar, Inc.
Copyright, 1914, by The Star Co.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
PENELOPE SEARS
DEBUTANTE
_To rhyme your name
With something lovely, fresh and young,
And sing the same
In measures heretofore unsung,
Is far beyond me, I'm afraid;
I'll not attempt it, dearest maid._
_No, not in verse,
Synthetic, stately, classic, chaste,
Shall I rehearse--
Although in perfectly good taste--
A catalogue of every grace
That you inherit from your race._
_Gracious and kind,
The gods your beauty gave to you,
And with a mind
These same kind gods endowed you, too;
That charming union is, I fear,
Somewhat uncommon on this sphere._
_I have no doubt
That scores of poets chant your fame;
No doubt, about
A million suitors press their claim;
And fashion, elegance and wit
Are at your feet inclined to sit._
_Penelope,
The fire-light flickers to and fro:
In you I see
The winsome child I used to know--
My little Maiden of Romance
Still whirling in your Shadow Dance._
_Though woman-grown,
To my unreconciled surprise
I gladly own
The same light lies within your eyes--
The same sweet candour which beguiled
Your rhymster when you were a child._
_And so I come,
With limping verse to you again,
Amid the hum
Of that young world wherein you reign--
Only a moment to appear
And say: "Your rhymster loves you, dear."_
_R. W. C._
PREFACE
Always animated by a desire to contribute in a small way toward
scientific investigation, the author offers this humble volume to a more
serious audience than he has so far ventured to address.
For all those who have outgrown the superficial amusement of mere
fiction this volume, replete with purpose, is written in hopes that it
may stimulate students to original research in certain obscure realms of
science, the borderlands of which, hitherto, have been scarcely crossed.
There is perhaps no division of science as important, none so little
understood, as the science of Crystal Gazing.
A vast field of individual research opens before the earnest, patient,
and sober minded investigator who shall study the subject and discover
those occult laws which govern the intimate relations between crystals,
playing cards, cigarettes, soiled pink wrappers, and the Police.
Amor nihil est celerius!
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"'Are you preaching?' asked Athalie, raising her eyes from the
green god"
"They inspected each other, apparently bereft of the power of
speech"
"The magnificent realism of it fascinated the Lady Alene"
"'I am in possession of the dog and you merely claim
possession'"
QUICK ACTION
I
There was a new crescent moon in the west which, with the star above it,
made an agreeable oriental combination.
In the haze over bay and river enough rose and purple remained to veil
the awakening glitter of the monstrous city sprawling supine between
river, sound, and sea. And its incessant monotone pulsated, groaning,
dying, ceaseless, interminable in the light-shot depths of its darkening
streets.
The sky-drawing-room windows of the Countess Athalie were all wide open,
but the only light in the room came from a crystal sphere poised on a
tripod. It had the quality and lustre of moon-light, and we had never
been able to find out its source, for no electric wires were visible,
and one could move the tripod about the room.
The crystal sphere itself appeared to be luminous, yet it remained
perfectly transparent, whatever the source of its silvery
phosphorescence.
At any rate, it was the only light in the room except the dulled glimmer
of our cigarettes, and its mild, mysterious light enabled us to see one
another as through a glass darkly.
There were a number of men there that evening. I don't remember, now,
who they all were. Some had dined early; others, during the evening,
strolled away into the city to dine somewhere or other, drifting back
afterward for coffee and sweetmeats and cigarettes in the
sky-drawing-room of the Countess Athalie.
As usual the girl was curled up by the open window among her silken
cushions, one smooth little gem-laden hand playing with the green jade
god, her still dark eyes, which slanted a little, fixed dreamily upon
infinite distance--or so it always seemed to us.
Through the rusty and corrugated arabesques of the iron balcony she
could see, if she chose, the yellow flare where Sixth Avenue crossed
the shabby street to the eastward. Beyond that, and parallel, a brighter
glow marked Broadway. Further east street lamps stretched away into
converging perspective, which vanished to a point in the faint nebular
radiance above the East River.
All this the Countess Athalie could see if she chose. Perhaps she did
see it. We never seemed to know just what she was looking at even when
she turned her dark eyes on us or on her crystal sphere cradled upon its
slender tripod.
But the sphere seemed to understand, for sometimes, under her still
gaze, it clouded magnificently like a black opal--another thing we never
understood, and therefore made light of.
"They have placed policemen before several houses on this street,"
remarked the Countess Athalie.
Stafford, tall and slim in his evening dress, relieved her of her coffee
cup.
"Has anybody bothered you?" he asked.
"Not yet."
Young Duane picked up a pack of cards at his elbow and shuffled them,
languidly.
"Where is the Ace of Diamonds, Athalie?" he asked.
"Any card you try to draw will be the Ace of Diamonds," replied the girl
indifferently.
"Can't I escape drawing it?"
"No."
We all turned and looked at Duane. He quickly spread the pack,
fan-shaped, backs up. After a moment's choosing he drew a card, looked
at it, held it up for us to see. It was the Ace of Diamonds.
"Would you mind trying that again, Athalie?" I asked. And Duane replaced
the card and shuffled the pack.
"But it's gone, now," said the girl.
"I replaced it in the pack," explained Duane.
"No, you gave it to me," she said.
We all smiled. Duane searched through the pack in his hands, once,
twice; then he laughed. The girl held up one empty hand. Then, somehow
or other, there was the Ace of Diamonds between her delicate little
thumb and forefinger.
She held it a moment or two for our inspection; then, curving her wrist,
sent it scaling out into the darkness. It soared away above the street,
tipped up, and describing an aerial ellipse, returned straight to the
balcony where she caught it in her fingers.
Twice she did this; but the third time, high in the air, the card burst
into violet flame and vanished.
"That," remarked Stafford, "is one thing which I wish to learn how to
do."
"Two hundred dollars," said the Countess Athalie, "--in two lessons;
also, your word of honour."
"Monday," nodded Stafford, taking out a note-book and making a
memorandum, "--at five in the afternoon."
"Monday and Wednesday at five," said the girl, lighting a cigarette and
gazing dreamily at nothing.
From somewhere in the room came a voice.
"Did they ever catch that crook, Athalie?"
"Which?"
"The Fifty-ninth Street safe-blower?"
"Yes."
"Did _you_ find him?"
She nodded.
"How? In your crystal?" I asked.
"Yes, he was there."
"It's odd," mused Duane, "that you can never do anything of advantage to
yourself by gazing into your crystal."
"It's the invariable limit to clairvoyance," she remarked.
"A sort of penalty for being super-gifted," added Stafford.
"Perhaps.... We can't help ourselves."
"It's too bad," I volunteered.
"Oh, I don't care," she said, with a slight shrug of her pretty
shoulders.
"Come," said somebody, teasingly, "wouldn't you like to know how soon
you are going to fall in love, and with whom?"
She laughed, dropped her cigarette into a silver bowl, stretched her
arms above her head, straightened her slender figure, turned her head
and looked at us.
"No," she said, "I do not wish to know. Light is swift; Thought is
swifter; but Love is the swiftest thing in Life, and if it is now
travelling toward me, it will strike me soon enough to suit me."
Stafford leaned forward and arranged the cushions for her; she sank back
among them, her dark eyes still on us.
"Hours are slow," she said; "years are slower, but the slowest thing in
Life is Love. If it is now travelling toward me, it will reach me soon
enough to suit me."
"I," said Duane, "prefer quick action, O Athalie, the Beautiful!"
"Athalie, lovely and incomparable," said Stafford, "I, also, prefer
quick action."
"Play _Scheherazade_ for us, Athalie," I said, "else we slay you with
our compliments."
A voice or two from distant corners repeated the menace. A match flared
and a fresh cigarette glowed faintly.
Somebody brought the tripod with its crystal sphere and set it down in
the middle of the room. Its mild rays fell on the marble basin of the
tiny fountain,--Duane's offering. The goldfish which I had given her
were floating there fast asleep.
When we had placed sweetmeats and cigarettes convenient for her, we all,
in turn, with circumstance and ceremony, bent over her left hand where
it rested listlessly among the cushions, saluting the emerald on her
third finger with our lips.
Then the dim circle closed around her, nearer.
"Of all the visions which have passed before your eyes within the depths
of that crystal globe," said Duane, "--of all the histories of men and
women which, unsuspected by them, you have witnessed, seated here in
this silent, silk-hung place, we desire to hear only those in which Fate
has been swiftest, Opportunity a loosened arrow, Destiny a flash of
lightning."
"But the victims of quick action must be nameless, except as I choose to
mask them," she said, looking dreamily into her crystal.
After a moment's silence Duane said in a low voice:
"Does anybody notice the odour of orange blossoms?"
We all noticed the fragrance.
"I seem to catch a whiff of the sea, also," ventured Stafford. "Am I
right?"
"Yes," she nodded, "you will notice the odour of the semi-tropics, even
if you miss the point of everything I tell you."
"In other words," said I, "we are but a material bunch, Athalie, and may
be addressed and amused only through our physical senses. Very well:
transpose from the spiritual for us if you please a little story of
quick action which has happened here in the crystal under your matchless
eyes!"
II
With her silver tongs she selected a sweetmeat. When it had melted in
her sweeter mouth, she lighted a cigarette, saluted us with a gay little
gesture and smilingly began:
"Don't ask me how I know what these people said; that is _my_ concern,
not yours. Don't ask me how I know what unspoken thoughts animated these
people; that is _my_ affair. Nor how I seem to be perfectly acquainted
with their past histories; for _that_ is part of my profession."
"And still the wonder grew," commented the novelist tritely, "that one
small head could carry all she knew!"
"Why," asked Stafford, "do you refuse to reveal your secret? Do you no
longer trust us, Athalie?"
She answered: "_Comment pretendons-nous qu'un autre garde notre secret,
si nous n'avons pas pu le garder nous-meme?_"
Nobody replied.
"Now," she said, laughingly, "I will tell you all that I know about the
_Orange Puppy_."
* * * * *
Plans for her first debut began before her birth. When it became
reasonably certain that she was destined to decorate the earth, she was
entered on the waiting lists of two schools--The Dinglenook School for
Boys, and The Idlebrook Institute for Young Ladies--her parents taking
no chances, but playing both ends coming and going.
When ultimately she made her first earthly appearance, and it was
apparent that she was destined to embellish the planet in the guise of a
girl, the process of grooming her for her second debut, some eighteen
years in the future, began. She lived in sanitary and sterilized
seclusion, eating by the ounce, sleeping through accurately measured
minutes, every atom of her anatomy inspected daily, every pore of her
skin explored, every garment she wore weighed, every respiration, pulse
beat, and fluctuation of bodily temperature carefully noted and
discussed.
When she appeared her hair was black. After she shed this, it came in
red; when she was eight her hair was coppery, lashes black, eyes blue,
and her skin snow and wild-strawberry tints in agreeably delicate
nuances. Several millions were set aside to grow up with her and for
her. Also, the list of foreign and aristocratic babyhood was scanned and
several dozen possibilities checked off--the list running from the
progeny of down-and-out monarchs with a sporting chance for a crown, to
the more solid infant aristocracy of Britain.
At the age of nine, the only symptom of intellect that had yet appeared
in her was a superbly developed temper. That year she eluded a governess
and two trained nurses in the park, and was discovered playing with some
unsterilized children near the duck-pond, both hands full of slime and
pollywogs.
It was the only crack in the routine through which she ever crawled.
Lessons daily in riding, driving, dancing, fencing, gymnastics, squash,
tennis, skating, plugged every avenue of escape between morning school
and evening sleep, after a mental bath in sterilized literature. Once,
out of the window she saw a fire. This event, with several runaways on
the bridle-path, included the sensations of her life up to her release
from special instructors, and her entry into Idlebrook Institute.
Here she did all she could to misbehave in a blind and instinctive
fashion, but opportunities were pitiably few; and by the time she had
graduated, honest deviltry seemed to have been starved out of her; and a
half year's finishing abroad apparently eliminated it, leaving only a
half-confused desire to be let alone. But solitude was the luxury always
denied her.
Unlike the usual debutante, who is a social veteran two years before her
presentation, and who at eighteen lacks no experience except
intellectual, Miss Cassillis had become neither a judge of champagne nor
an expert in the various cabaret steps popular at country houses and the
more exclusive dives.
"Mother," she said calmly, on her eighteenth birthday, "do you know that
I am known among my associates as a dead one?" At which that fat and
hard-eyed matron laughed, surveying her symmetrical daughter with grim
content.
"Let me tell you something," she said. "America, socially, is only one
vast cabaret, mostly consisting of performers. The spectators are few.
You're one. Conditions are reversed across the water; the audience is
in the majority.... How do you like young Willowmere?"
The girl replied that she liked Lord Willowmere. She might have added
that she was prepared to like anything in trousers that would give her a
few hours off.
"Do you think," said her mother, "you can be trusted to play in the
social cabaret all next winter, and then marry Willowmere?"
Said Cecil: "I am perfectly ready to marry anybody before luncheon, if
you will let me."
"I do not wish you to feel _that_ way."
"Mother, I _do_! All I want is to be let alone long enough to learn
something for myself."
"What do you not know? What have you _not_ learned? What accomplishment
do you lack, little daughter? What is it you wish?"
The girl glanced out of the window. A young and extremely well-built man
went striding down the avenue about his business. He looked a little
like a man she had seen playing ball on the Harvard team a year ago. She
sighed unconsciously.
"I've learned about everything there is to learn, I suppose....
Except--where do men go when they walk so busily about their business?"
"Down town," said her mother, laughing.
"What do they do there?"
"A million things concerning millions."
"But I don't see how there's anything left for them to do after their
education is completed. What is there left for me to do, except to marry
and have a few children?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Nothing.... I'd like to have something to do which would make me look
busy and make me walk rather fast--like that young man who was hurrying
down town all by himself. Then I'd like to be let alone while I'm busy
with my own affairs."
"When you marry Willowmere you'll be busy enough." She might have added:
"And lonely enough."
"I'll be occupied in telling others how to busy themselves with my
affairs. But there won't be anything for _me_ to do, will there?"
"Yes, dear child; it will be one steady fight to better a good position.
It will afford you constant exercise."
The tall young girl bit her lip and shook her pretty head in silence.
She felt instinctively that she knew how to do that. But that was not
the exercise she wanted. She looked out into the February sunshine and
saw the blue shadows on the snow and the sidewalks dark and wet, and
the little gutter arabs throwing snow-balls, and a yellow pup barking
blissfully. And, apropos of nothing at all, she suddenly remembered how
she had run away when she was nine; and a rush of blind desire surged
within her. What it meant she did not know, did not trouble to consider,
but it stirred her until the soft fire burned in her cheeks, and left
her twisting her white fingers, lips parted, staring across the wintry
park into the blue tracery of trees. To Miss Cassillis adolescence came
late.
They sang _Le Donne Curiose_ at the opera that evening; she sat in her
father's box; numbers of youthful, sleek-headed, white-shirted young men
came between the acts. She talked to all with the ardor of the young and
unsatisfied; and, mentally and spiritually still unsatisfied, buried in
fur, she was whirled back through snowy streets to the great grey
mansion of her nativity, and the silence of her white-hung chamber.
All through February the preparatory regime continued, with preliminary
canters at theatre and opera, informal party practice, and trial
dinners. Always she gave herself completely to every moment with a
wistful and unquenched faith, eager novice in her quest of what was
lacking in her life; ardent enthusiast in her restless searching for
the remedy. And, unsatisfied, lingering mentally by the door of Chance,
lest she miss somewhere the magic that satisfies and quiets--lest the
gates of Opportunity swing open after she had turned away--reluctantly
she returned to the companionship of her own solitary mind and
undeveloped soul, and sat down to starve with them in spirit, wondering
wherein might lie the reason for this new hunger that assailed her, mind
and body.
She ran up her private flag the next winter, amid a thousand other gay
and flaunting colours breaking out all over town. The newspapers roared
a salute to the wealthiest debutante; and an enthusiastic press, not yet
housebroken but agile with much exercise in leaping and fawning, leaped
now about the debutante's slippers, grinning, slavering and panting.
Later, led by instinct and its Celebrated Nose, it bounded toward young
Lord Willowmere, jumped and fawned about him, slightly soiling him,
until in midwinter the engagement it had announced was corroborated, and
a million shop-girls and old women were in a furor.
He was a ruddy-faced young man who wore his bowler hat toward the back
of his head, a small, pointed moustache, and who walked always as
though he were shod in riding boots.
He would have made a healthy studgroom for any gentleman's stable.
Person and intellect were always thoroughly scrubbed as with
saddle-soap. Had he been able to afford it, his stables would have been
second to none in England.
Soon he would be able to afford it.
To his intimates, including his fiancee, he was known as "Stirrups." All
day long he was in the saddle or on the box, every evening at the
Cataract Club or at a cabaret. Between times he called upon Miss
Cassillis--usually finding her out. When he found her not at home, he
called elsewhere, very casually.
Two continents were deeply stirred over the impending alliance.
III
Young Jones, in wildest Florida, had never heard of it or of her, or of
her income. His own fortune amounted to six hundred dollars, and he had
been born in Brooklyn, and what his salary might be only he and the
Smithsonian Institution knew.
He was an industrious young man, no better than you or I, accepting
thankfully every opportunity for mischief which the Dead Lake region
afforded. No opportunities of that kind ever presenting themselves in
that region, he went once a month to Miami in the _Orange Puppy_, and
drank too many swizzles and so forth, et cetera.
Having accomplished this, he returned to the wharf, put the _Orange
Puppy_ into commission, hoisted sail, and squared away for Matanzas
Inlet, finding himself too weak-minded to go home by a more direct
route.
He had been on his monthly pilgrimage to Miami, and was homeward bound
noisily, using his auxiliary power so that silence should not descend
upon him too abruptly. He had been, for half an hour now, immersed in a
species of solitaire known as The Idiot's Delight, when he caught
himself cheating himself, and indignantly scattered the pack to the four
winds--three of which, however, were not blowing. One card, the deuce of
hearts, fluttered seaward like a white butterfly. Beyond it he caught
sight of another white speck, shining like a gull's breast.
It was a big yacht steaming in from the open sea; and her bill of lading
included Miss Cassillis and Willowmere. But Jones could not know that.
So he merely blinked at the distant _Chihuahua_, yawned, flipped the
last card overboard, and swung the _Orange Puppy_ into the inlet, which
brimmed rather peacefully, the tide being nearly at flood.
Far away on the deck of the _Chihuahua_ the quick-fire racket of Jones's
auxiliary was amazingly audible. Miss Cassillis, from her deck-chair,
could see the _Orange Puppy_, a fleck of glimmering white across a
sapphire sea. How was she to divine that one Delancy Jones was aboard of
her? All she saw when the two boats came near each other was a noisy
little craft progressing toward the lagoon, emitting an earsplitting
racket; and a tall, lank young man clad in flannels lounging at the
tiller and smoking a cigarette.
Around her on the snowy deck were disposed the guests of her parents,
mostly corpulent, swizzles at every elbow, gracefully relaxing after a
morning devoted to arduous idleness. The Victor on deck, which had
furnished the incentive to her turkey-trotting with Lord Willowmere, was
still exuding a syncopated melody. Across the water, Jones heard it and
stood looking at the great yacht as the _Orange Puppy_ kicked her way
through the intensely blue water under an azure sky.
Willowmere lounged over to the rail and gazed wearily at the sand dunes
and palmettos. Presently Miss Cassillis slipped from her deck-chair to
her white-shod feet, and walked over to where he stood. He said
something about the possibilities of "havin' a bit of shootin'," with a
vague wave of his highly-coloured hand toward the palmetto forests
beyond the lagoon.
If the girl heard him she made no comment. After a while, as the
distance between the _Chihuahua_ and the _Orange Puppy_ lengthened, she
levelled her sea glasses at the latter craft, and found that the young
man at the helm was also examining her through his binoculars.
While she inspected him, several unrelated ideas passed through her
head; she thought he was very much sunburned and that his hatless head
was attractive, with its short yellow hair crisped by the sun. Without
any particular reason, apparently, she recollected a young man she had
seen the winter before, striding down the wintry avenue about his
business. He might have been this young man for all she knew. Like the
other, this one wore yellow hair. Then, with no logic in the sequence of
her thoughts, suddenly the memory of how she had run away when she was
nine years old set her pulses beating, filling her heart with the
strange, wistful, thrilling, overwhelming longing which she had supposed
would never again assail her, now that she was engaged to be married.
And once more the soft fire burned in her cheeks.
"Stirrups," she said, scarcely knowing what she was saying, "I don't
think I'll marry you after all. It's just occurred to me."
"Oh, I say!" protested Willowmere languidly, never for a moment
mistrusting that the point of her remark was buried in some species of
American humour. He always submitted to American humour. There was
nothing else to do, except to understand it.
"Stirrups, dear?"
"What?"
"You're very pink and healthy, aren't you?"
He shrugged his accustomed shrug of resignation.
"Oh, I say--come, now----" he murmured, lighting a cigarette.
"What a horrid smash there would be if I didn't make good, wouldn't
there, Stirrups?" She mused, her blue eyes resting on him, too coldly.
"Rather," he replied, comfortably settling his arms on the rail.
"It might happen, you know. Suppose I fell overboard?"
"Fish you out, ducky."
"Suppose I--ran away?"
"Ow."
"What would you do, Stirrups? Why, you'd go back to town and try to
pick another winner. Wouldn't you?"
He laughed.
"Naturally that is what you would do, isn't it?" She considered him
curiously for a moment, then smiled. "How funny!" she said, almost
breathlessly.
"Rather," he murmured, and flicked his cigarette overboard.
The _Orange Puppy_ had disappeared beyond the thicket of palmettos
across the point. The air was very warm and still.
Her father waddled forward presently, wearing the impressive summer
regalia of a commodore in the Siwanois Yacht Club. His daughter's blue
eyes rested on the portly waistline of her parent--then on his fluffy
chop-whiskers. A vacant, hunted look came into her eyes.
"Father," she said almost listlessly, "I'm going to run away again."
"When do you start?" inquired that facetious man.
"Now, I think. What is there over there?"--turning her face again toward
the distant lagoon, with its endless forests of water-oak, cedar, and
palmetto.
"Over there," said her father, "reside several species of snakes and
alligators. Also other reptiles, a number of birds, and animals, and
much microbic mud."
She bit her lip. "I see," she said, nodding.
Willowmere said: "We should find some shootin' along the lagoon. Look at
the ducks."
Mr. Cassillis yawned; he had eaten too heavily of duck to be interested.
Very thoughtfully he presented himself with a cigar, turned it over and
over between his soft fingers, and yawned again. Then, nodding solemnly
as though in emphasis of a profound idea of which he had just been
happily delivered, he waddled slowly back along the deck.
His daughter looked after him until he disappeared; gazed around her at
the dawdling assortment of guests aboard, then lifted her quiet eyes to
Willowmere.
"Ducky," she said, "I can't stand it. I'm going to run away."
"Come on, then," he said, linking his arm in hers.
The Victor still exuded the Tango.
She hesitated. Then freeing herself:
"Oh, not with you, Stirrups! I wish to go away somewhere entirely alone.
Could you understand?" she added wistfully.
He stifled a yawn. American humour bored him excessively.
"You'll be back in a day or two?" he inquired. And laughed violently
when the subtlety of his own wit struck him.
"In a day or two or not at all. Good-bye, Stirrups."
"Bye."
The sun blazed on her coppery hair and on the white skin that never
burned, as she walked slowly across the yacht's deck and disappeared
below.
While she was writing in her cabin, the _Chihuahua_ dropped her anchors.
Miss Cassillis listened to the piping, the thud of feet on deck, the
rattle and distant sound of voices. Then she continued her note:
I merely desire to run away. I don't know why, Mother, dear.
But the longing to bolt has been incubating for many years. And
now it's too strong to resist. I don't quite understand how it
came to a crisis on deck just now, but I looked at Stirrups,
whose skin is too pink, and at Father, who had lunched too
sumptuously, and at the people on deck, all digesting in a
row--and then at the green woods on shore, and the strip of
white where a fairy surf was piling up foam into magic castles
and snowy battlements, ephemeral, exquisite. And all at once
it came over me that I must go.
Don't be alarmed. I shall provision a deck canoe, take a tent,
some rugs and books, and paddle into that lagoon. If you will
just let me alone for two or three days, I promise I'll return
safe and sound, and satisfied. For something has got to be done
in regard to that longing of mine. But really, I think that if
you and Father _won't_ understand, and if you send snooping
people after me, I won't come back at all, and I'll never marry
Stirrups. Please understand me, Mother, dear.
CECIL.
This effusion she pinned to her pillow, then rang for the steward and
ordered the canoe to be brought alongside, provisioned for a three days'
shooting trip.
So open, frank, and guileless were her orders that nobody who took them
suspected anything unusual; and in the full heat and glare of the
afternoon siesta, when parents, fiance, and assorted guests were all
asleep and in full process of digestion and the crew of the _Chihuahua_
was drowsing from stem to stern, a brace of sailors innocently connived
at her escape, aided her into the canoe, and, doubting nothing, watched
her paddle away through the inlet, and into the distant lagoon, which
lay sparkling in golden and turquoise tints, set with palms like a
stupid picture in a child's geography.
Later, the _Chihuahua_ fired a frantic gun. Later still, two boats left
the yacht, commanded respectively by one angry parent and one fiance,
profoundly bored.
IV
When Miss Cassillis heard the gun, it sounded very far away. But it
irritated as well as scared her. She pushed the canoe energetically
through a screen of foliage overhanging the bank of the lagoon, it being
merely her immediate instinct to hide herself.
To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered herself in a narrow, deep
lead, which had been entirely concealed by the leaves, and which wound
away through an illimitable vista of reeds, widening as she paddled
forward, until it seemed like a glassy river bordered by live-oak,
water-oak, pine, and palmetto, curving out into a flat and endless land
of forests.
Here was liberty at last! No pursuit need now be feared, for the
entrance to this paradise which she had forced by a chance impulse
could never be suspected by parent or fiance.
A little breeze blew her hair and loosened it; silently her paddle
dipped, swept astern in a swirl of bubbles, flashed dripping, and dipped
again.
Ahead of her a snake-bird slipped from a dead branch into the water; a
cormorant perched on the whitened skeleton of a mango, made hideous
efforts to swallow a mullet before her approach disorganized his
manoeuvres.
So silently the canoe stole along that the fat alligators, dozing in the
saw-grass, dozed on until she stirred them purposely with a low tap of
her paddle against the thwarts; then they rose, great lumbering bodies
propped high on squatty legs, waddled swiftly to the bank's edge, and
slid headlong into the water.
Everywhere dragon-flies glittered over the saw-grass; wild ducks with
golden eyes and heads like balls of brown plush swam leisurely out of
the way; a few mallard, pretending to be frightened, splashed and
clattered into flight, the sunlight jewelling the emerald heads of the
drakes.
"Wonderful, wonderful," her heart was singing to itself, while her
enchanted eyes missed nothing--neither the feebly flying and strangely
shaped, velvety black butterflies, the narrow wings of which were
striped with violent yellow; nor the metallic blue and crestless jays
that sat on saplings, watching her; nor the pelicans fishing with
nature's orange and iridescent net in the shallows; nor the tall,
slate-blue birds that marched in dignified retreat through the sedge,
picking up their stilt-like legs with the precision of German
foot-soldiers on parade.
These and other phenomena made her drop her paddle at intervals and clap
her hands softly in an ecstasy beyond mere exclamation. How restfully
green was the world; how limpid the water; how royally blue the heavens!
Listening, she could hear the soft stirring of palmetto fronds in the
forests; the celestial song of a little bird that sat on a sparkle-berry
bush, its delicate long-curved bill tilted skyward. Then the deep note
of splendour flashed across the scheme of sound and colour as a crimson
cardinal alighted near her, crest erect.
But more wonderful than all was that at last, after eighteen years, she
was utterly alone; and liberty was showering its inestimable gifts upon
her in breathless prodigality--liberty to see with her own eyes and
judge with her own senses; liberty to linger capriciously amid mental
fancies, to move on impulsively to others; liberty to reflect unurged
and unrestricted; liberty to choose, to reject, to ignore.
[Illustration: "They inspected each other, apparently bereft of the
power of speech."]
Now and then a brilliant swimming snake filled her with interest and
curiosity. Once, on a flat, low bush, she saw a dull, heavy,
blunt-bodied serpent lying asleep in the sun like an old and swollen
section of rubber hose. But when she ventured to touch the bush with her
paddle, the snake reared high and yawned at her with jaws which seemed
to be lined in white satin. Which fortunately made her uneasy, and she
meddled no more with the Little Death of the southern swamps.
She was now passing very close to the edge of the "hammock," where
palmettos overhung the water; and as the cool, dim woodlands seemed to
invite her, she looked about her leisurely for an agreeable landing
place. There were plenty to choose from; and she selected a little sandy
point under a red cedar tree, drove her canoe upon it, and calmly
stepped ashore. And found herself looking into the countenance of Jones.
For a full minute they inspected each other, apparently bereft of the
power of speech.
She said, finally: "About a year ago last February, did you happen to
walk down Fifth Avenue--very busily? Did you?"
It took him an appreciable time to concentrate for mental retrospection.
"Yes," he said, "I did."
"You were going down town, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"On business?"
"Yes," he said, bewildered.
"I wonder," she said timidly, "if you would tell me what that business
was? Do you mind? Because, really, I don't mean to be impertinent."
He made an effort to reflect. It was difficult to reflect and to keep
his eyes on her but also it is impolite to converse with anybody and
look elsewhere. This he had been taught at his mother's knee--and
sometimes over it.
"My business down town," he said very slowly, "was with an officer of
the Smithsonian Institution who had come on from Washington to see
something which I had brought with me from Florida."
"Would you mind telling me what it was you brought with you from
Florida?" she asked wistfully.
"No. It was malaria."
"What!"
"It was malaria," he repeated politely.
"I--I don't see how you could--could show it to him," she murmured,
perplexed.
"Well, I'll tell you how I showed it to him. I made a little incision in
my skin with a lancet; he made a smear or two----"
"A--what?"
"A smear--he put a few drops of my blood on some glass plates."
"Why?"
"To examine them under the microscope."
"Why?"
"So that he might determine what particular kind of malaria I had
brought back with me."
"Did he find out?" she asked, deeply interested.
"Yes," said Jones, displaying mild symptoms of enthusiasm, "he
discovered that I was fairly swarming with a perfectly new and
undescribed species of bacillus. That bacillus," he added, with modest
diffidence, "is now named after me."
She looked at him very earnestly, dropped her blue eyes, raised them
again after a moment:
"It must be--pleasant--to give one's name to a bacillus."
"It is an agreeable and exciting privilege. When I look into the culture
tubes I feel an intimate relationship with those bacilli which I have
never felt for any human being."
"You--you are a----" she hesitated, with a slight but charming colour in
her cheeks, "a naturalist, I presume?" And she added hastily, "No doubt
you are a famous one, and my question must sound ignorant and absurd to
you. But as I do not know your name----"
"It is Jones," he said gloomily, "--and I am not famous."
"Mine is Cecil Cassillis; and neither am I," she said. "But I thought
when naturalists gave their names to butterflies and microbes that
everything concerned immediately became celebrated."
Jones smiled; and she thought his expression very attractive.
"No," he said, "fame crowns the man who, celebrated only for his wealth,
names hotels, tug-boats, and art galleries after himself. Thus are
Immortals made."
She laughed, standing there gracefully as a boy, her hands resting on
her narrow hips. She laughed again. A tug-boat, a hotel, and a cigar
were named after her father.
"Fame is an extraordinary thing," she said. "But liberty is still more
wonderful, isn't it?"
"Liberty is only comparative," he said, smiling. "There is really no
such thing as absolute freedom."
"_You_ have all the freedom you desire, haven't you?"
"Well--I enjoy the only approach to absolute liberty I ever heard of."
"What kind of liberty is that?"
"Freedom to think as I please, no matter what I'm obliged to do."
"But you do what you please, too, don't you?"
"Oh, no!" he said smiling. "The man was never born who did what he
pleased."
"Why not? You choose your own work, don't you?"
"Yes. But once the liberty of choice is exercised, freedom ends. I
choose my profession. There my liberty ends, because instantly I am
enslaved by the conditions which make my choice a profession."
She was deeply interested. A mossy log lay near them; she seated herself
to listen, her elbow on her knee, and her chin cupped in her hand. But
Jones became silent.
"Were you not in that funny little boat that passed the inlet about
three hours ago?" she asked.
"The _Orange Puppy_? Yes."
"What an odd name for a boat--the _Orange Puppy_!"
"An orange puppy," he explained, "is the name given in the Florida
orange groves to the caterpillar of a large swallow-tail butterfly,
which feeds on orange leaves. The butterfly it turns into is known to
entomologists as _Papilio cresphontes_ and _Papilio thoas_. The latter
is a misnomer."
She gazed upon this young man in undisguised admiration.
"Once," she said, "when I was nine years old, I ran away from a
governess and two trained nurses. They found me with both hands full of
muddy pollywogs. It has nothing to do with what you are saying, but I
thought I'd tell you."
He insisted that the episode she recalled was most interesting and
unusual, considered purely as a human document.
"Would you tell me what you are doing down here in these forests?" she
asked, "--as we are discussing human documents."
"Yes," he said. "I am investigating several thousand small caterpillars
which are feeding on the scrub-palmetto."
"Is that your _business_?"
"Exactly. If you will remain very still for a moment and listen very
intently you can hear the noise which these caterpillars make while
they are eating."
She thought of the _Chihuahua_, and it occurred to her that she had
rather tired of seeing things eat. However, except in Europe, she had
never _heard_ things eat. So she listened.
He said: "These caterpillars are in their third moult--that is, they
have changed their skin three times since emerging from the egg--and are
now busily chewing the immature fruit of the scrub-palmetto. You can
hear them very plainly."
She sat silent, spellbound; and presently in the woodland stillness, all
around her she heard the delicate and continuous sound--the steady,
sustained noise of thousands of tiny jaws, all crunching, all busily
working together. And when she realized what the elfin rustle really
meant, she turned her delighted and grateful eyes on Jones. And the
beauty of them made him exceedingly thoughtful.
"Will you explain to me," she whispered, "why you are studying these
caterpillars, Mr. Jones?"
"Because they are spreading out over the forests. Until recently this
particular species of caterpillar, and the pretty little moth into which
it ultimately turns, were entirely confined to a narrow strip of
jungle, only a few miles long, lying on the Halifax River. Nowhere else
in all the world could these little creatures be found. But recently
they have been reported from the Dead Lake country. So the Smithsonian
Institution sent me down here to study them, and find out whither they
were spreading, and whether any natural parasitic enemies had yet
appeared to check them."
She gazed at him, fascinated.
"Have any appeared?" she asked, under her breath.
"I have not yet found a single creature that preys upon them."
"Isn't it a very arduous and difficult task to watch these thousands of
little caterpillars all day long?"
"It is quite impossible for me to do it thoroughly all alone."
"Would you like to have me help you?" she asked innocently.
Which rather bowled him over, but he said:
"I'd b-b-be d-d-delighted--only you haven't time, have you?"
"I have three days. I've brought a tent, you see, and everything
necessary--rugs, magazines, blankets, toilet articles, bon-bons,
books--everything, in fact, to last three days.... I wonder how that
tent is put up. Do you know?"
He went over to the canoe and gazed at the tent.
"I think I could pitch it for you," he said.
"Oh, thanks so much! May I help you? I think I'll put it here on this
pretty stretch of white sand by the water's edge."
"I'm afraid that wouldn't do," he said, gravely.
"Why?"
"Because the lagoon is tidal. You'd be awash sooner or later."
"I see. Well, then, anywhere in the woods will do----"
"Not _anywhere_," he said, smiling. "High water leaves few dry places in
this forest; in fact--I'm afraid that my shack is perched on the only
spot which is absolutely dry at all times. It is a shell mound--the only
one in the Dead Lake region."
"Isn't there room for my tent beside yours?" she asked, a trifle
anxiously.
"Y-es," he said, in a voice as matter of fact as her own. "How many will
there be in your party?"
"In my _party_! Why, only myself," she said, with smiling animation.
"Oh, I see!" But he didn't.
They lugged the tent back among the trees to the low shell mound, where
in the centre of a ring of pines and evergreen oaks his open-faced shack
stood, thatched with palmetto fans. She gazed upon the wash drying on
the line, upon a brace of dead ducks hanging from the eaves, upon the
smoky kettle and the ashes of the fire. Purest delight sparkled in her
blue eyes.
Erecting her silk tent with practiced hands, he said carelessly:
"In case you cared to send any word to the yacht----"
"Did I say that I came from the yacht?" she asked; and her straight
eyebrows bent a trifle inward.
"Didn't you?"
"Will you promise me something, Mr. Jones?"
The things he was prepared to promise her choked him for a second, but
when he regained control of his vocal powers he said, very pleasantly,
that he would gladly promise her anything.
"Then don't ask me where I came from. Let me stay three days. Then I'll
go very quietly away, and never trouble you again. Is it a promise?"
"Yes," he said, not looking at her. His face had become very serious;
she noticed it--and how well his head was set on his shoulders, and how
his clipped hair was burned to the color of crisp hay.
"You were Harvard, of course," she said, unthinkingly.
"Yes." He mentioned the year.
"Not crew?"
"No."
"Baseball?"
"'Varsity pitcher," he nodded, surprised.
"Then this is the third time I've seen you.... I wonder what it is about
you----" She remained silent, watching him burying her water bottles in
the cool marl.
When all was in order, he smiled, made her a little formal bow, and
evinced a disposition to retire and leave her in possession.
"I thought we were going to work at once!" she said uneasily. "I am
quite ready." And, as he did not seem to comprehend, "I was going to
help you to examine the little caterpillars, one by one; and the minute
I saw anything trying to bite them I was going to call you. Didn't you
understand?" she added wistfully.
"That will be fine!" he said, with an enthusiasm very poorly
controlled.
"You will show me where the little creatures are hiding, won't you?"
"Indeed I will! Here they are, all about us!" He made a sweeping gesture
over the low undergrowth of scrub-palmetto; and the next moment:
"I see them!" she exclaimed, delighted. "Oh, what funny, scrubby, busy
little creatures! They are everywhere--_everywhere_! Why, there seem to
be thousands and thousands of them! And all are eating the tiny green
bunches of fruit!"
They bent together over a group of feeding larvae; he handed her a pocket
microscope like his own; and, enchanted, she studied the tiny things
while he briefly described their various stages of development from the
little eggs to the pretty, pearl-tinted moth so charmingly striped with
delicate, brown lines--a rare prize in the cabinet of any collector.
V
Through the golden forest light of afternoon, they moved from shrub to
shrub; and he taught her to be on the watch for any possible foes of the
neat and busy little caterpillars, warning her to watch for birds,
spiders, beetles, ichneumon flies, possibly squirrels or even hornets.
She nodded her comprehension; he went one way, she the other. For nearly
ten minutes they remained separated, and it seemed ages to one of them
anyway.
But the caterpillars appeared to be immune. Nothing whatever interfered
with them; wandering beetles left them unmolested; no birds even noticed
them; no gauzy-winged and parasitic flies investigated them.
"Mr. Jones!" she called.
He was at her side in an instant.
"I only wanted to know where you were," she said happily.
The sun hung red over the lagoon when they sauntered back to camp. She
went into her tent with a cheerful nod to him, which said:
"I've had a splendid time, and I'll rejoin you in a few moments."
When she emerged in fresh white flannels, she found him writing in a
blank-book.
"I wonder if I might see?" she said. "If it's scientific, I mean."
"It is, entirely."
So she seated herself on the ground beside him, and read over his
shoulder the entries he was making in his field book concerning the
day's doings. When he had finished his entry, she said:
"You have not mentioned my coming to you, and how we looked for
ichneumon flies together."
"I----" He was silent.
She added timidly: "I know I count for absolutely nothing in the
important experiences of a naturalist, but--I did look very hard for
ichneumon flies. Couldn't you write in your field book that I tried very
hard to help you?"
He wrote gravely:
"Miss Cassillis most generously volunteered her invaluable aid, and
spared no effort to discover any possible foe that might prove to be
parasitic upon these larvae. But so far without success."
"Thank you," she said, in a very low voice. And after a short silence:
"It was not mere vanity, Mr. Jones. Do you understand?"
"I know it was not vanity, even if I do not entirely understand."
"Shall I tell you?"
"Please."
"It was the first thing that I have ever been permitted to do all by
myself. It meant so much to me.... And I wished to have a little record
of it--even if you think it is of no scientific importance."
"It is of more importance than----" But he managed to stop himself,
slightly startled. She had lifted her head from the pages of the field
book to look at him. When his voice failed, and while the red burned
brilliantly in his ears, she resumed her perusal of his journal,
gravely. After a while, though she turned the pages as if she were
really reading, he concluded that her mind was elsewhere. It was.
Presently he rose, mended the fire, filled the kettle, and unhooked the
brace of wild ducks from the eaves where they swung, and marched off
with them toward the water.
When he returned, the ducks were plucked and split for broiling. He
found her seated as he had left her, dreaming awake, idle hands folded
on the pages of his open field book.
For dinner they had broiled mallard, coffee, ash-cakes, and bon-bons.
After it she smoked a cigarette with him.
Later she informed him that it was her first, and that she liked it, and
requested another.
"Don't," he said, smiling.
"Why?"
"It spoils a girl's voice, ultimately."
"But it's very agreeable."
"Will you promise not to?" he asked, lightly.
Suddenly her blue eyes became serious.
"Yes," she said, "if you wish."
The woods grew darker. Far across the lagoon a tiger-owl woke up and
began to yelp like a half-strangled hobgoblin.
She sat silent for a little while, then very quietly and frankly put her
hand on Jones's. It was shaking.
"I am afraid of that sound," she said calmly.
"It is only a big owl," he reassured her, retaining her hand.
"Is that what it is? How _very_ dark the woods are! I had no idea that
there could be such utter darkness. I am not sure that I care for it."
"There is nothing to harm you in these woods."
"No bears and wolves and panthers?"
"There are a few--and all very anxious to keep away from anything
human."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely."
"Do you mind if I leave my hand where it is?"
It appeared that he had no insurmountable objections.
After the seventh tiger-owl had awakened and the inky blackness quivered
with the witch-like shouting and hellish tumult, he felt her shoulder
pressing against his. And bending to look into her face saw that all the
colour in it had fled.
"You mustn't be frightened," he said earnestly.
"But I am. I'm sorry.... I'll try to accustom myself to it.... The
darkness is a--a trifle terrifying--isn't it?"
"It's beautiful, too," he said, looking up at the firelit foliage
overhead. She looked up also, her slender throat glimmering rosy in the
embers' glare. After a moment she nodded:
"It _is_ wonderful.... If I only had a little time to accustom myself to
it I am sure I should love it.... Oh! What was that very loud splash
out there in the dark?"
"A big fish playing in the lagoon; or perhaps wild ducks feeding."
After a few minutes he felt her soft hand tighten within his.
"It sounds as though some great creature were prowling around our fire,"
she whispered. "Do you hear its stealthy tread?"
"Noises in the forest are exaggerated," he said carelessly. "It may be a
squirrel or some little furry creature out hunting for his supper.
Please don't be afraid."
"Then it _isn't_ a bear?"
"No, dear," he said, so naturally and unthinkingly that for a full
second neither realised the awful break of Delancy Jones.
When they did they said nothing about it. But it was some time before
speech was resumed. She was the first to recover. Perhaps the
demoralisation was largely his. It usually is that way.
She said: "This has been the most perfect day of my entire life. I'm
even glad I am a little scared. It is delicious to be a trifle afraid.
But I'm not, now--very much.... Is there any established hour for
bedtime in the woods?"
"Inclination sounds the hour."
"Isn't that wonderful!" she sighed, her eyes on the fire. "Inclination
rules in the forest.... And here I am."
The firelight on her copper-tinted hair masked her lovely eyes in a soft
shadow. Her shoulder stirred rhythmically as she breathed.
"And here you live all alone," she mused, half to herself.... "I once
saw you pitch a game against Yale.... And the next time I saw you
walking very busily down Fifth Avenue.... And now--you are--here....
That is wonderful.... Everything seems to be wonderful in this place....
Wh-what _is_ that flapping noise, please?"
"Two herons fighting in the sedge."
"You know everything.... That is the most wonderful of all. And yet you
say you are not famous?"
"Nobody ever heard of me outside the Smithsonian."
"But--you _must_ become famous. To-morrow I shall look very hard for an
ichneumon fly for you----"
"But your discovery will make _you_ famous, Miss Cassillis----"
"Why--why, it's for _you_ that I am going to search so hard! Did you
suppose I would dream of claiming any of the glory!"
He said, striving to speak coolly:
"It is very generous and sweet of you.... And, after all, I hardly
suppose that you need any added lustre or any additional happiness in a
life which must be so full, so complete, and so care-free."
She was silent for a while, then:
"Is _your_ life then so full of care, Mr. Jones?"
"Oh, no," he said; "I get on somehow."
"Tell me," she insisted.
"What am I to tell you?"
"Why it is that your life is care-ridden."
"But it isn't----"
"Tell me!"
He said, gaily enough: "To labour for others is sometimes a little
irksome.... I am not discontented.... Only, if I had means--if I had
barely sufficient--there are so many fascinating and exciting lines of
independent research to follow--to make a name in----" He broke off with
a light laugh, leaned forward and laid another log on the fire.
"You can not afford it?" she asked, in a low voice; and for the moment
astonishment ruled her to discover that this very perfect specimen of
intelligent and gifted manhood was struggling under such an amazingly
trifling disadvantage. Only from reading and from hearsay had she been
even vaguely acquainted with the existence of poverty.
"No," he said pleasantly, "I can not yet afford myself the happiness of
independent research."
"When will you be able to afford it?"
Neither were embarrassed; he looked thoughtfully into the fire; and for
a while she watched him in his brown study.
"Will it be soon?" she asked, under her breath.
"No, dear."
That time a full minute intervened before either realised how he had
answered. And both remained exceedingly still until she said calmly:
"I thought you were the very ideal embodiment of personal liberty. And
now I find that wretched and petty and ignoble circumstances fetter even
such a man as you are. It--it is--is heartbreaking."
"It won't last forever," he said, controlling his voice.
"But the years are going--the best years, Mr. Jones. And your life's
work beckons you. And you are equipped for it, and you can not take it!"
"Some day----" But he could say no more then, with her hand tightening
in his.
"To--to rise superior to circumstances--that is god-like, isn't it?" she
said.
"Yes." He laughed. "But on six hundred dollars a year a man can't rise
very high above circumstances."
The shock left her silent. Any gown of hers cost more than that. Then
the awfulness of it all rose before her in its true and hideous
proportions. And there was nothing for her to do about it, nothing,
absolutely nothing, except to endure the degradation of her wealth and
remember that the merest tithe of it could have made this man beside her
immortally famous--if, perhaps, no more wonderful than he already was in
her eyes.
Was there no way to aid him? She could look for ichneumon flies in the
morning. And on the morning after that. And the next morning she would
say good-bye and go away forever--out of this enchanted forest, out of
his life, back to the _Chihuahua_, and to her guests who ate often and
digested all day long--back to her father, her mother--back to
Stirrups----
He felt her hand close on his convulsively, and turned to encounter her
flushed and determined face.
"You like me, don't you?" she said.
"Yes." After a moment he said: "Yes--absolutely."
"Do you like me enough to--to let me help you in your research work--to
be patient enough to teach me a little until I catch up with you?... So
we can go on together?... I know I am presumptuous--perhaps
importunate--but I thought--somehow--if you did like me well enough--it
would be--very agreeable----"
"It would be!... And I--like you enough for--anything. But you could not
remain here----"
"I don't mean here."
"Where, then?"
"Where?" She looked vaguely about her in the firelight. "Why,
everywhere. Wherever you go to make your researches."
"Dear, I would go to Ceylon if I could."
"I also," she said.
He turned a little pale, looking at her in silence. She said calmly:
"What would you do in Ceylon?"
"Study the unknown life-histories of the rarer Ornithoptera."
She knew no more than a kitten what he meant. But she wanted to know,
and, moreover, was perfectly capable of comprehending.
"Whatever you desire to study," she said, "would prove delightful to
me.... If you want me. Do you?"
"Want you!" Then he bit his lip.
"Don't you? Tell me frankly if you don't. But I think, somehow, you
would not make a mistake if you did want me. I really am intelligent. I
didn't know it until I talked with you. Now, I know it. But I have never
been able to give expression to it or cultivate it.... And, somehow, I
know I would not be a drag on you--if you would teach me a little in the
beginning."
He said: "What can I teach _you_, Cecil? Not the heavenly frankness that
you already use so sweetly. Not the smiling and serene nobility which
carries your head so daintily and so fearlessly. Not the calm purity of
thought, nor the serene goodness of mind that has graciously included a
poor devil like me in your broad and generous sympathies----"
"Please!" she faltered, flushing. "I am not what you say--though to hear
you say such things is a great happiness--a pleasure--very intense--and
wonderful--and new. But I am nothing, _nothing_--unless I should become
useful to you. I _could_ amount to something--with--you----" She checked
herself; looked at him as though a trifle frightened. "Unless," she
added with an effort, "you are in love with somebody else. I didn't
think of that. _Are_ you?"
"No," he said. "Are you?"
"No.... I have never been in love.... This is the nearest I have come to
it."
"And I."
She smiled faintly.
"If we----"
"Oh, yes," he said, calmly, "if we are to pass the balance of our
existence in combined research, it would be rather necessary for us to
marry."
"Do you mind?"
"On the contrary. Do you?"
"Not in the least. Do you really mean it? It wouldn't be disagreeable,
would it? You are above marrying for mere sentiment, aren't you?
Because, somehow, I seem to know you like me.... And it would be death
for me--a mental death--to go back now to--to Stirrups----"
"Where?"
"To--why do you ask? Couldn't you take me on faith?"
He said, unsteadily: "If you rose up out of the silvery lagoon, just
born from the starlight and the mist, I would take you."
"You--you are a poet, too," she faltered. "You seem to be about
everything desirable."
"I'm only a man very, very deep in--love."
"In love!... I thought----"
"Ah, but you need think no more. You _know_ now, Cecil."
She remained silent, thinking for a long while. Then, very quietly:
"Yes, I know.... It is that way with me also. For I no sooner find my
liberty than I lose it--in the same moment--to you. We must never again
be separated.... Do you feel as I do?"
"Absolutely.... But it must be so."
"Why?" she asked, troubled.
"For one thing, I shall have to work harder now."
"Why?"
"Don't you know we can not marry on what I have?"
"Oh! Is _that_ the reason?" She laughed, sprang lightly to her feet,
stood looking down at him. He got up, slowly.
"I bring you," she said, "six hundred dollars a year. And a _little_
more. Which sweeps away that obstacle. Doesn't it?"
"I could not ask you to live on that----"
"I can live on what you live on! I should wish to. It would make me
utterly and supremely happy."
Her flushed, young face confronted his as she took a short, eager step
toward him.
"I am not making love to you," she said, "--at least, I don't think I
am. All I desire is to help--to give you myself--my youth, energy,
ambition, intelligence--and what I have--which is of no use to me unless
it is useful to you. Won't you take these things from me?"
"Do you give me your heart, too, Cecil?"
She smiled faintly, knowing now that she had already given it. She did
not answer, but her under lip trembled, and she caught it between her
teeth as he took her hands and kissed them in silence.
VI
"Miami is not very far, is it?" she asked, as she sprang aboard the
_Orange Puppy_.
"Not very, dear."
"We could get a license immediately, couldn't we?"
"I think so."
"And then it will not take us very long to get married, will it?"
"Not very."
"What a wonderful night!" she murmured, looking up at the stars. She
turned toward the shore. "What a wonderful place for a honeymoon!...
And we can continue business, too, and watch our caterpillars all day
long! Oh, it is all too wonderful, wonderful!" She kissed her hand to
the unseen camp. "We will be back to-morrow!" she called softly. Then a
sudden thought struck her. "You never can get the _Orange Puppy_ through
that narrow lead, can you?"
"Oh, there is an easier way out," he said, taking the tiller as the sail
filled.
Her head dropped back against his knees. Now and then her lips moved,
murmuring in sheerest happiness the thoughts that drifted through her
enchanted mind.
"I wonder when it began," she whispered, "--at the ball-game--or on
Fifth Avenue--or when I saw you here? It seems to me as if I always had
been in love with you."
Outside in the ocean, the breeze stiffened and the perfume was tinged
with salt.
Lying back against his knees, her eyes fixed dreamily on the stars, she
murmured:
"Stirrups _will_ be surprised."
"What are you talking about down there all by yourself?" he whispered,
bending over her.
She looked up into his eyes. Suddenly her own filled; and she put up
both arms, linking them around his neck.
And so the _Orange Puppy_ sailed away into the viewless, formless,
starry mystery of all romance.
* * * * *
After a silence the young novelist, who had been poking the goldfish,
said slowly: "That's pretty poor fiction, Athalie, but, as a matter of
simple fact and inartistic truth, recording sentimental celerity, it
stands unequalled."
"Straight facts make poor fiction," remarked Duane.
"It all depends on who makes the fiction out of them," I ventured.
"Not always," said Athalie. "There are facts which when straightly told
are far stranger than fiction. I noticed a case of that sort in my
crystal last winter." And to the youthful novelist she said: "Don't try
to guess who the people were if I tell it, will you?"
"No," he promised.
"Please fix my cushions," she said to nobody in particular. And after
the stampede was over she selected another cigarette, thoughtfully, but
did not light it.
VII
"You are queer folk, you writers of fiction," she mused aloud. "No
monarch ordained of God takes himself more seriously; no actor lives
more absolutely in a world made out of his imagination."
She lighted her cigarette: "You often speak of your most 'important'
book,--as though any fiction ever written were important. Painters speak
of their most important pictures; sculptors, composers, creative
creatures of every species employ the adjective. And it is all very
silly. Facts only can be characterised as important; figments of the
creative imagination are as unimportant----" she blew a dainty ring of
smoke toward the crystal globe--"as that! '_Tout ce qu'ont fait les
hommes, les hommes peuvent le detruire. Il n'y a de caracteres
ineffacables que ceux qu' imprime la nature._' There has never been but
one important author."
I said smilingly: "To quote the gentleman you think important enough to
quote, Athalie, '_Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des
choses: tout degenere entre les mains de l'homme_.'"
Said the novelist simply: "Imagination alone makes facts important.
'_Cette superbe puissance, ennemie de la raison!_'"
"O Athalie," whispered Duane, "night-blooming, exquisite blossom of the
arid municipal desert, recount for us these facts which you possess and
which, in your delightful opinion, are stranger than fiction, and more
important."
And Athalie, choosing another sweetmeat, looked at us until it had
dissolved in her fragrant mouth. Then she spoke very gravely, while her
dark eyes laughed at us:
* * * * *
When young Lord Willowmere's fiancee ran away from him and married
Delancy Jones, that bereaved nobleman experienced a certain portion of
the universal shock which this social seismic disturbance spread far and
wide over two hemispheres.
That such a girl should marry beneath her naturally disgusted everybody.
So both Jones and his wife were properly damned.
England read its morning paper, shrugged its derision, and remarked that
nobody ought to be surprised at anything that happened in the States.
"The States" swallowed the rebuke and squirmed.
Now, among the sturdy yeomanry, gentry, and nobility of those same
British and impressive Isles there was an earnest gentleman whose ample
waist and means and scholarly tastes inclined him to a sedentary life of
research. The study of human nature in its various native and exotic
phases had for forty years obsessed his insular intellect. Philologist,
anthropologist, calm philosopher, and benignant observer, this
gentleman, who had never visited the United States, determined to do so
now. For, he reasoned--and very properly--a country where such a thing
could happen to a British nobleman and a Peer of the Realm must be worth
exploring, and its curious inhabitants merited, perhaps, the
impersonally judicial inspection of an F. R. B. A. whose gigantic work
on the folk manners of the world had now reached its twentieth volume,
without as yet including the United States. So he determined to devote
several chapters in the forthcoming and twenty-first volume to the
recent colonies of Great Britain.
Now, when the Duke of Pillchester concluded to do anything, that thing
was invariably and thoroughly done. And so, before it entirely realised
the honour in store for it, the United States was buttoning its collar,
tying its white tie, and rushing down stairs to open its front door to
the Duke of Pillchester, the Duchess of Pillchester, and the Lady Alene
Innesly, their youthful and ornamental daughter.
For a number of months after its arrival, the Ducal party inspected the
Yankee continent through a lens made for purposes of scientific
investigation only. The massed wealth of the nation met their Graces in
solid divisions of social worth. The shock was mutual.
Then the massed poverty of the continent was exhibited, leaving the
poverty indifferent and slightly bored, and the Ducal party taking
notes.
It was his Grace's determination to study the folk-ways of Americans;
and what the Duke wished the Duchess dutifully desired. The Lady Alene
Innesly, however, was dragged most reluctantly from function to
function, from palace to purlieu, from theatre to cathedral, from Coney
Island to Newport. She was "havin' a rotten time."
All day long she had nothing to look at but an overdressed and alien
race whose voices distressed her; day after day she had nothing to say
except, "How d'y do," and "Mother, shall we have tea?" Week after week
she had nothing to think of except the bare, unkempt ugliness of the
cities she saw; the raw waste and sordid uglification of what once had
been matchless natural resources; dirty rivers, ruined woodlands, flimsy
buildings, ignorant architecture. The ostentatious and wretched hotels
depressed her; the poor railroads and bad manners disgusted her.
Listless, uninterested, Britishly enduring what she could not escape,
the little Lady Alene had made not the slightest effort to mitigate the
circumstances of her temporary fate. She was civilly incurious
concerning the people she met; their social customs, amusements,
pastimes, duties, various species of business or of leisure interested
her not a whit. All the men looked alike to her; all the women were
over-gowned, tiresomely pretty, and might learn one day how to behave
themselves after they had found out how to make their voices behave.
Meanwhile, requiring summer clothing--tweeds and shooting boots being
not what the climate seemed to require in July--she discovered with
languid surprise that for the first time in her limited life she was
well gowned. A few moments afterward another surprise faintly thrilled
her, for, chancing to glance at herself after a Yankee hairdresser had
finished her hair, she discovered to her astonishment that she was
pretty.
For several days this fact preyed upon her mind, alternately troubling
and fascinating her. There were several men at home who would certainly
sit up; Willowmere among others.
As for considering her newly discovered beauty any advantage in America,
the idea had not entered her mind. Why should it? All the men looked
alike; all wore sleek hair, hats on the backs of their heads, clothing
that fitted like a coster's trousers. She had absolutely no use for
them, and properly.
However, she continued to cultivate her beauty and to adorn it with
Yankee clothing and headgear befitting; which filled up considerable
time during the day, leaving her fewer empty hours to fill with tea and
three-volumed novels from the British Isles.
Now, it had never occurred to the Lady Alene Innesly to read anything
except British fact and fiction. She had never been sufficiently
interested even to open an American book. Why should she, as long as the
three props of her national literature endured intact--curates, tea, and
thoroughbred horses?
But there came a time during the ensuing winter when the last of the
three-volumed novels had been assimilated, the last serious tome
digested; and there stretched out before her a bookless prospect which
presently began to dismay her with the aridness of its perspective.
The catastrophe occurred while the Ducal party was investigating the
strange folk-customs of those Americans who gathered during the winter
in gigantic Florida hotels and lived there, uncomfortably lodged, vilely
fed, and shamelessly robbed, while third-rate orchestras play cabaret
music and enervating breezes stir the cabbage-palmettos till they rustle
like bath-room rubber plants.
It was a bad place and a bad time of year for a young and British girl
to be deprived of her native and soporific fiction; for the livelier and
Frenchier of British novelists were self-denied her, because somebody
had said they were not unlike Americans.
Now she was, in the uncouth vernacular of the country, up against it
for fair! She didn't know what it was called, but she realised how it
felt to be against something.
Three days she endured it, dozing in her room, half awake when the
sea-breeze rattled the Venetian blinds, or the niggers were noisy at
baseball.
On the fourth day she arose, went to the window, gazed disgustedly out
over the tawdry villas of Verbena Inlet, then rang for her maid.
"Bunn," she said, "here are three sovereigns. You will please buy for me
one specimen of every book on sale in the corridor of this hotel. And,
Bunn!----"
"Yes, my lady."
"What was it you were eating the other day?"
"Chewing-gum, my lady."
"Is it--agreeable?"
"Yes, my lady."
"Is it nourishing?"
"No, my lady. It is not intended to be eaten; it is to be chewed."
"Then one does not swallow it when one supposes it to be sufficiently
masticated?"
"No, my lady."
"What does one do with it?"
"Beg pardon, my lady--one spits it out."
"Ow," said the girl.
VIII
She was lying on the bed when a relay of servants staggered in bearing
gaudy piles of the most recent and popular novels, and placed them in
tottering profusion upon the adjacent furniture.
The Lady Alene turned her head where it lay lazily pillowed on her left
arm, and glanced indifferently at the multi-coloured battlement of
books. The majority of the covers were embellished with the heads of
young women, all endowed with vaudeville-like beauty--it having been
discovered by intelligent publishers that a girl's head on any book
sells it.
On some covers were displayed coloured pictures of handsome and athletic
American young men, usually kissing beautiful young ladies who wore
crowns, ermines, and foreign orders over dinner dresses. Sometimes,
however, they were kicking Kings. That seemed rather odd to the Lady
Alene, and she sat up on the bed and reached out her hand. It
encountered a book on which rested a small, oblong package. She took
book and package. On the pink wrapper of the latter she read this verse:
Why are my teeth so white and bright?
Because I chew with all my might
The gum that fills me with delight
And keeps me healthy day and night.
Five cents.
The Lady Alene's unaccustomed fingers became occupied with the pink
wrapper. Presently she withdrew from it a thin and brittle object,
examined it, and gravely placed it in her mouth.
For a while the perplexed and apprehensive expression remained upon her
face, but it faded gradually, and after a few minutes her lovely
features settled into an expression resembling contentment. And,
delicately, discreetly, at leisurely intervals, her fresh, sweet lips
moved as though she were murmuring a prayer.
All that afternoon she perused the first American novel she had ever
read. And the cumulative effect of the fiction upon her literal mind was
amazing as she turned page after page, and, gradually gathering mental
and nervous speed, dashed from one chapter, bang! into another, only to
be occultly adjured to "take the car ahead"--which she now did quite
naturally, and on the run.
Never, never had she imagined such things could be! Always heretofore,
to her, fiction had been a strict reflection of actuality in which a
dull imagination was licensed to walk about if it kept off the grass.
And it always did in the only novels to which she had been accustomed.
But good heavens! Here was a realism at work in these pages so
astonishing yet so convincing, so subtle yet so natural, so matter of
fact yet so astoundingly new to her that the book she was reading was
already changing the entire complexion of the Yankee continent for her.
It had to do with a young, penniless, and athletic American who went to
Europe, tipped a king off his throne, pushed a few dukes, counts, and
barons out of the way, reorganized the army, and went home taking with
him a beautiful and exclusive princess with honest intentions.
The inhabitants of several villages wept at his departure; the abashed
nobility made unsuccessful attempts to shoot him; otherwise the trip to
the Cunard Line pier was uneventful, and diplomatic circles paid no
attention to the incident.
When the Lady Alene finished the story her oval face ached; but this was
no time to consider aches. So with a charming abandon she relieved her
pretty teeth of the morceau, replaced it with another, helped herself to
a second novel, settled back on her pillow, and opened the enchanted
pages.
And zip! Instantly she became acquainted with another athletic and
penniless American who was raising the devil in the Balkans.
Never in her life had she dreamed that any nation contained such
fearless, fascinating, resourceful, epigrammatic, and desirable young
men! And here she was in the very midst of them, and never had realised
it until now.
Where were they? All around her, no doubt. When, a few days later, she
had read some baker's dozen novels, and in each one of them had
discovered similar athletic, penniless, and omniscient American young
men, her opinion was confirmed, and she could no longer doubt that, like
the fiction of her own country, the romances of American novelists must
have a substantial foundation in solid fact.
There could be no use in quibbling. The situation had become exciting.
Her youthful imagination was now fired; her Saxon blood thoroughly
stirred. She knew perfectly well that there were in her own country no
young men like these she had read about--not a man-jack among them who
would ever dream of dashing about the world cuffing the ears of
reprehensible monarchs, meting out condign punishment to refractory
nobility, reconstructing governments and states and armies, and escaping
with a princess every time.
Not that she actually believed that such episodes were of common
occurrence. Young as she was she knew better. But somehow it seemed very
clear to her that a race of writers who were so unanimous on the subject
and a nation which so complacently read of these events without denying
their plausibility, must within itself harbour germs and seeds of
romance and reckless deeds which no doubt had produced a number of young
men thoroughly capable of doing a few of the exciting things she had
read about.
Now she regretted she had not noticed the men she had met; now she was
indeed sorry she had not at least taken pains to learn to distinguish
them one from the other. She wished that she had investigated this
reckless, chivalrous, energetic, and distinguishing trait of the
American young man.
It seemed odd, too, that Pa-_pa_ had never investigated it; that
Ma-_ma_ had never appeared to notice it.
She mentioned it at dinner carelessly, in the midst of a natural and
British silence. Neither parent enlightened her. One said, "Fancy!" And
the other said, "Ow."
And so, as both parents departed the following morning to investigate
the tarpon fishing at Miami, the little Lady Alene made private
preparations to investigate and closely observe the astonishing,
reckless, and romantic tendencies of the American young man. Her tour of
discovery she scheduled for five o'clock that afternoon.
Just how these investigations were to be accomplished she did not see
very clearly. She had carefully refrained from knowing anybody in the
hotel. So how to go about it she did not know; but she knew enough after
luncheon to have her hair done by somebody besides her maid, selected
the most American gown in her repertoire, took a sunshade hitherto
disdained, and glanced in the mirror at a picture in white, with gold
hair, violet eyes, and a skin of snow and roses.
Further she did not know how to equip herself, except by going out doors
at five o'clock. And at five o'clock she went.
From the tennis courts young men and girls looked at her. On the golf
links youth turned to observe her slim and dainty progress. She was
stared at from porch and veranda, from dock and deck, from garden and
walk and orange grove and hedge of scarlet hibiscus.
From every shop window in the village, folk looked out at her; from
automobile, wheeled chair, bicycle, and horse-drawn vehicle she was
inspected. But she knew nobody; not one bright nod greeted her; not one
straw hat was lifted; not one nigger grinned. She knew nobody. And,
alas! everybody knew her. A cold wave seemed to have settled over
Verbena Inlet.
Yet her father was not unpopular, nor was her mother either; and
although they asked too many questions, their perfectly impersonal and
scientific mission in Verbena Inlet was understood.
But the Lady Alene Innesly was not understood, although her indifference
was noted and her exclusiveness amusedly resented. However, nobody
interfered with her or her seclusion. The fact that she desired to know
nobody had been very quickly accepted. Youth and the world at Verbena
Inlet went on without her; the sun continued to rise and set as usual;
and the nigger waiters played baseball.
She stood watching them now for a few minutes, her parasol tilted over
her lovely shoulders. Tiring of this, she sauntered on, having not the
slightest idea where she was going, but very calmly she made up her mind
to speak to the first agreeable looking young man she encountered, as
none of them seemed at all inclined to speak to her.
Under her arm she had tucked a novel written by one Smith. She had read
it half through. The story concerned a young and athletic and penniless
man from Michigan and a Balkan Princess. She had read as far as the
first love scene. The young man from Michigan was still kissing the
Princess when she left off reading. And her imagination was still on
fire.
She had wandered down to the lagoon without finding anybody sufficiently
attractive to speak to. The water was blue and pretty and very inviting.
So she hired a motor-boat, seated herself in the stern, and dabbled her
fingers in the water as the engineer took her whizzing across the lagoon
and out into the azure waste, headed straight for the distant silvery
inlet.
IX
She read, gazed at the gulls and wild ducks, placed a bit of gum between
her rose-leaf lips, read a little, glanced up to mark the majestic
flight of eight pelicans, sighed discreetly, savoured the gum, deposited
it in a cunning corner adjacent to her left and snowy cheek, and spoke
to the boatman.
"Did you ever read this book?" she asked.
"Me! No, ma'am."
"It is very interesting. Do you read much?"
"No, ma'am."
"This is a very extraordinary book," she said. "I strongly advise you to
read it."
The boatman glanced ironically at the scarlet bound volume which bore
the portrait of a pretty girl on its covers.
"Is it that book by John Smith they're sellin' so many of down to the
hotel?" he inquired slowly.
"I believe it was written by one Smith," she said, turning over the
volume to look. "Yes, John Smith is the author's name. No doubt he is
very famous in America."
"He lives down here in winter."
"Really!" she exclaimed with considerable animation.
"Oh, yes. I take him shooting and fishing. He has a shack on the Inlet
Point."
"Where?"
"Over there, where them gulls is flying."
The girl looked earnestly at the point. All she saw were snowy dunes and
wild grasses and seabirds whirling.
"He writes them books over there," remarked the boatman.
"How extremely interesting!"
"They say he makes a world o' money by it. He's rich as mud."
"Really!"
"Yaas'm. I often seen him a settin' onto a camp chair out beyond them
dunes a-writing pieces like billy-bedam. Yes'm."
"Do you think he is there now?" she asked with a slight catch in her
breath.
"Well, we kin soon find out----" He swung the tiller; the little boat
rushed in a seething circle toward the point, veered westward, then
south.
"Yaas'm," said the boatman presently. "Mr. Smith he's reclinin' out
there onto his stummick. I guess he's just a thinkin'. He thinks more'n
five million niggers, he does. Gor-a-mighty! _I_ never see such a man
for thinkin'! He jest lies onto his stummick an' studies an' ruminates
like billy-bedam. Yaas'm. Would you want I should land you so's you can
take a peek at him?"
"Might I?"
"Sure, Miss. Go up over them dunes and take a peek at him. He won't
mind. Ten to nothin' he won't even see ye."
There was a little dock built of coquina. A power boat, a sloop, several
row-boats, and a canoe lay there, riding the little, limpid,
azure-tinted wavelets. Under their keels swam gar-pike, their fins and
backs also shimmering with blue and turquoise green.
Lady Alene rose; her boatman aided her, and she sprang lightly to the
coquina dock and walked straight over the low dune in front of her.
There was nothing whatever in sight except beach-grapes and scrubby
tufts of palmetto, and flocks of grey, long-legged, long-billed birds
running to avoid her. But they did not run very fast or very far, and
she saw them at a little distance loitering, with many a bright and
apparently friendly glance at her.
There was another dune in front. She mounted it. Straight ahead of her,
perhaps half a mile distant, stood a whitewashed bungalow under a
cluster of palms and palmettos.
From where she stood she could see a cove--merely a tiny crescent of
sand edged by a thin blade of cobalt water, and curtained by the
palmetto forest. And on this little crescent beach, in the shade of the
palms, a young man lay at full length, very intent upon his occupation,
which was, apparently, to dig holes in the sand with a child's toy
shovel.
He was clad in white flannels; beside him she noticed a red tin pail,
such as children use for gathering shells. Near this stood two
camp-chairs, one of which was piled with pads of yellow paper and a few
books. She thought his legs very eloquent. Sometimes they lay in
picturesque repose, crossed behind him; at other moments they waved in
the air or sprawled widely, appearing to express the varying emotions
which possessed his deep absorption in the occult task under his nose.
"Now, what in the world can he be doing?" thought Lady Alene Innesly,
watching him. And she remained motionless on top of the dune for ten
minutes to find out. He continued to sprawl and dig holes in the sand.
Learning nothing, and her interest increasing inversely, she began to
walk toward him. It was her disposition to investigate whatever
interested her. Already she was conscious of a deep interest in his
legs.
From time to time low dunes intervened to hide the little cove, but
always when she crossed them, pushing her way through fragrant thickets
of sweet bay and sparkle-berry shrub, cove and occupant came into view
again. And his legs continued to wave. The nearer she drew the less she
comprehended the nature of his occupation, and the more she decided to
find out what he could be about, lying there flat on his stomach and
digging and patting the sand.
Also her naturally calm and British heart was beating irregularly and
fast, because she realised the fact that she was approaching the
vicinity of one of those American young men who did things in books that
she never dreamed could be done anywhere. Nay--under her arm was a novel
written by this very man, in which the hero was still kissing a Balkan
Princess, page 169. And it occurred to her vaguely that her own good
taste and modesty ought to make an end of such a situation; and that she
ought to finish the page quickly and turn to the next chapter to relieve
the pressure on the Princess.
Confused a trifle by a haunting sense of her own responsibility, by the
actual imminence of such an author, and by her intense curiosity
concerning what he was now doing, she walked across the dunes down
through little valleys all golden with the flowers of a flat, spreading
vine. The blossoms were larger and lovelier than the largest golden
portulacca, but she scarcely noticed their beauty as she resolutely
approached the cove, moving forward under the cool shadow of the border
forest.
He did not seem to be aware of her approach, even when she came up and
stood by the camp-chairs, parasol tilted, looking down at him with
grave, lilac-blue eyes.
But she did not look at him as much as she gazed at what he was doing.
And what he was doing appeared perfectly clear to her now.
With the aid of his toy shovel, his little red pail, and several
assorted shells, he had constructed out of sand a walled city. Houses,
streets, squares, market place, covered ways, curtain, keep, tower,
turret, crenelated battlement, all were there. A driftwood drawbridge
bridged the moat, guarded by lead soldiers in Boznovian uniform.
And lead soldiers were everywhere in the miniature city; the keep
bristled with their bayonets; squads of them marched through street and
square; they sat at dinner in the market place; their cannon winked and
blinked in the westering sun on every battlement.
And after a little while she discovered two lead figures which were not
military; a civilian wearing a bowler hat; a feminine figure wearing a
crown and ermines. The one stood on the edge of the moat outside the
drawbridge: the other, in crown and ermines, was apparently observing
him of the bowler hat from the top of a soldier-infested tower.
It was plain enough to her now. This amazing young man was working out
in concrete detail some incident of an unwritten novel. And the
magnificent realism of it fascinated the Lady Alene. Genius only
possesses such a capacity for detail.
Without even arousing young Smith from his absorbed preoccupation, she
seated herself on the unincumbered camp-chair, laid her book on her
knees, rested both elbows on it, propped her chin on both clasped hands,
and watched the proceedings.
The lead figure in the bowler hat seemed to be in a bad way. Several
dozen Boznovian soldiers were aiming an assortment of firearms at him;
cavalry were coming at a gallop, too, not to mention a three-gun battery
on a dead run.
The problem seemed to be how, in the face of such a situation, was the
lead gentleman in the bowler hat to get away, much less penetrate the
city?
Flight seemed hopeless, but presently Smith picked him up, marched him
along the edge of the moat, and gave him a shove into it.
"He's swimming," said Smith, aloud to himself. "Bang! Bang! But they
don't hit him.... Yes, they do; they graze his shoulder. It is the only
wound possible to polite fiction. There is consequently a streak of red
in the water. Bang--bang--bang! Crack--crack! The cavalry empty their
pistols. Boom! A field piece opens---- Where the devil is that
battery----"
[Illustration: "The magnificent realism of it fascinated the Lady
Alene."]
Smith reached over, drew horses, cannoniers, gun and caisson over the
drawbridge, galloped them along the moat, halted, unlimbered, trained
the guns on the bowler hatted swimmer, and remarked, "Boom!"
"The shell," he murmured with satisfaction, "missed him and blew up in
the casemates. Did it kill anybody? No; that interferes with the
action.... He dives, swims under water to an ancient drain." Smith stuck
a peg where the supposed drain emptied into the moat.
"That drain," continued Smith thoughtfully, "connects with the royal
residence.... Where's that Princess? Can she see him dive into it? Or
does she merely suspect he is making for it? Or--or--doesn't she know
anything about it?"
"She doesn't know anything about it!" exclaimed Lady Alene Innesly. The
tint of excitement glowed in her cheeks. Her lilac-tinted eyes burned
with a soft, blue fire.
X
Slowly as a partly paralysed crab, Smith raised himself to a sitting
posture and looked over his shoulder into the loveliest face that he had
ever beheld, except on the paper wrappers of his own books.
"I'm sorry," said the Lady Alene. "Shouldn't I have spoken?"
The smoke and turmoil of battle still confused Smith's brain;
visualisation of wall and tower and crowns and ermines made the Lady
Alene's fresh, wholesome beauty very unreal to him for a moment or two.
When his eyes found their focus and his mind returned to actuality, he
climbed to his feet, hat in hand, and made his manners to her. Then,
tumbling books and pads from the other camp-chair, he reseated himself
with a half smiling, half shamed glance at her, and a "May I?" to which
she responded, "Please! And might I talk to you for a few moments?"
Smith shot a keen glance at the book on her knees. Resignation and pride
altered his features, but when again he looked at the Lady Alene he
experienced a pleasure in his resignation which hitherto no curious
tourist, no enterprising reporter had ever aroused. Smilingly he
composed himself for the impending interview.
"Until now," said the girl earnestly, "I think I have not been entirely
convinced by your novels. Somehow or other I could not bring myself to
comprehend the amazing realism of your plots. But now I understand the
basis of great and fundamental truth on which you build so plausibly
your splendid novels of love and life."
"What?" said Smith.
"To see you," she continued, "constructing the scenes of which later you
are to write, has been a wonderful revelation to me. It has been a
privilege the importance of which I can scarcely estimate. Your devotion
to the details of your art, your endless patience, your almost austere
absorption in truth and realism, have not only astounded me but have
entirely convinced me. The greatest thing in the world is Truth. _Now_ I
realise it!"
She made a pretty gesture of enthusiasm:
"What a wonderful nation of young men is yours, Mr. Smith! What
qualities! What fearlessness--initiative--idealism--daring--! What
invention, what recklessness, what romance----"
Her voice failed her; she sat with lips parted, a soft glow in her
cheeks, gazing upon Smith with fascinated eyes. And Smith gazed back at
her without a word.
"I don't believe," she said, "that in all England there exists a single
man capable even of conceiving the career for which so many young
Americans seem to be equipped."
After a moment Smith said very quietly:
"I am sorry, but do you know I don't quite understand you?"
"I mean," she said, "that you Americans have a capacity for conceiving,
understanding, and performing everything you write about."
"Why do you think so?" asked Smith, a trifle red.
"Because if Englishmen could understand and do such things, our
novelists would write about them. They never write about them. But you
Americans do. You write thousands of most delightful novels about young
men who do things unheard of, undreamed of, in England. Therefore, it is
very clear to me that you Americans are quite capable of doing what you
write about, and what your readers so ardently admire."
"I see," said Smith calmly. His ear-tips still burned.
"No doubt," said the girl, "many of the astonishing things you Americans
write about are really done. Many astounding episodes in fiction are of
not uncommon occurrence in real life."
"What kind of episodes?" asked Smith gravely.
"Why, any of them you write about. They all are astonishing enough. For
example, your young men do not seem to know what fear is."
"No," said Smith, "they don't."
"And when they love," said the girl, "nothing can stop them."
"Nothing."
"Nothing!" she repeated, the soft glow coming into her cheeks again.
"--Nothing! Neither rank nor wealth nor political considerations nor
family prejudices, nor even the military!"
Smith bit his lip in silence. He had heard of irony; never had he
dreamed it could be so crushing: he had heard of sarcasm; but the quiet
sarcasm of this unknown young girl was annihilating him. Critics had
carved him in his time; but the fine mincemeat which this pretty
stranger was making of him promised to leave nothing more either to
carve or to roast.
"Do you mind my talking to you?" she asked, noting the strained
expression of his features.
"No," he said, "go ahead."
"Because if I am tiring you----"
He said he was not tired.
"--or if it bores you to discuss your art with a foreigner who so truly
admires it----"
He shot a glance at her, then forced a laugh.
"I am not offended," he said. "What paper do you represent?"
"I?" she said, bewildered.
"Yes. You are a newspaper woman, are you not?"
"Do you mean a reporter?"
"Naturally."
"No," she said very seriously, "I am not a reporter. What an odd idea!"
"Do you think it odd?"
"Why, yes. Do not many admirers of your works express their pleasure in
them to you?"
He studied her lovely face coolly and in detail--the dainty arch of the
questioning eyebrows, the sensitive curve of the mouth, the clear, sweet
eyes. Could it be possible that such candour masked irony? Could all
this be the very essence of the art of acting, concealing the most
murderous sarcasm ever dreamed of by a terrified author?
And suddenly his face went red all over, and he understood that the
essence of this young girl was a candour so utterly free of
self-consciousness--a frankness so absolutely truthful, that the
simplicity of her had been a miracle too exquisite for him to
comprehend.
"You _do_ like what I write!" he exclaimed.
Her blue eyes widened: "Of course I do," she said, amazed. "Didn't you
understand me?"
"No," he said, cooling his burning face in the rising sea-wind. "I
thought you were laughing at me."
"I'm sorry if I was stupid," she said.
"_I_ was stupid."
"You!" She laughed a little.
The sinking sun peered through the palm forest behind them and flung a
beam of blinding light at her.
"Am I interrupting your work, Mr. Smith? I mean, I know I am, but----"
"Please don't go away."
"Thank you.... I have noticed what agreeable manners you Americans have
in novels. Naturally you are even more kindly and polite in real life."
"Have you met many Americans?"
"No, only you. In the beginning I did not feel interested in Americans."
"Why?"
"The young men all seemed to resemble one another," she said frankly,
"like Chinese. But now that I really know an American I am intensely
interested."
"You notice no Mongolian monotony in me?" he inquired gravely.
"Oh, no----" She coloured; then discovering that he was laughing, she
laughed, too, rather faintly.
"That was a joke, wasn't it?" she said.
"Yes, that was a joke."
"Because," she said, "there is no Mongolian uniformity about _you_. On
the contrary, you remind me in every way of one of your own heroes."
"Oh, really now!" he protested; but she insisted with serious
enthusiasm.
"You are the counterpart of the hero in this book," she repeated,
resting one hand lightly on the volume under her elbow. "You wear white
flannels, you are tall, well built, straight, with very regular
features and a fasci---- a smile," she corrected herself calmly, "which
one naturally associates with your features."
"Also," she continued, "your voice is cultivated and modulated with just
enough of the American accent to make it piquantly agreeable. And what
you say is fasci---- is well expressed and interesting. Therefore, as I
have said, to me you resemble one of your own heroes."
There was enough hot colour in his face to make it boyishly bashful.
"And you appear to be as modest as one of your own heroes," she added,
studying him. "That is truly delightful."
"But really, I am nothing like any of my heroes," he explained, terribly
embarrassed.
"Why do you say that, Mr. Smith?"
"Because it's true. I don't even resemble 'em superficially."
She made a quick, graceful gesture: "Why do you say that, when here you
are before me, the exact and exciting counterpart of the reckless and
fasci---- the reckless and interesting men you write about?"
He said nothing. She closed the parasol and considered him in silence
for a moment or two. Then:
"And I have no doubt that you are capable of doing the very things that
your heroes do so adroitly and so charmingly."
"What, for example?" he asked, reddening to his temples.
"Reconstructing armies, for instance."
"Filibustering?"
"Is that what it is called?"
"It's called that in the countries south of the United States."
"Well, would you not be capable of overturning a government and of
reconstructing the army, Mr. Smith?"
"Capable?"
"Yes."
"Well," he said cautiously, "if it was the thing I wanted to do, perhaps
I might have a try at it."
"I knew it," she exclaimed triumphantly.
"But," he explained, "I never desired to overturn any government."
"You probably have never seen any that you thought worth while
overturning."
Her confident rejoinder perplexed him and he remained silent.
"Also," she continued, still more confidently, "I am certain that if you
were in love, no obstacles would prove too great for you to surmount.
Would they?"
"Really," he said, "I don't know. I'm not very enterprising."
"That is the answer of a delightfully modest man. Your own hero would
return me such an answer, Mr. Smith. But I--and your heroine
also--understand you--I mean your hero."
"Do you?" he asked gravely.
"Certainly. I, as well as your heroine, understand that no obstacles
could check you if you loved her--neither political considerations,
diplomatic exigencies, family prejudices, nor her own rank, no matter
what it might be. Is not that true?"
Eager, enthusiastic, impersonally but warmly interested, she leaned a
little toward him, intent on his reply.
He looked into the lovely, flushed face in silence for a while. Then:
"Yes," he said, "it is true. If I loved, nothing could check me
except----" he shrugged.
"Death?" She nodded, fascinated.
He nodded. He had meant to say the police.
She said exultantly: "I knew it, Mr. Smith! I was certain that you are
the living embodiment of your own heroes! The moment I set eyes on you
playing in the sand with your lead soldiers, I was sure of it!"
Thrilled, she considered him, her soft eyes brilliant with undisguised
admiration.
"I wish I could actually _see_ it!" she said under her breath.
"See what?"
"See you, in real life, as one of your own heroes--doing some of the
things they do so cleverly, so winningly--careless of convention,
reckless of consequences, oblivious to all considerations except only
the affair in hand. That," she said excitedly, "would be glorious, and
well worth a trip to the States!"
"How far," he asked, "have you read in that book of mine?"
"In this book?" She opened it, impulsively, ran over the pages,
hesitated, stopped.
"He was--was kissing the Balkan Princess," she said. "I left them--_in
statu quo_."
"I see.... Did he do _that_ well?"
"I--suppose so."
"Have you no opinion?"
"I think he did it--very--thoroughly, Mr. Smith."
"It ought to be done thoroughly if done at all," he said reflectively.
"Otherwise," she nodded, "it would be offensive."
"To the reader?"
"To her, too. Wouldn't it?"
"You know better than I."
"No, I don't know. A nice girl can not imagine herself being
kissed--except under very extraordinary circumstances, and by a very
extraordinary man.... Such a man as you have drawn in this book."
"Had you been that Balkan Princess, what would you have done?" he asked,
rather pale.
"I?" she said, startled.
"Yes, you."
She sat considering, blue eyes lost in candid reverie. Then the faintest
smile curved her lips; she looked up at Smith with winning simplicity.
"In your story, Mr. Smith, does the Balkan Princess return his kiss?"
"Not in that chapter."
"I think I would have returned it--in that--chapter." Then, for the
first time, she blushed.
The naive avowal set the heart and intellect of Mr. Smith afire. But he
only dropped his well-shaped head and didn't look at her. Which was
rather nice of him.
"Romance," he said after a moment or two, "is all well enough. But real
life is stranger than fiction."
"Not in the British Isles," she said with decision. "It _is_ tea and
curates and kennels and stables--as our writers depict it."
"No, you are mistaken! Everywhere it is stranger than fiction," he
insisted--"more surprising, more charming, more wonderful. Even here in
America--here in Florida--here on this tiny point of sand jutting into
the Atlantic, life is more beautiful, more miraculous than any fiction
ever written."
"Why do you say that?" she asked.
"I am afraid I can't tell you why I say it."
"Why can't you tell me?"
"Only in books could what I might have to tell you be logically
told--and listened to----"
"Only in books? But books in America reflect actual life," she said.
"Therefore, you can tell me what you have to tell. Can't you?"
"Can I?" he asked.
"Yes...." Far in the inmost recesses of her calm and maiden heart
something stirred, and her breath ceased for a second.... Innocent, not
comprehending why her breath missed, she looked at him with the
question still in her blue eyes.
"Shall I tell you why real life is stranger than fiction?" he asked
unsteadily.
"Tell me--yes--if----"
"It is stranger," he said, "because it is often more headlong and
romantic. Shall we take ourselves, for example?"
"You and me?"
"Yes. To illustrate what I mean."
She inclined her head, her eyes fixed on his.
"Very well," he said. "Even in the most skillfully constructed
story--supposing that you and I were hero and heroine--no author would
have the impudence to make us avow our love within a few minutes of our
first meeting."
"No," she said.
"In the first chapter," he continued, "certain known methods of
construction are usually followed. Time is essential--the lapse of time.
How to handle it cleverly is a novelist's business. But even the most
skillful novelist would scarcely dare make me, for example, tell you
that I am in love with you. Would he?"
"No," she said.
"And in real life, even if a man does fall in love so suddenly, he does
not usually say so, does he?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"But he _does_ fall in love sometimes more suddenly than in fiction. And
occasionally he declares himself. In real life this actually happens.
And _that_ is stranger than any fiction. Isn't it?"
"Yes," she said.
"One kind of fiction," he continued very unsteadily, "is that in which,
when he falls in love--he doesn't say so--I mean in such a case as
ours--supposing I had already fallen in love with you. I could not say
so to you. No man could say it to any girl. He remains mute. He observes
very formally every convention. He smiles, hat in hand, as the girl
passes out of his life forever.... Doesn't he? And that is one kind of
fiction--the tragic kind."
She had been looking down at the book in her lap. After a moment she
lifted her troubled eyes to his.
"I do--not know what men do--in real life," she said. "What would they
do in the--_other_ kind of fiction?"
"In the other kind of fiction there would be another chapter."
"Yes.... You mean that for us there is only this one chapter."
"Only one chapter."
"Or--might it not be called a short story, Mr. Smith?"
"Yes--one kind of short story."
"Which kind?"
"The kind that ends unhappily."
"But this one is not going to end unhappily, is it?"
"You are about to walk out of the story when it ends."
"Yes--but----" She bit her lip, flushed and perplexed, already
dreadfully confused between the personal and the impersonal--between
fact and fancy.
"You see," he said, "the short story which deals with--love--can end
only as ours is going to end--or the contrary."
"How is ours going to end?" she asked with candid curiosity.
"It must be constructed very carefully," he said, "because this is
realism."
"You must be very skillful, too," she said. "I do not see how you are to
avoid----"
"What?"
"A--an--unhappy--ending."
He looked gravely at his sand castle. "No," he said, "I don't see how it
can be avoided."
After a long silence she murmured, half to herself:
"Still, this is America--after all."
He shrugged, still studying his sand castle.
"I wish I had somebody to help me work it out," he said, half to
himself.
"A collaborator?"
"Yes."
"I'm so sorry that I could not be useful."
"Would you try?"
"What is the use? I am utterly unskilled and inexperienced."
"I'd be very glad to have you try," he repeated.
XI
After a moment she rose, went over and knelt down in the sand before the
miniature city, studying the situation. All she could see of the lead
hero in the bowler hat were his legs protruding from the drain.
"Is this battery of artillery still shelling him?" she inquired, looking
over her shoulder at Smith.
He went over and dropped on his knees beside her.
"You see," he explained, "our hero is still under water."
"All this time!" she exclaimed in consternation. "He'll drown, won't
he?"
"He'll drown unless he can crawl into that drain."
"Then he must crawl into it immediately," she said with decision.
So he of the bowler was marched along a series of pegs indicating the
subterranean drain, and set down in the court of the castle.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed the Lady Alene. "We can't leave him here! They
will know him by his bowler hat!"
"No," said Smith gloomily, "we can't leave him here. But what can we do?
If he runs out they'll fire at him by platoons."
"_Couldn't_ they miss him?" pleaded the girl.
"I'm afraid not. He has already lived through several showers of
bullets."
"But he can't die _here_!--here under the very eyes of the Princess!"
she insisted.
"Then," said Smith, "the Princess will have to pull him through. It's up
to her now."
The girl knelt there in excited silence, studying the problem intently.
It was bad business. The battlements bristled with bayonets; outside,
cavalry, infantry, artillery were massed to destroy the gentleman in the
bowler hat.
Presently the flush deepened on the girl's cheeks; she took the bowler
hat between her gloved fingers and set its owner in the middle of the
moat again.
"Doesn't he crawl into the drain?" asked Smith anxiously.
"No. But the soldiers in the castle think he does. So," she continued
with animation, "the brutal commander rushes downstairs, seizes a
candle, and enters the drain from the castle court with about a thousand
soldiers!"
"But----"
"With about ten thousand soldiers!" she repeated firmly. "And no
sooner--_no sooner_--does their brutal and cowardly commander enter that
drain with his lighted candle than the Princess runs downstairs, seizes
a hatchet, severs the gas main with a single blow, and pokes the end of
the pipe into the drain!"
"B-but----" stammered Smith, "I think----"
"Oh, _please_ wait! You don't understand what is coming."
"_What_ is coming?" ventured Smith timidly, instinctively closing both
ears with his fingers.
"Bang!" said Lady Alene triumphantly. And struck the city of sand with
her small, gloved hand.
After a silence, still kneeling there, they turned and looked at each
other through the red sunset light.
"The explosion of gas killed them both," said Smith, in an awed voice.
"No."
"What?"
"No. The explosion killed everybody in the city except those two young
lovers," she said.
"But why?"
"Because!"
"By what logic----"
"I desire it to be so, Mr. Smith." And she picked up the bowler hat and
the Princess and calmly set them side by side amid the ruins.
After a moment Smith reached over and turned the two lead figures so
that they faced each other.
There was a long silence. The red sunset light faded from the sand.
Then, very slowly, the girl reached out, took the bowler hat between her
small thumb and forefinger, and gently inclined the gentleman forward at
the slightest of perceptible angles.
After a moment Smith inclined him still farther forward. Then, with
infinite precaution, he tipped forward the Princess, so that between her
lips and the lips of the bowler hat only the width of a grass blade
remained.
The Lady Alene looked up at him over her left shoulder, hesitated,
looked at bowler hat and at the Princess. Then, supporting her weight on
one hand, with the other she merely touched the Princess--delicately--so
that not even a blade of grass could have been slipped between their
painted lips.
She was a trifle pale as she sank back on her knees in the sand. Smith
was paler.
After both her gloved hands had rested across his palm for five full
minutes, his fingers closed over them, tightly, and he leaned forward a
little. She, too, swayed forward a trifle. Her eyes were closed when he
kissed her.
Now, whatever misgivings and afterthoughts the Lady Alene Innesly may
have had, she was nevertheless certain that to resist Smith was to fight
against the stars in their courses. For not only was she in the toils of
an American, but more hopeless still, an American who chronicled the
most daring and headlong idiosyncrasies of the sort of young men of whom
he was very certainly an irresistible example.
To her there was something Shakespearean about the relentless sequence
of events since the moment when she had first succumbed to the small,
oblong pink package, and her first American novel.
And, thinking Shakespeareanly as she stood in the purple evening light,
with his arm clasping her waist, she looked up at him from her charming
abstraction:
"'If 'twere done,'" she murmured, "'when 'tis done, then 'twere well it
were done quickly.'" And then, gazing deep into his eyes, a noble idiom
of her adopted country fell from her lips:
"Dearest," she said, "my father won't do a thing to you."
And so she ran away with him to Miami where the authorities, civil and
religious, are accustomed to quick action.
It was only fifty miles by train, and preliminary telephoning did the
rest.
The big chartered launch that left for Verbena Inlet next morning poked
its nose out of the rainbow mist into the full glory of the rising sun.
Her golden head lay on his shoulder.
Sideways, with delicious indolence, she glanced at a small boat which
they were passing close aboard. A fat gentleman, a fat lady, and a
boatman occupied the boat. The fat gentleman was fast to a tarpon.
Up out of the dazzling Atlantic shot three hundred pounds of quivering
silver. Splash!
"Why, Dad!" exclaimed the girl.
Her father and mother looked over their shoulders at her in wooden
amazement.
"We are married----" called out their pretty daughter across the sunlit
water. "I will tell you all about it when you land your fish. Look
sharp, Dad! Mind your reel!"
"Who is that damned rascal?" demanded the Duke.
"My husband, Dad! Don't let him get away!--the fish, I mean. Put the
drag on! Check!"
Said his Grace of Pillchester in a voice of mellow thunder:
"If I were not fast to my first tarpon----"
"Reel in!" cried Smith sharply, "reel or you lose him!"
The Duke reeled with all the abandon of a squirrel in a wheel.
"Dearest," said Mrs. John Smith to her petrified mother, "we will see
you soon at Verbena. And _don't_ let Dad over-play that fish. He always
over-plays a salmon, you know."
The Duchess folded her fat hands and watched her departing offspring
until the chartered launch was a speck on the horizon. Then she looked
at her husband.
"Fancy!" she said.
"Nevertheless," remarked the youthful novelist, coldly, "there is
nothing on earth as ignoble as a best-seller."
"I wonder," ventured Duane, "whether you know which books actually do
sell the best."
"Or which books of bygone days were the best-sellers?"
"Some among them are still best-sellers," added Athalie.
"A truly important book----" began the novelist, but Athalie interrupted
him:
"O solemn child," she said, "write on!--and thank the gods for their
important gifts to you of hand and mind! So that you keep tired eyes
awake that otherwise would droop to brood on pain or sorrow you have
done well; and what you have written to this end will come nearer being
important than anything you ever write."
"True, by the nine muses!" exclaimed Stafford with emphasis. Athalie
glanced at him out of sweetly humourous eyes.
"There is a tenth muse," she said. "Did you never hear of her?"
"Never! Where did you discover her, Athalie?"
"Where I discover many, many things, my friend."
"In your crystal?" I said. She nodded slowly while the sweetmeat was
dissolving in her mouth.
Through the summer silence a bell here and there in the dusky city
sounded the hour.
"The tenth muse," she repeated, "and I believe there are other sisters,
also. Many a star is suspected before its unseen existence is proven....
Please--a glass of water?"
XII
She sipped the water pensively as we all returned to our places. Then,
placing the partly empty glass beside her jar of sweetmeats, she opened
her incomparable lips.
* * * * *
It is a fine thing when a young man, born to travel the speedway of
luxury, voluntarily leaves it to hew out a pathway for himself through
life. Brown thought so, too. And at twenty-four he resolutely graduated
from Harvard, stepped out into the world, and looked about him very
sternly.
All was not well with the world. Brown knew it. He was there to correct
whatever was wrong. And he had chosen Good Literature as the vehicle for
self expression.
Now, the nine sister goddesses are born flirts; and every one of them
immediately glanced sideways at Brown, who was a nice young man with
modesty, principles, and a deep and reverent belief in Good Literature.
The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne seemed very attractive to him
until the tenth and most recent addition to the Olympian family
sauntered by with a flirt of her narrow skirt--the jade!
One glance into the starry blue wells of her baby eyes bowled him over.
Henceforth she was to be his steady--Thalomene, a casual daughter of
Zeus, and muse of all that is sacredly obvious in the literature of
modern realism.
From early infancy Brown's had been a career of richest promise. His
mother's desk was full of his earlier impressions of life. He had, in
course of time, edited his school paper, his college paper; and, as an
undergraduate, he had appeared in the contributor's columns of various
periodicals.
His was not only a wealthy but a cultivated lineage as well. The love of
literature was born in him.
To love literature is all right in its way; to love it too well is to
mistake the appreciative for the creative genius. Reverence and devotion
are no equipment for creative authorship. It is not enough to have
something to say about what other people have said. And the inspiration
which comes from what others have done is never the true one. But Brown
didn't know these things. They were not revealed unto him at Harvard; no
inward instinct made them plain to him.
He began by foregathering with authors. Many, many authors foregather,
from various causes--tradition, inclination, general shiftlessness. When
they do that they produce a sort of serum called literary atmosphere,
which is said to be delightful. And so Brown found it. However, there
are authors who seem to be too busy with their profession to foregather
and exhale atmosphere. But these are doubtless either literary hacks or
the degraded producers of best-sellers. They are not authors, either;
they are merely writers.
Now, in all the world there is only one thing funnier than an author;
and that is a number of them. But Brown didn't know that, either.
All authors are reformers. Said one of them to Brown in the Empyrean
Club:
"When an author in his own heart ceases to be a reformer he begins to be
a menace!"
It was a fine sentiment, and Brown wrote it in his note-book.
Afterward, the more he analyzed it the less it seemed to mean.
Another author informed him that the proper study for man is man. He'd
heard that before, but the repetition steeled his resolve. And his
resolve was to reproduce in literature exactly what he observed about
him; nothing more, nothing less.
There was to be no concession to imagination, none to convention, none
to that insidious form of human weakness known as good taste. As for
art, Brown already knew what Art really was.
There was art enough for anybody in sheer truth, enough in the realism
made up of photographic detail, recorded uncompromisingly in ordered
processional sequence. After all, there was really no beauty in the
world except the beauty of absolute truth. All other alleged beauty was
only some form of weakness. Thus Brown, after inhaling literary
atmosphere.
Like the majority of young men, Brown realised that only a man, and a
perfectly fearless, honest, and unprejudiced one, was properly equipped
to study woman and tell the entire truth about her in literature.
So he began his first great novel--"The Unquiet Sex"--and he made heavy
weather of it that autumn--what with contributing to the literary
atmosphere every afternoon and evening at various clubs and cafes--not
to mention the social purlieus into which he ventured with the immortal
lustre already phosphorescent on his brow. Which left him little time
for mere writing. It is hard to be an author and a writer, too.
The proper study for man being woman, Brown studied her solemnly and
earnestly. He studied his mother and his sisters, boring them to the
verge of distraction; he attempted to dissect the motives which governed
the behaviour of assorted feminine relatives, scaring several of the
more aged and timorous, agitating others, and infuriating one or
two--until his father ordered him to desist.
House-maids, parlour-maids, ladies'-maids, waitresses, all fought very
shy of him; for true to his art, he had cast convention aside and had
striven to fathom the souls and discover the hidden motives imbedded in
Milesian, Scandinavian and Briton.
"The thing for me to do," said Brown rather bitterly to his father, "is
to go out into the world and investigate far and wide."
"Investigate what?" asked his father.
"Woman!" said Brown sturdily.
"There's only one trouble about that."
"What's that?"
"Woman," said his father, "is likely to do the investigating. This
household knows more about you than you do about it."
Brown smiled. So did his father.
"Son," said the latter, "what have you learned about women without
knowing anything about them?"
"Nothing, naturally," said Brown.
"Then you will never have anything more than _that_ to say about them,"
remarked Brown senior.
"Why not?"
"Because the only thing possible for a man to say about them is what his
imagination dictates. He'll never learn any more concerning women than
that."
"Imagination is not literature," said Brown junior, with polite
toleration.
"Imagination is often the truer truth," said the old gentleman.
"Father, that is rot."
"Yes, my son--and it is almost Good Literature, too. Go ahead, shake us
if you like. But, if you do, you'll come back married."
XIII
So Brown, who was nourishing a theory, shook his family and, requiring
mental solitude to develop his idea, he went to Verbena Inlet. Not to
the enormous and expensive caravansary swarming with wealth, ennui,
envy, and fashion; not even to its sister hotel similarly infested. But
to West Verbena, where for a mile along the white shell road modest
hotels, boarding houses, and cottages nestled behind mosquito screens
under the dingy cabbage-palmettos.
Here was stranded the winter driftwood from the North--that peculiar
flotsam and jetsam which summered in similar resorts in the North,
rocked in rocking chairs on dreary rural verandas, congregated at the
village post-office, awaited its men folk every week-end from the filthy
and sweltering metropolis.
It was at a shabby but pretentious hostelry called the Villa Hibiscus
that Brown took up his quarters. Several rusty cabbage-palmettos waved
above the whitish, sandy soil surrounding it; one or two discouraged
orange trees fruited despondently near the veranda. And the place
swarmed with human beings from all over the United States, lured from
inclement climes, into the land of the orange and the palm--wistfully
seeking in the land of advertised perpetual sunshine what the restless
world has never yet discovered anywhere--surcease from care, from
longing, from the unkindliness of its fellow seekers.
Dowdiness filled the veranda rocking chairs; unlovely hands were folded;
faded eyes gazed vacantly at the white road, at the oranges; enviously
at the flashing wheels and fluttering lingerie from the great Hotel
Verbena.
Womanhood was there in all its ages and average phases; infancy, youth,
middle age, age--all were there in the rusty villas and hotels ranged
for a mile along the smooth shell road.
The region, thought Brown to himself, was rich in material. And the
reflection helped him somewhat with his dinner, which needed a fillip or
two.
In his faultless dinner jacket he sauntered out after the evening meal;
and the idea which possessed and even thrilled him aided him to forget
what he had eaten.
The lagoon glimmered mysteriously in the starlight; the royal palms
bordering it rustled high in the night breeze from the sea. Perfume from
oleander hedges smote softly the olfactories of Brown; the southern
whip-poor-wills' hurried whisper thrilled the darkness with a deeper
mystery.
Here was the place to study woman. There could be no doubt about that.
Here, untrammelled, uninterrupted, unvexed by the jarring of the world,
he could place his model, turn her loose, and observe her.
To concentrate all his powers of analytical observation upon a single
specimen of woman was his plan. Painters and sculptors used models. He
meant to use one, too.
It would be simple. First, he must discover what he wanted. This
accomplished, he had decided to make a plain business proposition to
her. She was to go about her own affairs and her pleasure without
embarrassment or self-consciousness--behave naturally; do whatever it
pleased her to do. But he was to be permitted to observe her, follow
her, make what notes he chose; and, as a resume of each day, they were
to meet in some quiet spot in order that he might question her as he
chose, concerning whatever interested him, or whatever in her movements
or behaviour had seemed to him involved or inexplicable.
Thus and thus only, he had decided, could light be shed upon the
mysterious twilight veiling the inner woman! Thus only might carefully
concealed motives be detected, cause and effect co-ordinated, the very
source of all feminine logic, reason, and emotion be laid bare and
dissected at leisure.
Never had anybody written such a novel as he would be equipped to write.
The ultimate word concerning woman was about to be written.
Inwardly excited, outwardly calm, he had seated himself on the coquina
wall which ran along the lagoon under the Royal Palms. He was about to
study his subject as the great masters studied, coolly, impersonally,
with clear and merciless intelligence, setting down with calm simplicity
nothing except facts.
All that was worthy and unworthy should be recorded--the good with the
evil--nothing should be too ephemeral, too minute, to escape his
searching analysis.
And all the while, though Brown was not aware of it, the memory of a
face he had seen in the dining-room grew vaguely and faded, waxing and
waning alternately, like a phantom illustration accompanying his
thoughts.
As for the model he should choose to study, she ought to be thoroughly
feminine, he thought; young, probably blonde, well formed, not very
deeply experienced, and with every human capacity for good and bad
alike.
He would approach her frankly, tell her what he required, offer her the
pay of an artist's model, three dollars a day; and, if she accepted, she
could have her head and do what she liked. All that concerned him was to
make his observations and record them.
In the blue starlight people passed and re-passed like ghosts along the
shell-road--the white summer gowns of young girls were constantly
appearing in the dusk, taking vague shape, vanishing. On the lagoon, a
guitar sounded very far away. The suave scent of oleander grew sweeter.
Spectral groups passed in clinging lingerie; here and there a ghost
lingered to lean over the coquina wall, her lost gaze faintly accented
by some level star. One of these, a slender young thing, paused near to
Brown, resting gracefully against the wall.
All around her the whip-poor-wills were calling breathlessly; the
perfume of oleander grew sweeter.
As for the girl herself, she resembled the tenth muse. Brown had never
attempted to visualise his mistress; it had been enough for him that she
was Thalomene, daughter of Zeus, and divinely fair.
But now, as he recognised the face he had noticed that evening in the
dining-room, somehow he thought of his muse for the first time,
concretely. Perhaps because the girl by the coquina wall was young,
slim, golden haired, and Greek.
His impulse, without bothering to reason, was to hop from the wall and
go over to where she was standing.
She looked around calmly as he approached, gave him a little nod in
recognition of his lifted hat.
"I'm John Brown, 4th," he said. "I'm stopping at the Villa Hibiscus. Do
you mind my saying so?"
"No, I don't mind," she said.
"There is a vast amount of nonsense in formality and convention," said
Brown. "If you don't mind ignoring such details, I have something
important to say to you."
She looked at him unsmilingly. Probably it was the starlight in her
eyes that made them glimmer as though with hidden laughter.
"I am," said Brown, pleasantly, "an author."
"Really," she said.
"When I say that I am an author," continued Brown seriously, "I mean in
the higher sense."
"Oh. What is the higher sense, Mr. Brown?" she asked.
"The higher sense does not necessarily imply authorship. I do not mean
that I am a mere writer. I have written very little."
"Oh," she said.
"Very little," repeated Brown combatively. "You will look in vain among
the crowded counters piled high with contemporary fiction for anything
from my pen."
"Then perhaps I had better not look," she said so simply that Brown was
a trifle disappointed in her.
"Some day, however," he said, "you may search, and, perhaps, not wholly
in vain."
"Oh, you are writing a book!"
"Yes," he said, "I am, so to speak, at work on a novel."
"Might one, with discretion, make further inquiry concerning your novel,
Mr. Brown?"
"_You_ may."
"Thank you," she said, apparently a trifle disconcerted by the privilege
so promptly granted.
"_You_ may," repeated Brown. "Shall I explain why?"
"Please."
"You will not mistake me, I am sure. Will you?"
She turned her pretty face toward him.
"I don't think so," she said after a moment. The starlight was meddling
with her eyes again.
XIV
So Brown told her about his theory; how he desired to employ a model,
how he desired to study her; what were his ideas of the terms suitable.
He talked fluently, earnestly, and agreeably; and his pretty audience
listened with so much apparent intelligence and good taste that her very
attitude subtly exhilarated Brown, until he became slightly aware that
he was expressing himself eloquently.
He had, it seemed, much to say concerning the profession and practice of
good literature. It seemed, too, that he knew a great deal about it,
both theoretically and practically. His esteem and reverence for it were
unmistakable; his enthusiasm worthy of his courage.
He talked for a long while, partly about literature, partly about
himself. And he was at intervals a trifle surprised that he had so much
to say, and wondered at the valuable accumulations of which he was
unburdening himself with such vast content.
The girl had turned her back to the lagoon and stood leaning against the
coquina wall, facing him, her slender hands resting on the coping.
Never had he had such a listener. At the clubs and cafes other literary
men always wanted to talk. But here under the great southern stars
nobody interrupted the limpid flow of his long dammed eloquence. And he
ended leisurely, as he had begun, yet auto-intoxicated, thrillingly
conscious of the spell which he had laid upon himself, upon his young
listener--conscious, too, of the spell that the soft air and the perfume
and the stars had spun over a world grown suddenly and incredibly lovely
and young.
She said in a low voice: "I need the money very much.... And I don't
mind your studying me."
"Do you really mean it?" he exclaimed, enchanted.
"Yes. But there is one trouble."
"What is it?" he asked apprehensively.
"I _must_ have my mornings to myself."
He said: "Under the terms I must be permitted to ask you any questions I
choose. You understand that, don't you?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then--why must you have your mornings to yourself?"
"I have work to do."
"What work? What are you?"
She flushed a trifle, then, accepting the rules of the game, smiled at
Brown.
"I am a school-teacher," she said. "Ill health from overwork drove me
South to convalesce. I am trying to support myself here by working in
the mornings."
"I am sorry," he said gently. Then, aware of his concession to a very
human weakness, he added with businesslike decision: "What is the nature
of your morning's work?"
"I--write," she admitted.
"Stories?"
"Yes."
"Fiction?"
"Anything, Mr. Brown. I send notes to fashion papers, concerning the
costumes at the Hotel Verbena; I write for various household papers
special articles which would not interest you at all. I write little
stories for the women's and children's columns in various newspapers.
You see what I do is not literature, and could not interest you."
"If you are to act for me in the capacity of a model," he said firmly,
"I am absolutely bound to study every phase of you, every minutest
detail."
"Oh."
"Not one minute of the day must pass without my observing you," he said.
"Unless you are broad-minded enough to comprehend me you may think my
close and unremitting observation impertinent."
"You don't mean to be impertinent, I am sure," she faltered, already
surprised, apprehensive, and abashed by the prospect.
"Of course I don't mean to be impertinent," he said smilingly, "but all
great observers pursue their studies unremittingly day and night----"
"_You_ couldn't do _that_!" she exclaimed.
"No," he admitted, troubled, "that would not be feasible. You require,
of course, a certain amount of slumber."
"Naturally," she said.
"I ought," he said thoughtfully, "to study that phase of you, also."
"What phase, Mr. Brown?"
"When you are sleeping."
"But that is impossible!"
"Convention," he said disdainfully, "makes it so. A literary student is
fettered.
"But it is perfectly possible for you to imagine what I look like when
I'm asleep, Mr. Brown."
"Imagination is to play no part in my literary work," he said coldly.
"What I set down are facts."
"But is that art?"
"There is more art in facts than there are facts in art," he said.
"I don't quite know what you mean."
He didn't, either, when he came to analyse what he had said; and he
turned very red and admitted it.
"I mean to be honest and truthful," he said. "What I just said sounded
clever, but meant nothing. I admit it. I mean to be perfectly pitiless
with myself. Anything tainted with imagination; anything hinting of
romance; any weak concession to prejudice, convention, good taste, I
refuse to be guilty of. Realism is what I aim at; raw facts, however
unpleasant!"
"I don't believe you will find anything very unpleasant about me," she
said.
"No, I don't think I shall. But I mean to detect every imperfection,
every weakness, every secret vanity, every unworthy impulse. That is why
I desire to study you so implacably. Are you willing to submit?"
She bit her lip and looked thoughtfully at the stars.
"You know," she said, "that while it may be all very well for you to say
'anything for art's sake,' _I_ can't say it. I can't _do_ it, either."
"Why not?"
"Because I can't. You know perfectly well that you can't follow me about
taking notes _every_ minute of the twenty-four hours."
He said very earnestly: "Sir John Lubbock sat up day and night, never
taking his eyes off the little colony of ants which he had under
observation in a glass box!"
"Do you propose to sit up day and night to keep me under observation?"
she asked, flushed and astounded.
"Not at first. But as my studies advance, and you become accustomed to
the perfectly respectful but coldly impersonal nature of my
observations, your mind, I trust, will become so broadened that you will
find nothing objectionable in what at first might scare you. An artist's
model, for example----"
"But I am not an artist's model!" she exclaimed, with a slight shiver.
"To be a proper model at all," he said, "you must concede all for art,
and remain sublimely unconscious of self. _You_ do not matter. _I_ do
not matter. Only my work counts. And that must be honest, truthful,
accurate, minute, exact--a perfect record of a woman's mind and
personality."
For a few moments they both remained silent. And after a little the
starlight began to play tricks with her eyes again, so that they seemed
sparkling with hidden laughter. But her face was grave.
She said: "I really do need the money. I will do what I can.... And if
in spite of my courage I ever shrink--our contract shall terminate at
once."
"And what shall I do then?" inquired Brown.
The starlight glimmered in her eyes. She said very gravely:
"In case the demands of your realism and your art are too much for my
courage, Mr. Brown--you will have to find another model to study."
"But another model might prove as conventional as you!"
"In that case," she said, while her sensitive lower lip trembled, and
the starlight in her eyes grew softly brilliant, "in that case, Mr.
Brown, I am afraid that there would be only one course to pursue with
that _other_ model."
"What course is that?" he asked, deeply interested.
"I'm afraid you'd have to marry her."
"Good Lord!" he said. "I can't marry every girl I mean to study!"
"Oh! Do you mean to study very many?"
"I have my entire life and career before me."
"Yes. That is true. But--women are much alike. One model, thoroughly
studied, might serve for them all--with a little imagination."
"I have no use for imagination in fiction," said Brown firmly. After a
moment's silence, he added: "Is it settled, then?"
"About our--contract?"
"Yes."
She considered for a long while, then, looking up, she nodded.
"That's fine!" exclaimed Brown, with enthusiasm.
They walked back to the Villa Hibiscus together, slowly, through the
blue starlight. Brown asked her name, and she told him.
"No," he said gaily, "your name is Thalomene, and you are the tenth
muse. For truly I think I have never before been so thoroughly inspired
by a talk with anyone."
She laughed. He had done almost all the talking. And he continued it,
very happily, as by common consent they seated themselves on the
veranda.
XV
The inhabitants of the Villa Hibiscus retired. But Brown talked on,
quite unconscious that the low-voiced questions and softly modulated
replies were magic which incited him to a perfect ecstasy of
self-revelation.
Perhaps he thought he was studying her--for the compact by mutual
consent was already in force--and certainly his eyes were constantly
upon her, taking, as no doubt he supposed, a cold and impersonal measure
of her symmetry. Calmly, and with utter detachment, he measured her
slender waist, her soft little hands; noting the fresh, sweet lips, the
clear, prettily shaped eyes, the delicate throat, the perfect little
Greek head with its thick, golden hair.
And all the while he held forth about literature and its true purpose;
about what art really is; about his own art, his own literature, and
his own self.
And the girl was really fascinated.
She had seen, at a distance, such men. When Brown had named himself to
her, she had recognised the name with awe, as a fashionable and wealthy
name known to Gotham.
Yet, had Brown known it, neither his eloquence nor his theories, nor his
aims, were what fascinated her. But it was his boyish enthusiasm, his
boyish intolerance, his immaturity, his happy certainty of the
importance of what concerned himself.
He was so much a boy, so much a man, such a candid, unreasonable, eager,
selfish, impulsive, portentous, and delightfully illogical mixture of
boy and man that the combination fascinated every atom of womanhood in
her--and at moments as the night wore on, she found herself listening
perilously close to the very point of sympathy.
He appeared to pay no heed to the flight of time. The big stars frosted
Heaven; the lagoon was silvered by them; night winds stirred the orange
bloom; oleanders exhaled a bewitching perfume.
As he lay there in his rocking chair beside her, it seemed to him that
he had known her intimately for years--so wonderfully does the charm of
self-revelation act upon human reason. For she had said almost nothing
about herself. Yet, it was becoming plainer to him every moment that
never in all his life had he known any woman as he already knew this
young girl.
"It is wonderful," he said, lying back in his chair and looking up at
the stars, "how subtle is sympathy, and how I recognise yours. I think I
understand you perfectly already."
"Do you?" she said.
"Yes, I feel sure I do. Somehow, I know that secretly and in your own
heart you are in full tide of sympathy with me and with my life's work."
"I thought you had no imagination," she said.
"I haven't. Do you mean that I only imagine that you are in sympathy
with me?"
"No," she said. "I am."
After a few moments she laughed deliciously. He never knew why. Nor was
she ever perfectly sure why she had laughed, though they discussed the
matter very gravely.
A new youth seemed to have invaded her, an exquisite sense of lightness,
of power. Vaguely she was conscious of ability, of a wonderful and
undreamed of capacity. Within her heart she seemed to feel the subtle
stir of a new courage, a certainty of the future, of indefinable but
splendid things.
The manuscript of the novel which she had sent North two weeks ago
seemed to her a winged thing soaring to certain victory in the empyrean.
Suddenly, by some magic, doubt, fear, distress, were allayed--and it was
like surcease from a steady pain, with all the blessed and heavenly
languor relaxing her mind and body.
And all the while Brown talked on.
Lying there in her chair she listened to him while the thoughts in her
eased mind moved in delicate accompaniment.
Somehow she understood that never in her life had she been so
happy--with this boy babbling beside her, and her own thoughts
responding almost tenderly to his youth, his inconsistencies, to the
arrogance typical of his sex. He was _so_ wrong!--so far from the track,
so utterly astray, so pitiably confident! Who but she should know, who
had worked and studied and failed and searched, always _writing_,
however--which is the only way in the world to learn how to write--or to
learn that there is no use in writing.
Her hand lay along the flat arm of her rocking-chair; and once, when he
had earnestly sustained a perfectly untenable theory concerning success
in literature, unconsciously she laid her fresh, smooth hand on his arm
in impulsive protest.
"No," she said, "don't think that way. You are quite wrong. That is the
road to failure!"
It was her first expression of disagreement, and he looked at her
amazed.
"I am afraid you think I don't know anything about real literature and
realism," she said, "but I do know a little."
"Every man must work out his salvation in his own way," he insisted,
still surprised at her dissent.
"Yes, but one should be equipped by long practice in the art before
definitely choosing one's final course."
"I am practiced."
"I don't mean theoretically," she murmured.
He laughed: "Oh, you mean mere writing," he said, gaily confident.
"That, according to my theory, is not necessary to real experience.
Literature is something loftier."
In her feminine heart every instinct of womanhood was aroused--pity for
the youth of him, sympathy for his obtuseness, solicitude for his
obstinacy, tenderness for the fascinating combination of boy and man,
which might call itself by any name it chose--even "author"--and go
blundering along without a helping hand amid shrugs and smiles to a goal
marked "Failure."
"I wonder," she said almost timidly, "whether you could ever listen to
me."
"Always," he said, bending nearer to see her expression. Which having
seen, he perhaps forgot to note in his little booklet, for he continued
to look at her.
"I haven't very much to say," she said. "Only--to learn any art or trade
or profession it is necessary to work at it unremittingly. But to
discuss it never helped anybody."
"My dear child," he said, "I know that what you say was the old idea.
But," he shrugged, "I do not agree with it."
"I am so sorry," she said.
"Sorry? Why are you sorry?"
"I don't know.... Perhaps because I like you."
It was not very much to say--not a very significant declaration; but the
simplicity and sweetness of it--her voice--the head bent a little in the
starlight--all fixed Brown's attention. He sat very still there in the
luminous dusk of the white veranda; the dew dripped steadily like rain;
the lagoon glittered.
Then, subtly, taking Brown unawares, his most treacherous enemy crept
upon him with a stealth incredible, and, before Brown knew it, was in
full possession of his brain. The enemy was Imagination.
Minute after minute slipped away in the scented dusk, and found Brown's
position unchanged, where he lay in his chair looking at her.
The girl also was very silent.
With what wonderful attributes his enemy, Imagination, was busily
endowing the girl beside him in the starlight, there is no knowing. His
muse was Thalomene, slim daughter of Zeus; and whether she was really
still on Olympus or here beside him he scarcely knew, so perfectly did
this young girl inspire him, so exquisitely did she fill the bill.
"It is odd," he said, after a long while, "that merely a few hours with
you should inspire me more than I have ever been inspired in all my
life."
"That," she said unsteadily, "is your imagination."
At the hateful word, imagination, Brown seemed to awake from the spell.
Then he sat up straight, rather abruptly.
"The thing to do," he said, still confused by his awakening, "is to
consider you impersonally and make notes of everything." And he fumbled
for pencil and note-book, and, rising, stepped across to the front door,
where a light was burning.
Standing under it he resolutely composed his thoughts; but to save his
life he could remember nothing of which to make a memorandum.
This worried him, and finally alarmed him. And so long did he stand
there, note-book open, pencil poised, and a sickly expression of dismay
imprinted upon his otherwise agreeable features, that the girl rose at
last from her chair, glanced in through the door at him, and then came
forward.
"What is the matter?" she asked.
"The matter is," said Brown, "that I don't seem to have anything to
write about."
"You are tired," she said. "I think we both are a little tired."
"_I_ am not. Anyway, I have something to write about now. Wait a moment
till I make a note of how you walk--the easy, graceful, flowing motion,
so exquisitely light and----"
"But _I_ don't walk like that!" she said, laughing.
"--Graciously as a youthful goddess," muttered Brown, scribbling away
busily in his note-book. "Tell me; what motive had you just now in
rising and coming to ask me what was the matter--with such a sweetly
apprehensive expression in your eyes?"
"My--my motive?" she repeated, astonished.
"Yes. You had one, hadn't you?"
"Why--I don't know. You looked worried; so I came."
"The motive," said Brown, "was feminine solicitude--an emotion natural
to nice women. Thank you." And he made a note of it.
"But motives and emotions are different things," she said timidly. "I
had no motive for coming to ask you why you seemed troubled."
"Wasn't your motive to learn why?"
"Y-yes, I suppose so."
He laid his head on one side and inspected her critically.
"And if anything had been amiss with me you would have been sorry,
wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why? Because--one is sorry when a friend--when anyone----"
"I _am_ your friend," he said. "So why not say it?"
"And I am yours--if you wish," she said.
"Yes, I do." He began to write: "It's rather odd how friendship begins.
We both seem to want to be friends." And to her he said: "How does it
make you feel--the idea of our being friends? What emotions does it
arouse in you?"
She looked at him in sorrowful surprise. "I thought it was real
friendship you meant," she murmured, "not the sort to make a note
about."
"But I've got to make notes of everything. Don't you see? Certainly our
friendship is real enough--but I've got to study it minutely and make
notes concerning it. It's necessary to make records of everything--how
you walk, stand, speak, look, how you go upstairs----"
"I am going now," she said.
He followed, scribbling furiously; and it is difficult to go upstairs,
watch a lady go upstairs, and write about the way she does it all at the
same time.
"Good-night," she said, opening her door.
"Good-night," he said, absently, and so intent on his scribbling that he
followed her through the door into her room.
XVI
"She goes upstairs as though she were floating up," he wrote, with
enthusiasm; "her lovely figure, poised on tip-toe, seems to soar upward,
ascending as naturally and gracefully as the immortals ascended the
golden stairs of Jacob----"
In full flood of his treacherous imagination he seated himself on a
chair beside her bed, rested the note-book on his knees, and scribbled
madly, utterly oblivious to her. And it was only when he had finished,
for sheer lack of material, that he recollected himself, looked up, saw
how she had shrunk away from him against the wall--how the scarlet had
dyed her face to her temples.
"Why--why do you come--into my bedroom?" she faltered. "Does our
friendship count for no more than that with you?"
"What?" he said, bewildered.
"That you do what you have no right to do. Art--art is _not_ enough
to--to--excuse--disrespect----"
Suddenly the tears sprang to her eyes, and she covered her flushed face
with both hands.
For a moment Brown stood petrified. Then a deeper flush than hers
settled heavily over his features.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She made no response.
"I didn't mean to hurt you. I _do_ respect you," he said.
No response.
Brown gazed at her, gazed at his note-book.
Then he hurled the note-book across the room and walked over to her as
she lifted her lovely head, startled and tearful.
"You are right," he said, swallowing nothing very desperately. "You can
not be studied this way. Will you--marry me?"
"What!"
"Will you marry me?"
"Why?" she gasped.
"Because I--want to study you."
"No!" she said, looking him straight in the eyes.
Brown thought hard for a full minute.
"Would you marry me because I love you?" he asked timidly.
The question seemed to be more than she could answer. Besides, the tears
sprang to her blue eyes again, and her under lip began to tremble, and
she covered her face with both hands. Which made it impossible for him
to kiss her.
"Isn't it wonderful?" he said earnestly, trembling from head to foot.
"Isn't it wonderful, dear?"
"Yes," she whispered. The word, uttered against his shoulder, was
stifled. He bent his head nearer, murmuring:
"Thalomene--Thalomene--embodiment of Truth! How wonderful it is to me
that at last I find in you that absolute Truth I worship."
"I am--the embodiment--of your--imagination," she said. "But you will
never, never believe it--most adorable of boys--dearest--dearest of
men."
And, lifting her stately and divine young head, she looked innocently at
Brown while he imprinted his first and most chaste kiss upon the fresh,
sweet lips of the tenth muse, Thalomene, daughter of Zeus.
* * * * *
"Athalie," said the youthful novelist more in sorrow than in anger,
"you are making game of everything I hold most important."
"Provide yourself with newer and truer gods, dear child," said the girl,
laughing. "After you've worshipped them long enough somebody will also
poke fun at them. Whereupon, if you are fortunate enough to be one of
those who continues to mature until he matures himself into the
Ewigkeit, you will instantly quit those same over-mauled and worn out
gods for newer and truer ones."
"And so on indefinitely," I added.
"In literature," began the novelist, "the great masters must stand as
parents for us in our first infantile steps----"
"No," said the girl, "all worthy aspirants enter the field of literature
as orphans. Opportunity and Fates alone stand for them _in loco
parentis_. And the child of these is known as Destiny."
"No cubist could beat that, Athalie," remarked Duane. "I'm ashamed of
you--or proud--I don't know which."
"Dear child," she said, "you will never know the true inwardness of any
sentiment you entertain concerning me until I explain it to you."
"Smitten again hip and thigh," said Stafford. "Fair lady, I am far too
wary to tell you what I think of the art of incoherence as practised
occasionally by the prettiest Priestess in the Temple."
Athalie looked at me as the sweetmeat melted on her tongue.
"You promised me a dog," she remarked.
"I've picked him out. He'll be weaned in another week."
"What species of pup is he?" inquired Duane.
"An Iceland terrier," I answered. "They use them for digging out walrus
and seals."
"Thank you," said Duane pleasantly.
"After all," observed the girl, lifting her glass of water, "it does not
concern Mr. Duane what sort of a dog you have chosen for me."
She sipped it leisurely, looking over the delicate crystal rim at Duane.
"You are young," she said. "'_L'enfance est le sommeil de la raison._'"
"How would you like to have an Angora kitten?" he asked, reddening
slightly.
"But infancy," she added, "is always adorable.... I think I might like a
white one with blue eyes."
"Puppies, kittens, children," remarked Stafford--"they're all tolerable
while they're young."
"All of these," said the girl softly, "I should like to have."
And she gazed inquiringly at the crystal. But it could tell her nothing
of herself or of her hopes. She turned and looked out into the dark
city, a trifle wearily, it seemed to me.
XVII
After a silence, she lay back among her cushions and glanced at us with
a faint smile.
"One day last winter," she said, "after the last client had gone and
office hours were over, I sat here thinking, wondering what in the world
could be worse for a girl than to have no parents.... And I happened to
glance into my crystal, and saw there an incident beginning to evolve
that cheered me up, because it was a parody on my more morbid train of
thought. After all, the same Chance that gives a child to its parents
gives the parents to that child. You may think this is Tupper," she
added, "but it is Athalie. And that being the case, nobody will laugh."
Nobody did laugh.
"Thank you," she said sweetly. "Now I will tell you what I saw in my
crystal when I happened to be feeling unusually alone in the world." And
with a pretty nod to us, collectively, she began.
* * * * *
The bulk of the cargo and a few bodies were coming ashore at the eastern
end of the island, and that is where the throngs were--people from the
Light House, fishermen from the inlet, and hundreds of winter tourists
from St. Augustine, in white flannels and summer gowns, all attracted to
Ibis Island by the grewsome spectacle of the wreck.
The West Indian hurricane had done its terrific business and had gone,
leaving a turquoise sky untroubled by a cloud, and a sea of snow and
cobalt.
Nothing living had been washed ashore from the wreck. As for the brig,
she had vanished--if there had been anything left of her to disappear
except the wreckage, human and otherwise, that had come tumbling ashore
through the surf all night long.
So young Gray, seeing that there was nothing for him to do, and not
caring for the spectacle at the eastern end of the island, turned on his
heel and walked west through thickets of sweet bay, palmetto, and
beach-grape.
He wore the lightest weight solaro, with a helmet and close-fitting
puttees of the same. Two straps crossed his breast, the one supporting a
well filled haversack, the other a water bottle. Except for fire arms he
was equipped for darkest Africa, or for anything else on earth--at least
he supposed so. He was wrong; he was not equipped for what he was about
to encounter on Ibis Island.
It happened in this manner: traversing the seaward dunes, because the
beach no longer afforded him even a narrow margin for a footing,
shoulder deep in a tangle of beach-grapes, he chanced to glance at the
little sandy cove which he was skirting, and saw there an empty fruit
crate tumbling in the smother of foam, and a very small setter puppy
clinging to it frantically, with every claw clutching, and his drenched
tail between his legs.
Even while Gray was forcing his eager way through the tangle, he was
aware of somebody else moving forward through the high scrub just west
of him; and as he sprang out onto the beach and laid his hand on the
stranded fruit crate, another hand, slimmer and whiter than his, fell
on the crate as he dragged it out of the foamy shallows and up across
the dry sand, just as a tremendous roller smashed into clouds of foam
behind it.
"I beg your pardon," said a breathless voice at his elbow, "but I think
I saw this little dog first."
Gray already was reaching for the shivering little thing, but two other
hands deprived him of the puppy; and he looked up, impatient and
annoyed, into the excited brown eyes of a young girl.
She had taken the dripping, clawing little creature to her breast, where
it shivered and moaned and whined, shoving its cold nose up under her
chin.
"I beg your pardon," said Gray, firmly, "but I am really very certain
that I first discovered that dog."
"I am sorry you think so," she said, clasping the creature all the
tighter.
"I _do_ think so," insisted Gray. "I _know_ it!"
"I am very sorry," she repeated. Over the puppy's shivering back her
brown eyes gazed upon Gray. They were very pretty, but hostile.
"There can be no question about the ownership of this pup," persisted
Gray. "Of course, I am sorry if you really think you discovered the
dog. Because you didn't."
"I _did_ discover him," she said, calmly.
"I beg your pardon. I was walking through the beach-grapes----"
"I beg yours! I also was crossing the sweet-bay scrub when I happened to
glance down at the cove and saw this poor little dog in the water."
"That is exactly what _I_ did! I happened to glance down, and there I
saw this little dog. Instantly I sprang----"
"So did I!--I _beg_ your pardon for interrupting you!"
"I was merely explaining that I first saw the dog, and next I noticed
you. But first of all I saw the dog."
"That is the exact sequence in my own observations," she rejoined
calmly. "First of all I saw the dog in the water, then I heard a crash
in the bush, and saw something floundering about in the tangle."
"And," continued Gray, much annoyed by her persistency, "no sooner had I
caught hold of the crate than _you_ came up and laid _your_ hand on it,
also. You surely must remember that I had my hand on the crate before
you did!"
"I am very sorry you think so. The contrary was the case. _I_ took firm
hold of the crate, and then you aided me to draw it up out of the
water."
"It is extraordinary," he said, "how mistaken you are concerning the
actual sequence of events. Not that I doubt for a moment that you really
suppose you discovered the dog. Probably you were a little excited----"
"I was perfectly cool. Possibly _you_ were a trifle excited."
"Not in the least," he retorted with calm exasperation. "I never become
agitated."
The puppy continued to shiver and drive its nose up under the girl's
chin.
"Poor little thing! Poor little shipwrecked baby!" she crooned. And, to
Gray: "I don't know why this puppy should be so cold. The water is warm
enough."
"Put it in the hot sand," he said. "We can rub it dry."
She hesitated, flushing perhaps at her own suspicions; but nevertheless
she said:
"You would not attempt to take it if I put it down, would you?"
"I don't intend to snatch it," he said with dignity. "_Men_ don't
snatch."
So they went inland a few paces where the sand was hot and loose and
deep; and there they knelt down and put the puppy on the sand.
[Illustration: "'I am in possession of the dog and you merely claim
possession.'"]
"Scrub him thoroughly," she suggested, pouring heaping handfuls of hot,
silvery sand over the little creature.
Gray did likewise, and together they rubbed and scrubbed and rolled the
puppy about until the dog began to roll on his back all by himself,
twisting and wriggling and waving his big, padded paws.
"What he wants is water," asserted Gray, unstrapping his haversack and
bottle. From the one he produced an aluminum pannikin; from the other he
filled it with water. The puppy drank it all while Gray and the
brown-eyed girl looked on intently.
Then Gray produced some beef sandwiches, and the famished little
creature leaped and whirled and danced as Gray fed him cautiously, bit
by bit.
"Do you think that is perfectly fair?" asked the girl gravely.
"Fair?" repeated Gray guiltily.
"Yes. Who first feeds a strange dog is recognised as the reigning
authority."
"Very well, you may feed him, too. But that does not alter the facts in
the case."
"The facts," said the girl, taking a sandwich from Gray, "are that I am
in possession of the dog and you merely claim possession."
They fed him alternately and in silence--until their opinion became
unanimous that it was dangerous, for the present, to feed him any more.
The puppy begged and pleaded and cajoled and danced--a most appealing
and bewitching little creature, silvery white and blue-ticked, with a
tiny tan point over each eye and a black and tan saddle.
"Lavarack," observed Gray.
"English," she nodded.
It wagged not only its little, whippy tail, but in doing so wriggled its
entire hind quarters, showing no preference for either of its rescuers,
but bestowing winning and engaging favours impartially.
The girl could endure it no longer, but snatched the puppy to her with a
soft little cry, and cuddled it tight. Gray looked on gloomily. Then,
when she released it, he took it and caressed it in masculine fashion.
There was no discernible difference in its affectionate responses.
After the dog had lavished enthusiasm and affection on its saviours to
the point of physical exhaustion, it curled up on the hot sand between
them. At first, when they moved or spoke, the little, silky head was
quickly lifted, and the brown eyes turned alertly from one to the other
of the two beings most beloved on earth. But presently only the whippy
tail stirred in recognition of their voices. And finally the little dog
slept in the hot sunshine.
XVIII
For a long while, seated on either side of the slumbering puppy, they
remained silent, in fascinated contemplation of what they had rescued.
Finally Gray said slowly: "It may seem odd to you that I should be so
firm and uncompromising concerning my right to a very small dog which
may be duplicated in the North for a few dollars."
She lifted her brown eyes to his, then let them fall again on the dog.
"The reason is this," said Gray. "The native dogs I dislike intensely.
Dogs imported from the North soon die in this region. But this little
pup was evidently born on shipboard and on tropical seas. I think he's
very likely to survive the climate. And as I am obliged to reside here
for a while, and as I am to live all alone, this pup is a godsend to
me."
The girl, still resting her eyes on the sleeping puppy, said very
quietly:
"I do not desire to appear selfish, but a girl is twice as lonely as a
man. And as I fortunately first discovered the dog it seems to me
absolutely right and just that I should keep him."
Gray sat pouring sand through his fingers and casting an occasional
oblique glance at the girl. She was not sunburned, so she must be a
recent arrival. She spoke with a northern accent, which determined her
origin.
_What_ was she doing down here on this absurd island? Why didn't she go
back to St. Augustine where she belonged?
"You know," he said craftily, "I can buy a very nice little dog indeed
for you in St. Augustine."
"I am not stopping in St. Augustine. Besides, there are only horrid
little lap-dogs there."
"Don't you like lap-dogs--Pomms, Pekinese, Maltese?" he inquired
persuasively.
"No."
"You are unlike the majority of girls then. What sort of dog do you
like?"
"Setters," she explained with decision.
And as he bit his lip in annoyed silence she added:
"Setter puppies are what I adore."
"I'm sorry," he said bluntly.
She added, not heeding his observation: "I am mad about setter puppies,
particularly English setter puppies. And when I try to realise that I
discovered a shipwrecked one all by myself, and rescued it, I can
scarcely believe in such an adorable miracle."
It was on the tip of his tongue to offer to purchase the pup, but a
quick glance at the girl checked him. She was evidently perfectly
sincere, and the quality of her was unmistakable.
Already, within these few minutes, her skin had begun to burn a delicate
rose tint from the sun's fierce reflection on the white sands. Her hair
was a splendid golden brown, her eyes darker, or perhaps the long, dark
lashes made them seem so. She was daintily and prettily made, head,
throat, shoulders, and limbs; she wore a summer gown so waistless and
limp that it conformed to the corsetless fashions in vogue, making
evident here and there the contours of her slim and supple figure.
From the tip of her white shoe to the tip of her hat she was the futile
and exquisite essence of Gotham.
Gray realised it because he lived there himself. But he could not
understand where all her determination and obstinacy came from, for she
seemed so young and inexperienced, and there was about her a childish
dewiness of eye and lip that suggested a blossom's fragrance.
She was very lovely; and that was all very well in its way, but Gray had
come down there on stern business, and how long his business might last,
and how long he was to inhabit a palmetto bungalow above the coquina
quarry he did not know. The coquina quarry was as hot as the infernal
pit. Also, snakes frequented it.
No black servant--promised him faithfully in St. Augustine the day
before--had yet arrived. A few supplies had been sent over from St.
Augustine, and he was camping in his little house of logs, along with
wood-ticks, blue lizards, white ants, gophers, hornets, and several
chestnut-colored scorpions.
"I wouldn't mind yielding the dog to you," he admitted, "if I were not
so horribly lonely on this miserable island. When evening comes, _you_
will go back to luxury and comfort somewhere or other, with dinner
awaiting you and servants to do everything, and a nice bed to retire to.
That's a pleasant picture, isn't it?"
"Very," she replied, with a slight shrug.
"Now," he said, "please gaze mentally upon this other picture. _I_ am
obliged to go back to a shack haunted by every species of creature that
this wretched island harbours.
"There will be no dinner for me except what I can scoop out of a tin; no
servants to do one bally thing for me; no bed.
"Listen attentively," he continued, becoming slightly dramatic as he
remembered more clearly the horrors of the preceding night--his first on
Ibis Island. "I shall go into that devilish bungalow and look around
like a scared dog, standing very carefully in the exact centre of the
room. And what will be the first object that my unwilling eyes
encounter? A scorpion! Perhaps two, crawling out from the Spanish moss
with which the chinks of that miserable abode are stuffed. I shall slay
it--or _them_--as the case may be. Then a blue-tailed lizard will frisk
over the ceiling--or perhaps one of those big, heavy ones with blunt,
red heads. Doubtless at that same instant I shall discover a wood-tick
advancing up one of my trousers' legs. Spiders will begin to move across
the walls. Perhaps a snake or two will then develop from some shadowy
corner."
He waved his arm impressively and pointed at the sleeping puppy.
"Under such circumstances," he said pathetically, "would you care to
deprive me of this little companion sent by Providence for me to rescue
out of the sea?"
She, too, had been steadily pouring sand between her white fingers
during the moving recital of his woes. Now she looked up, controlling a
shudder.
"Your circumstances, with all their attendant horrors, are my own," she
began. "I, also, since last night, inhabit a picturesque but most horrid
bungalow not very far from here; and every one of the creatures you
describe, and several others also, inhabit it with me. Do you wonder I
want _some_ companionship? Do you wonder that I am inclined to cling to
this little dog--whether or not it may seem ill bred and selfish to
you?"
He said: "I suppose all the houses in this latitude harbour tarantulas,
centipedes, and similar things, but you must remember that you do not
live alone as I do----"
"Yes, I do!"
"What?"
"Certainly. I engaged two black servants in St. Augustine, but they have
not arrived, and I was obliged to remain all alone in that frightful
place last night."
"That's very odd," he said uneasily. "Where _is_ this bungalow of
yours?"
She started to speak, checked herself as at a sudden and unpleasant
thought, looked up at him searchingly; and found his steel-grey eyes as
searchingly fixed on her.
"Where is _your_ bungalow?" she asked, watching him intently.
"Mine is situated at the west end of a coquina quarry. Where is yours?"
"Mine," she answered unsteadily but defiantly, "is situated on the
eastern edge of a coquina quarry."
"Why did _you_ choose a quarry bungalow?"
"Why did _you_ choose one?"
"Because the coquina quarry happens to belong to me."
"The quarry," she retorted, "belongs to _me_."
He was almost too disgusted to speak, but he contrived to say, quietly
and civilly:
"You are Constance Leslie, are you not?"
"Yes.... You are Johnson Gray?"
"Yes, I am," he answered, checking his exasperation and forcing a smile.
"It's rather odd, isn't it--rather unfortunate, I'm afraid."
"It _is_ unfortunate for you, Mr. Gray," she returned firmly. "I'm
sorry--really sorry that this long journey is in vain."
"So am I," he said, with lips compressed.
For a few moments they sat very still, not looking at each other.
Presently he said: "It was a fool of a will. He was a most disagreeable
old man."
"_I_ never saw him."
"Nor I. They say he was a terror. But he had a sense of humour--a grim
and acrid one--the cynic's idea of wit. No doubt he enjoyed it. No doubt
he is enjoying this very scene between you and me--if he's anywhere
within sight or hearing----"
"Don't say that!" she exclaimed, almost violently. "It is horrible
enough on this island without hinting of ghosts."
"Ghosts? Of course there are ghosts. But I'd rather have my bungalow
full of 'em than full of scorpions."
"We differ," she said coldly.
Silence fell again, and again was broken by Gray.
"Certainly the old fellow had a sense of humour," he insisted; "the will
he left was one huge joke on every relative who had expectations.
Imagine all that buzzard family of his who got nothing to amount to
anything; and all those distant relatives who expected nothing and got
almost everything!"
"Do you think that was humourous?"
"Yes; don't you? And I think what he did about you and me was really
very funny. Don't you?"
"Why is it funny for a very horrid old man to make a will full of grim
jokes and jests, and take that occasion to tell everybody exactly what
he thinks of everybody?"
"He said nothing disagreeable about _us_ that I recollect," remarked
Gray, laughing.
Pouring sand between her fingers, she said:
"I remember very well how he mentioned us. He said that he had never
seen either one of us, and was glad of it. He said that as I was an
orphan with no money, and that as you were similarly situated, and that
as neither you nor I had brains enough to ever make any, he would leave
his coquina quarry to that one of us who had brains enough to get here
first and stake the claim. Do you call that an agreeable manner of
making a bequest?"
Gray laughed easily: "_I_ don't care what he thought about my
intellectual capacity."
"I suppose that I don't either. And anyway the bequest may be valuable."
"There is no doubt about that," said Gray.
She let her brown eyes rest thoughtfully on the ocean.
"I think," she said, "that I shall dispose of it at once."
"The dog?" he asked politely.
Her pretty, hostile eyes met his:
"The quarry," she replied calmly.
"Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "Do you think also that _you_ arrived at the
quarry before I arrived?"
"You will find my stake with its written notice sticking in the sand on
the eastern edge of the quarry, about a hundred yards south of my
bungalow!"
"_My_ notice is very carefully staked on the western edge of the quarry
about the same distance from my bungalow," he said. "I placed it there
yesterday evening."
"I also placed my notice there yesterday evening!"
"By what train did you come?"
"By the Verbena Special. It arrived at St. Augustine yesterday at four
o'clock in the afternoon."
"_I_ also came on that train."
"I," she said, "waited in St. Augustine only long enough to telephone
for servants, and then I jumped into a victoria and drove over the
causeway to the eastern end of the quarry."
"I did exactly the same," he insisted, "only I drove to the western end
of the quarry. What time did you set your notice?"
"I don't know exactly. It was just about dusk."
"It was just about dusk when I drove in _my_ stake!"
After a moment's idling in the sand with her slim fingers, she looked up
at him a trifle pale.
"I suppose this means a lawsuit."
"I'm afraid it does."
"I'm sorry. If I wasn't in such desperate need of money----" But she
said no more, and he also remained silent for a while. Then:
"I shall write to my attorney to come down," he said soberly. "You had
better do the same this evening."
She nodded.
"It's got to be settled, of course," he continued; "because I'm too poor
to concede the quarry to you."
"It is that way with me also. I do not like to appear so selfish to
you, but what am I to do, Mr. Gray?"
"What am _I_ to do? I honestly believe that I staked the quarry before
you did.... And my financial situation does not permit me to relinquish
my claim on the quarry."
"What a horrid will that was!" she exclaimed, the quick tears of
vexation springing into her brown eyes. "If you knew how hard I've
worked, Mr. Gray--all these years having nothing that other girls
have--being obliged to work my way through college, and then take a
position as governess--and just as it seemed that relief was in
sight--_you_ come into sight!--you!--and you even try to take away my
little dog--the only thing I--I ever really cared for since I have--have
been alone in the world----"
Gray sprang up nervously: "I'm sorry--terribly sorry for you! You may
keep the dog anyway."
She had turned away her face sharply as the quick tears started. Now she
looked around at him in unfeigned surprise.
"But--what will _you_ do?"
"Oh, I can stand being alone. I don't mind. There's no doubt about it;
you must have the dog----" He glanced down at the little creature and
caught his breath sharply as the puppy opened one eye and wagged its
absurd tail feebly.
The girl rose lightly and gracefully from the sand, refusing his
assistance, and stood looking down at the puppy. The little thing was on
its clumsy feet, wagging and wriggling with happiness, and gazing up
adoringly from Gray to Constance Leslie.
The girl looked at the dog, then at Gray.
"It--it seems too cruel," she said. "I can't bear to take him away from
you."
"Oh, that's all right. I'll get on very well alone."
"You are generous. You are very generous. But after the way you
expressed yourself concerning the dog, I don't feel that I can possibly
take him."
"You really must. I don't blame you at all for falling in love with him.
Besides, one adores what one rescues, above everything in the world."
"But--but I thought that you thought _you_ had rescued him?" she
faltered.
"It was a close call. I think perhaps that you arrived just a fraction
of a second sooner than I did."
"Do you really? Or do you say that to be kind? Besides, I am not at all
sure. It is perfectly possible--even, perhaps, probable that you saw
him before I did."
"No, I don't think so. I think he's your dog, Miss Leslie. I surrender
all claim to him----"
"No! I can not permit you to do such a thing! Forgive me. I was excited
and a little vexed.... I know you would be very unhappy if I took the
little thing----"
"Please take him. I do love him already, but that is why it gives me a
p-p-peculiar pleasure to relinquish all claims in y-your favour."
"Thank you. It is--is charming of you--exceedingly nice of you--but how
can I accept such a real sacrifice?... You would be perfectly wretched
to-night without him."
"So would you, Miss Leslie."
"I shall be wretched anyway. So it doesn't really matter."
"It _does_ matter! If this little dog can alleviate your unhappiness in
the slightest degree, I insist most firmly that you take him!"
The girl stood irresolute, lifted her brown eyes to his, lowered them,
and gazed longingly at the puppy.
"Do you suppose he will follow me?"
"Try!"
So she walked one way and Gray started in the opposite direction, and
the bewildered puppy, who at first supposed it was all in play, dashed
from one back to the other, until the widening distance between them
perplexed and finally began to trouble him.
Nevertheless, he continued to run back and forth from Gray to Constance
Leslie as long as his rather wavering legs held out. Then, unable to
decide, he stood panting midway between them, whining at moments, until,
unable to understand or endure the spectacle of his two best beloveds
vanishing in opposite directions, he put up his nose and howled.
Then both best beloveds came back running, and Constance snatched him to
her breast and covered him with caresses.
"What on earth are we to do?" she said in consternation. "We nearly
broke his heart that time."
"_I_ don't know what to do," he admitted, much perplexed. "This pup
seems to be impartial in his new-born affections."
"I thought," she said, with an admirable effort at self-denial, "that he
rather showed a preference for _you_!"
"Why?"
"Because when he was sitting there howling his little heart out, he
seemed to look toward you a little oftener than he gazed in my
direction."
Gray rose nobly to the self-effacing level of his generous adversary:
"No, the balance was, if anything, in your favour. I'm very certain that
he will be happier with you. T-take him!"
The girl buried her pretty face in the puppy's coat as though it had
been a fluffy muff.
"What a pity," she said, in a muffled voice, "that he is compelled to
make a choice. It will break his heart; I know it will. He is too
young."
"He'll very soon forget me, once he is alone with you in your bungalow."
The girl shook her head and stood caressing the puppy. The soft, white
hand, resting on the dog's head, fascinated Gray.
"Perhaps," he ventured, "I had better walk as far as your bungalow with
you.... It may spare the dog a certain amount of superficial anguish."
She nodded, dreamy-eyed there in the sunshine. And of what she might be
thinking he could form no idea.
XIX
He fell into step beside her, and they walked up from the little cover
through the beach-grapes and out among the scrubby dunes, where in the
heated silence the perfume of sweet-bay and pines mingled with the odour
of the sea.
Everywhere the great sulphur-coloured butterflies were flying, making
gorgeous combinations with the smaller, orange butterflies and the
great, velvet-winged Palamedes swallow-tail.
Lizards frisked and raced away before them, emerald tinted, green with
sky-blue tails, grey and red; the little gophers scurried into their
burrows along the tangled hammock's edges. Over the palm-trees' feathery
crests sailed a black vulture, its palmated wing-tips spread like inky
fingers against the blue. Somewhere in the saw-grass a bittern boomed
and boomed; and the seagulls' clamour rang incessantly above the thunder
of the surf.
"I wonder," she murmured, "whether my sunburn makes me drowsy."
"It's the climate. You'll feel sleepy for a week before you are
acclimated," he said.... "Why don't you put down the puppy and let him
follow?"
She did so; and the little creature frisked and leaped and padded
joyously about among the bayberry bushes, already possessed with the
canine determination to investigate all the alluring smells in the
world, and miss none of them.
After a little while they arrived at the bungalow which Constance had
chosen. The girl pushed open the unlocked door; the puppy pranced in
like a diminutive hobby-horse, flushed a big lizard, and went into fits
of excitement till the solitary cabin rang with his treble barking.
They watched him through the doorway, laughingly; then Gray looked at
the claim notice stuck upright in the sand. Presently he walked to the
edge of the coquina quarry and looked down into it.
Thousands of dollars' worth of the shell deposit lay already exposed.
There were great strata of it; ledges, shelves, vast masses in every
direction. The quarry had been worked very little, and that little had
been accomplished stupidly. Either in the rough, or merely as lumps of
conglomerate for crushing, the coquina in sight alone was very, very
valuable. There could be no doubt of that.
Also, he understood that the strata deposited there continued at least
for half a mile to the westward, where his own bungalow marked its
probable termination.
He turned after a few minutes' inspection, and walked slowly back to
where Constance was standing by the open door. A slight constraint,
amounting almost to embarrassment, ensued for a few minutes, but the
puppy dissipated it when he leaped at a butterfly, fell on his nose with
a thump, and howled dismally until reassured by his anxious
foster-parents, who caught him up and generously passed him to each
other, petting him vigourously.
Twice Gray said good-bye to Constance Leslie and started to go on toward
his own bungalow, but the puppy invariably began a frantic series of
circles embracing them both, and he had to come back to keep the dog
from the demoralisation of utter exhaustion.
"You know," he said, "this is going to be awkward. I believe that dog
thinks we are mar--thinks we are sister and brother. Don't you?"
She replied with a slight flush on her fair face, that the dog
undoubtedly cherished some such idea.
"Take him inside," said Gray firmly. "Then I'll beat it."
So she took the puppy inside and closed the door, with a smiling nod of
adieu to Gray. But he had not gone very far when he heard her clear, far
call; and, turning, saw her beckon frantically.
Back he came at top speed.
"Oh, dear," she exclaimed. "Oh, dear! He's tearing 'round and 'round the
room moaning and whining and barking. I'm very certain he will have fits
if you don't speak to him."
Gray opened the door cautiously, and the little dog came out, projected
like a bolt from a catapult, fairly flinging his quivering little body
into Gray's arms.
The reunion was elaborate and mutually satisfying. Constance furtively
touched her brown eyes with a corner of her handkerchief.
"What on earth are we to do?" she asked, unfeignedly affected. "I would
give him to you in a minute if you think he would be contented without
me."
"We can try it."
So Constance started westward, across the dunes, and Gray went into the
bungalow with the dog. But it required only a second or two to convince
him that it wouldn't do, and he opened the door and called frantically
to Constance.
"There is no use in trying that sort of thing," he admitted, when
Constance hastened back to a touching reunion with the imprisoned dog.
"Strategy is our only hope. I'll sit here on the threshold with you, and
as soon as he goes to sleep I'll slink away."
So side by side they seated themselves on the sandy threshold of the
bungalow, and the little dog, happy and contented, curled up on the
floor of the room, tucked his blunt muzzle into his flank, and took a
series of naps with one eye always open. He was young, but suspicion had
already done its demoralising work with him, and he intended to keep at
least one eye on his best beloveds.
She in her fresh and clinging gown, with the first delicate sunmask
tinting her unaccustomed skin, sat silent and distrait, her idle fingers
linked in her lap. And, glancing askance at her now and then, the droop
of her under lip seemed to him pathetic, like that of a tired child in
trouble.
When he was not looking at her he was immersed in perplexed cogitation.
The ownership of the dog he had already settled in his mind; the
ownership of the quarry he had supposed he had settled.
Therefore, why was he so troubled about it? Why was he so worried about
her, wondering what she would do in the matter?
The only solution left seemed to lie in a recourse to the
law--unless--unless----
But he couldn't--he simply couldn't, merely for a sentimental impulse,
give up to a stranger what he honestly considered an inheritance. That
would be carrying sentimentalism too far.
And yet--and yet! He needed the inheritance desperately. Matters
financial had gone all wrong with him. How _could_ he turn his back on
offered salvation just because a youthful and pretty girl also required
a financial lift in a cold-blooded and calculating world?
And yet--and yet! He would sleep over it, of course. But he honestly saw
no prospect of changing his opinion concerning the ownership of the
quarry.
As he sat there biting a stem of sweet-bay and listening to the
cardinals piping from the forest, he looked down into the heated coquina
pit.
A snake was coiled up on one of the ledges, basking.
"Miss Leslie!"
She lifted her head and straightened her drooping shoulders, looking at
him from eyes made drowsy and beautiful by the tropic heat.
"I only wanted to say," he began gravely, "that it is not safe for you
to go into the quarry alone--in case you had any such intention."
"Why?"
"There are snakes there. Do you see that one? Well, he's harmless, I
think--a king-snake, if I am not mistaken. But it's a good place for
rattlers."
"Then you should be careful, too."
"Oh, I'm careful enough, but you might not know when to be on your
guard. This island is a snaky one. It's famous for its diamond-back
rattlers and the size of them. Their fangs are an inch long, and it
usually means death to be struck by one of them."
The girl nodded thoughtfully.
He said with a new anxiety: "As a matter of fact, you really ought not
to be down here all alone."
"I know it. But it meant a race for ownership, and I had to come at a
minute's notice."
"You should have brought a maid."
"My dear Mr. Gray, I have no maid."
"Oh, I forgot," he muttered--"but, somehow, you _look_ as though you
had been born to several."
"I am the daughter of a very poor professor."
He fidgetted with his sweet-bay twig, considering the aromatic leaves
with a troubled and concentrated scowl.
"You know," he said, "this wretched island is celebrated for its
unpleasant fauna. Scorpions and wood-ticks are numerous. The sting of
the one is horribly painful, and might be dangerous; the villainous
habits of the other might throw you into a fever."
"But what can I do?" she inquired calmly.
"There are other kinds of snakes, too," he went on with increasing
solicitude for this girl for whom, suddenly, he began to consider
himself responsible. "There's a vicious snake called a moccasin; and he
won't get out of your way or warn you. And there's a wicked little
serpent with rings of black, scarlet, and yellow around his body. He
pretends to be harmless, but if he gets your finger into his mouth he'll
chew it full of a venom which is precisely the same sort of venom as
that of the deadly East Indian cobra."
"But--what can I do?" she repeated pitifully. "If I go to St. Augustine
and leave you here in possession, it might invalidate my claim."
He was silent, knowing no more about the law than did she, and afraid to
deny her tentative assertion.
"If it lay with me," he said, "I'd call a truce until you could go to
St. Augustine and return again with the proper people to look out for
you."
"Even if you were kind enough to do that, I could not afford even a
servant under present--and unexpected--conditions."
"Why?"
"Because it has suddenly developed that I shall be obliged to engage a
lawyer. And I had not expected that."
He reddened to his hair but said nothing. After a while the girl looked
over her shoulder. The puppy slept, this time with both eyes closed.
When she turned again to Gray, he nodded his comprehension and rose to
his feet cautiously.
"I'm going to take a walk on the beach and think this thing all out," he
whispered, taking the slim, half-offered hand in adieu. "Don't go out in
the scrub after sun-down. Rattlers move then. Don't go near any swamp;
moccasins are the colour of sun-baked mud, and you can't see them. Don't
touch any pretty little snake marked scarlet, black, and yellow----"
"How absurd!" she whispered. "As though I were likely to fondle snakes!"
"I'm terribly worried about you," he insisted, retaining her hand.
"Please don't be."
"How can I help it--what with these bungalows full of scorpions and----"
"Yours is, too," she said anxiously. "You will be very careful, won't
you?"
"Yes, of course.... I'm--I'm uncertain about you. That's what is
troubling me----"
"Please don't bother about me. I've had to look out for myself for
years."
"Have you?" he said, almost tenderly. Then he drew a quick, determined
breath.
"You'll be careful, won't you?"
"Yes."
"Are you armed?"
"I have a shot-gun inside."
"That's all right. Don't open your door to any stranger.... You know I
simply hate to leave you alone this way----"
"But I have the dog," she reminded him, with a pretty flush of
gratitude.
He had retained her hand longer than the easiest convention required or
permitted. So he released it, hesitated, then with a visible effort he
turned on his heel and strode away westward across the scrub.
The sun hung low behind the tall, parti-coloured shaft of the Light
House, towering smooth and round high above the forest.
He looked up at Ibis Light, at the circling buzzards above it, then
walked on, scarcely knowing where he was going, until he walked into the
door of his own bungalow, and several large spiders scattered into
flight across the floor.
"There's no use," he said aloud to an audience of lizards clinging to
the silvery bark of the log-room. "I can't take that quarry. I can't do
it--whether it belongs to me or not. _How_ can a big, strong, lumbering
young man do a thing like that? No. No. _No!_"
He picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper:
"Oh, Lord! I really do need the money, but I can't do it."
And he wrote:
DEAR MISS LESLIE:
You arrived on the scene before I did. I am now convinced of
this. I shall not dispute the ownership of the quarry. It is
yours. This statement over my signature is your guarantee that
I shall never interfere with your title to the coquina quarry
on Ibis Island.
So now I've got to return to New York and go to work. I'm going
across to Augustine in a few moments; and while I'm there I'll
engage a white woman as companion for you, and a white servant,
and have them drive over at once so they will reach your
bungalow before evening. With undisputed title to the quarry,
you can easily afford their wages.
Good-bye. I wish you every happiness and success. Please give
my love to the dog.
Yours very truly,
JOHNSON GRAY.
"It's the only way out of it," he muttered. "I'll leave it with her and
bolt before she reads it. There is nothing else to do, absolutely
nothing."
As he came out of his cabin, the sun hung low and red above the palm
forest, and a few bats were already flying like tiny black devils above
the scrub.
There was a strip of beach near his cabin, and he went down to it and
began to tramp up and down with a vague idea of composing himself so
that he might accomplish what he had to do gracefully, gaily, and with
no suspicion of striking an attitude for gods and men to admire his
moral resignation and his heroic renunciation.
No; he'd do the thing lightly, smilingly, determined that she should not
think that it was a sacrifice. No; she must believe that a sense of
fairness alone moved him to an honest recognition of her claims. He must
make it plain to her that he really believed she had arrived at the
quarry before he had.
And so he meant to leave her the letter, say good-bye, and go.
When this was all settled in his mind he looked at the ocean very
soberly, then turned his back on the Atlantic and walked back to his
cabin to gather up his effects.
As he approached the closed door a desolate howl from the interior
greeted him: he sprang to the door and flung it open; and the puppy
rushed into his arms.
Then, pinned to the scorpion-infested wall, he saw a sheet of writing,
and he read:
DEAR MR. GRAY:
He woke up and howled for you. It was too tragic for me. I love
him but I give him to you. I give the quarry to you, also.
Under the circumstances it would be impossible for me to enjoy
it, even if the law awarded it to me. Nobody could ever really
know which one of us first arrived and staked the claim. No
doubt you did.
I am sorry I came into your life and made trouble for you and
for the puppy.
So I leave you in peaceful possession. It really is a happiness
for me to do it.
I am going North at once. Good-bye; and please give my love to
the dog. Poor little darling, he thought we both stood _in loco
parentis_. But he'll get over his grief for me.
Yours truly,
CONSTANCE LESLIE.
The puppy at his feet was howling uncomforted for the best beloved who
was so strangely missing from the delightful combination which he had so
joyously accepted _in loco parentis_.
XX
Gray gathered the dog into his arms and strode swiftly out into the
sunshot, purple light of early evening.
"What a girl!" he muttered to himself. "What a girl! What a corking
specimen of her sex!"
Presently he came in sight of her, and the puppy scrambled violently
until set down. Then he bolted for Constance Leslie, and it was only
when the little thing leaped frantically upon her that she turned with a
soft, breathless little cry. And saw Gray coming toward her out of the
rose and golden sunset.
Neither spoke as he came up and looked into her brown eyes and saw the
traces of tears there still. The puppy leaped deliriously about them.
And for a long while her slim hands lay limply in his. He looked at the
ocean; she at the darkening forest.
And after a little while he drew the note from his pocket.
"I had written this when I found yours," he said. And he held it for her
while she read it, bending nearer in the dim, rosy light.
After she read it she took it from him gently, folded it, and slipped it
into the bosom of her gown.
Neither said anything. One of her hands still remained in his,
listlessly at first--then the fingers crisped as his other arm encircled
her.
They were both gazing vaguely at the ocean now. Presently they moved
slowly toward it through the fragrant dusk. Her hair, loosened a little,
brushed his sunburned cheek.
And around them gambolled the wise little dog, no longer apprehensive,
but unutterably content with what the God of all good little doggies had
so mercifully sent to him _in loco parentis_.
* * * * *
"That," said the novelist, "is another slice of fact which would never
do for fiction. Besides I once read a story somewhere or other about a
dog bringing two people together."
"The theme," I observed, "is thousands of years old."
"That's the trouble with all truth," nodded Duane. "It's old as Time
itself, and needs a new suit of clothes every time it is exhibited to
instruct people."
"What with new manners, new fashions, new dances, and the moral
levelling itself gradually to the level of the unmoral," said Stafford,
"nobody on the street would turn around to look at the naked truth in
these days."
"Truth must be fashionably gowned to attract," I admitted.
"We of the eccentric nobility understand that," said the little Countess
Athalie, glancing out of the window; and to me she added: "Lean over and
see whether they have stationed a policeman in front of the Princess
Zimbamzim's residence."
I went out on the balcony and glanced down the block. "Yes," I said.
"Poor old Princess," murmured the girl. "She detests moving."
"All frauds do," remarked Duane.
"She isn't a fraud," said Athalie quietly.
Our silence indicated our surprise. After a few moments the girl added:
"Whatever else she may be she is not a fraud in her profession. I think
I had better give you an example of her professional probity. It
interested me considerably as I followed it in my crystal. She knew all
the while that I was watching her as well as the very people she herself
was watching; and once or twice she looked up at me out of my crystal
and grinned."
"Can she see us now?" I inquired uneasily.
"No."
"Why not?" asked Duane.
"I shall not tell you why."
"Not that I care whether she sees me or not," he added.
"Do you care, Harry, whether I see you occasionally in my crystal?"
smiled Athalie.
Duane flushed brightly and reminded her that she was too honourable to
follow the movements of her personal friends unless requested to do so
by them.
"That is quite true," rejoined the girl, simply. "But once I saw you
when I did not mean to."
"Well?" he demanded, redder still.
"You were merely asleep in your own bed," she said, laughing and
accepting a lighted match from me. Then as the fragrant thread of smoke
twisted in ghostly ringlets across her smooth young cheeks she settled
back among her cushions.
XXI
"This," she said, "will acquaint you in a measure with the
trustworthiness of the Princess Zimbamzim. And, if the policeman in
front of her house could hear what I am going to tell you, he'd never
remain there while his legs had power to run away with him."
* * * * *
They met by accident on Madison Square, and shook hands for the first
time in many years. High in the Metropolitan Tower the chimes celebrated
the occasion by sounding the half hour.
"It seems incredible," exclaimed George Z. Green, "that you could have
become so famous! You never displayed any remarkable ability in school."
"I never displayed any ability at all. But you did," said Williams
admiringly. "How beautifully you used to write your name on the
blackboard! How neat and scholarly you were in everything."
"I know it," said
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