It was one of those golden evenings that sometimes follows a hot clear day—one of those rare evenings which linger in the memory when summer has slipped away and which come back into the mind like a smile, an endearment or a broad sweet melody, renewing optimism and replenishing faith. The sun had gone, but its warm glow lingered in a sky that was utterly unspotted. The quiet unruffled trees in all the rich green of early maturity stood out against it almost as though they were painted on canvas. The light was so true that distances were brought up to the eye. Far-away sounds came closely to the ear. The murmur from the earth gathered like that of a multitude of voices responding to prayers.
Palgrave drove slowly. The God-given peace and beauty that lay over everything quieted the stress and storm of his mind. Somehow, too, with Joan at his side on the road to the cottage in which he was to play out the second or the last act of the drama of his Great Emotion, life and death caught something of the truth and dignity of that memorable evening—the sounds of life and the distance of death. If he was not to live with Joan he would die with her. There was, to him, in the state of mind into which this absorbing passion had worked him, no alternative. Love, that he had made his lodestar in early youth and sought in vain, had come at last. Marriage, convention, obligations, responsibility, balance and even sanity mattered nothing. They were swept like chaff before this sex-storm. Ten years of dreams were epitomized in Joan. She was the ideal that he had placed on the secret altar of his soul. She struck, all vibrant with youth, the one poetic note that was hidden in his character behind vanity and sloth, cynicism and the ingrained belief that whatever he desired he must have. And as he drove away from Easthampton and the Hosack house he left behind him Alice and all that she was and meant. She receded from his mind like the white cliffs of a shore to which he never intended to return. He was happier than he had ever been. In his curious exaltation, life, with its tips and downs, its pettiness, its monotony, lay far below him, as the moving panorama of land does to a flying man. His head was clear, his plan definite. He felt years younger—almost boyish. Laughter came easy—the sort of reasonless laughter that comes to tired men as they start out on a holiday. He saw the strangeness of it all with some wonder and much triumph. The Gilbert Palgrave who had been molded by money and inertia and autocracy was discarded, and the man with Joan at his side was the young Gilbert whom he had caught sight of that night in Paris, when, on his way home under the stars, Joan, with her brown hair and laughing eyes, tip-tilted nose and the spirit of spring in her breath, had come out of his inner consciousness and established herself like a shape in a dream.
His heart turned when he looked at Joan's face. Was its unusual gravity due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling—that she, too, had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so. He believed so. She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less triumphantly irresponsible. She sat, like a child, with her hands in her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with their long curling lashes. A black straight-brimmed straw hat sat well down on her small head and put a shadow on her face. The slim roundness of her arms showed through the white silk shirt, and her low collar proved all the beauty of her throat and neck. She looked more than ever unplucked, untouched, like a rosebud.
On the tip of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly in order to give the two Japanese servants time to carry out his instructions and remove themselves. That cottage, which he had bought on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care and used only twice, for two weeks since, was to justify itself, after all. Who knows? He might have bought it two years before under an inspiration. Even then, months and months before he met Joan or knew of her existence, this very evening might have been mapped out He was a fatalist, and it fell into his creed to think so.
He didn't wonder why Joan was silent or ask himself jealously of what she was thinking. He chose to believe that she had arrived at the end of impishness, had grown weary of Harry Oldershaw and his cubbish ways and had turned to himself naturally and with relief, choosing her moment with the uncanny intuition that is the gift of women. She was only just in time. To-morrow would have found him following the faithful Alice on her forlorn hope—the incurable man.
It was only when they turned into the narrow sandy road that was within a quarter of a mile of the club at Devon that Joan came out of the numbness that had settled upon her and recognized things that were stamped with the marks of an afternoon that was never to be forgotten. Martin—Martin—and it was all her fault.
"But why are you coming this way?" she asked, drawing back into her seat.
"Because my cottage is just here," said Gilbert.
"At Devon?"
"Yes. Why not? I had a fancy for playing hermit from time to time. I saw the sun set behind the water,—a Byron sunset,—and in the hope of seeing just such another I bought this shack. I did those things once for want of something better. Look at it," he said, and turned the car through a rustic gate, alive with honeysuckle.
It was a bungalow, put up on a space cleared among a wood of young trees that was carpeted with ferns. It might have been built for a poet or a novelist or just an ordinary muscular man who loved the water and the silences and the sense of being on the edge of the world. It was a bungalow of logs, roughly constructed and saved from utter banality by being almost completely clothed in wisteria. It was admirably suited to two men who found amusement in being primitive or to a romantic honeymoon couple who wanted to fancy themselves on a desert island. Better still, it might have been built for just that night, for Palgrave and the girl who had taken shape in his one good dream.
Joan got out of the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the side of the house. There was no garage and not even a shed to give it cover. Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen.
Joan had noticed this place twice that day—on the way out to find Martin, and again on the way back from having heard the voice of the girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle. Martin—Martin—and it was all her fault.
She wondered for a moment why no one came to open the door. Some one was there because smoke was coming out of a chimney. But she refused to be impatient. She had decided to give Gilbert one evening—to be nice to him for one evening. He was terribly humble. Fate had dealt her a smashing blow on the heart, and she had returned to consciousness wistfully eager to make up at least to this man as well as she could for the pain that she had caused. There was only this one evening in which to do so because to-morrow she was going back to the old house, the old people, the old servants and the old days, a failure, having fallen off the Round-about, of which she had spoken so much. She was going back a sort of cripple to the place from which she had escaped to put the key into life; once more to read to her grandfather, to obey the orders of her grandmother, to sleep in the warm kind arms of her old bedroom, to go among the flowers and trees among which she had grown up, herself old and tired and ashamed and broken-hearted, with her gold ring burning into her finger and the constant vision of Martin's shining armor lying bent and rusty before her eyes. What an end to her great adventure!
Gilbert came up. He walked without his usual affectation of never permitting anything to hurry him. All about him there was still a sort of exaltation. His eyes were amazingly bright. His face had lost its cynicism. Ten years seemed to have fallen from his shoulders like a pack. He was a youth again, like Martin and Harry and Howard. Joan noticed all this and was vaguely surprised—and glad, because obviously she was giving him pleasure. He deserved it after her impish treatment of him. What a fool she had been.
He said, bending down, "We keep the key here," and picked it up, unlocked the door and stood back for her to pass.
"Oh, isn't this nice!" said Joan.
"Do you like it? It amused me to make it comfortable."
"Comfortable! But it's like a picture."
Gilbert laughed boyishly. Her enthusiasm delighted him. To make the long low living room with its big brick chimney and open fireplace absolutely right had dispelled his boredom—little as he had intended to use it. The whole thing was carried out on the lines of the main room in an English shooting box. The walls were matchboarded and stained an oak color, and the floor was polished and covered with skins. Old pewter plates and mugs, and queer ugly delightful bits of pottery were everywhere—on shelves, on the wide mantelpiece, and hanging from the beams. Colored sporting prints covered the walls, among stuffed fish and heads of deer with royal antlers and beady eyes with a fixed stare. The furniture was Jacobean—the chairs with ladder backs and cane seats; a wide dresser, lined with colored plates; a long narrow table with rails and bulging legs. Two old oak church pews were set on each side of the fireplace filled with cushions covered with a merry chintz. There were flowers everywhere in big bowls—red rambler roses, primula, sweet williams, Shasta daisies, and scarlet poppies. All the windows were open, and there was nothing damp or musty in the smell of the room. On the contrary, the companionable aroma of tobacco smoke hung in the air mixed with the sweet faint scent of flowers. The place seemed "lived-in"—as well it might. The two Japs had played gentlemen there for some weeks. The table was laid for two, and appetizing dishes of cold food, salad and fruit were spread out on the dresser and sideboard, with iced champagne and claret cup.
"The outside of the cottage didn't suggest all this comfort," said Joan.
"Comfort's the easiest thing in the world when you can pay for it. There's one bedroom half the size of this and two small ones. A bathroom and kitchen beyond. There's water, of course, and electric light, and there's a telephone. I loathe the telephone, the destroyer of aloofness, the missionary that breaks into privacy." He switched on the lights in several old lanterns as he spoke. The day had almost disappeared.
He went over to her and stood smiling.
"Well, isn't this better than a road-house reeking of food and flies and made hideous by a Jazz band?"
"Much better," she said.
The delightful silence was broken by the crickets.
"Martin—Martin," she thought, "and it was all my fault."
A sort of tremble ran over Gilbert as he looked at her. Agony and joy clashed in his heart. He had suffered, gone sleepless, worn himself out by hard, grim exercise in order, who knew how many times, to master his almost unendurable passion. He had killed long nights, the very thought of which made him shudder, by reading books of which he never took in a word. He had stood up in the dark, unmanned, and cursed himself and her and life. He had denounced her to himself and once to her as a flapper, a fool-girl, an empty-minded frivolous thing encased in a body as beautiful as spring. He had thrown himself on his knees and wept like a young boy who had been hurt to the very quick by a great injustice. He had faced himself up, and with the sort of fear that comes to men in moments of physical danger, recognized madness in his eyes. But not until that instant, as she stood before him unguarded in his lonely cottage, so slight and sweet and unexpectedly gentle, her eyes as limpid as the water of a brook, her lips soft and kind and unkissed, her whole young body radiating virginity, did he really know how amazingly and frighteningly he loved her. But once again he held back a rush of adoring words and a desire to touch and hold and claim. The time had not come yet. Let her warm to him. Let him live down the ugliness of the mood that she had recently put him into, do away with the impression he must have given her of jealousy and petulance and scorn. Let her get used to him as a man who had it in him to be as natural and impersonal, and even as cubbish, as some of the boys she knew. Later, when night had laid its magic on the earth, he would make his last bid for her kisses—or take her with him across the horizon.
"How do you like that?" he asked, and pointed to a charmingly grotesque piece of old Staffordshire pottery which made St. George a stunted churchwarden with the legs of a child, his horse the kind of animal that would be used in a green grocer's cart and the dragon a cross between a leopard and a half-bred bulldog.
"Very amusing," she said, going over to it.
And the instant her back was turned, he opened a drawer in a sideboard and satisfied himself that the thing which might have to put them into Eternity together lay there, loaded.
"And now," he said gayly, "let's dine and, if you don't mind, I will buttle. I hate servants in a place like this." He went to the head of the table and drew back a chair.
Joan sat down, thanking him with a smile. It was hard to believe that, with the words of that girl still ringing in her ears and the debris of her hopes lying in a heap about her feet, she was going through the process of being nice to this man who had his claims. It was unreal, fantastic. It wasn't really happening. She must be lying face down on some quiet corner of Mother Earth and watering its bosom with tears of blood. Martin—Martin! It was all her fault.
Tomorrow she would be back again in the old house, with the old people and the old dogs and the old trees and follow her old routine—old, old. That was the price she must pay for being a kid when she should have been a woman.
Palgrave stood at the sideboard and carved a cold chicken decorated with slips of parsley. "Have you ever gone into a room in which you've never been before and recognized everything in it or done some thing for the first time that you suddenly realize isn't new to you?"
"Yes, often," replied Joan. "Why?"
"You've never sat in that chair until this minute and this chicken was probably killed this morning. But I've seen you sitting in just that attitude at that table and cut the wing of this very bird and watched that identical smile round your lips when I put the plate in front of you." He put it in front of her and the scent of her hair made him catch his breath. "Oh, my God!" he said to himself. "This girl—this beautiful, cool, bewitching thing—the dew of youth upon her, as chaste as unsunned snow—Oh, my God...."
But Joan had caught the scent of honeysuckle, and back into her brain came that cottage splashed with sun, the lithe figure of Harry Oldershaw with his face tanned the color of mahogany and the clear voice of "Mrs. Gray."
Gilbert filled her glass with champagne cup, carved for himself and sat at the foot of the table. "The man from whom I bought this place," he said, saying anything to make conversation and keep himself rig idly light and, as he hoped, like Oldershaw, "owns a huge ready-made clothes store on Broadway—appalling things with comic belts and weird pockets."
"Oh!" said Joan. Always, for ever, the scent of honeysuckle would bring that picture back. Martin—Martin.
"He makes any amount of money by dressing that portion of young America which sells motors and vacuum cleaners and gramaphone records and hangs about stage doors smoking cheap cigarettes."
"Yes?" Joan listened but heard nothing except that high clear voice coming through the screen door.
"He built this cottage as an antidote and spent his week-ends here entirely alone with the trees and crickets, trying to write poetry. He was very pleased with it and believed that this atmosphere was going to make him immortal."
"I see,"—but all she saw was a porch covered with honeysuckle, a hammock with an open book face downwards in it and the long shadow of Harry Oldershaw flung across the white steps.
Gilbert went on—pathetically unable to catch the unaffected young stuff of the nice boy and his kind. He had never been young.
"He had had no time during his hard struggle to read the masters, and when, without malice, I quoted a chunk of Grey's 'Elegy' to him, the poor devil's jaw fell, he withdrew his blank refusal to sell the place to me, pocketed my cheque, packed his grip, and slouched off then and there, looking as if a charge of dynamite had blown his chest away. His garments, I notice, are as comic as ever, and I suppose he is now living in a turretted house with stucco walls and stone lions at New Rochelle, wedded to Commerce and a buxom girl who talks too much and rag-times through her days."
Joan joined in his laugh. She was there to make up for her unkindness. She would do her best under the circumstances. She hoped he would tell lots of long stories to cover her wordlessness.
Gilbert emptied his glass and filled it again. He was half conscious of dramatizing the episode as it unrolled itself and thrilled to think that this might be the last time that he would eat and drink in the only life that he knew. Death, upon which he had looked hitherto with horror, didn't scare him if he went into it hand in hand with Joan. With Alice trying, in her persistently gentle way, to cure him, life was unthinkable. Life with Joan—there was that to achieve. Let the law unravel the knots while he and she wandered in France and Italy, she triumphantly young, and he a youth again, his dream come true.... Would she have come with him to-night if she hadn't grown weary of playing flapper? She knew what she meant to him. He had told her often enough. Too often, perhaps. He had taken the surprise of it away, discounted the romance..
He got up and gave her some salad and stood by her for a moment. He was like a moth hovering about a lamp.
She smiled up at him again—homesick for the old bedroom and the old trees, eager to sit in her grand father's room and read the paper to him. He was old and out of life and so was she. Oh, Martin, Martin. Why couldn't he have waited a little while longer?
The shock of touching her fingers as she took the salad plate sent the blood to Gilbert's brain. But he reined himself in. He was afraid to come to the point yet. Life was too good like this. The abyss yawned at their feet. He would turn his back to it and see only the outstretched landscape of hope.
They ate very little, and Joan ignored her glass. Gilbert frequently filled his own, but he might just as well have been drinking water. He was already drunk with love.
Finally, after a long silence, Joan pushed her chair back and got up.
Instantly he was in front of her, with his back to the door. "Joan," he said, and held out his hands in supplication.
"Don't you think we ought to drive home now?" she asked.
"Home?"
"Yes. It must be getting late."
"Not yet," he said, steadying his voice. "Time is ours. Don't hurry."
He went down suddenly on to his knees and kissed her feet.
At any other time, in any other mood, the action would have stirred her sense of the ridiculous. She would have laughed and whipped him with sarcasm. He had done exuberant things before and left her unmoved except to mirth. But this time she raised him up without a word, and he answered her touch with curious unresistance, like a man hypnotized and stood speechless, but with eyes that were filled with eloquence.
"Be good to-night, Gilbert," she said. "I've ... I've been awfully hurt to-day and I feel tired and worn—not up to fencing with you."
The word "fencing" didn't strike home at first, nor did he gather at once from her simple appeal that she had not come in the mood that he had persuaded himself was hers.
"This is the first time that you've given me even an hour since you drew me to the Hosacks," he said. "Be generous. Don't do things by halves."
She could say nothing to that. She was there only because of a desire to make up ever so little for having teased him. He had been consistently generous to her. She had hoped, from his manner, that he was simply going to be nice and kind and not indulge in romantics. She was wrong, evidently. It was no new thing, though. She was well accustomed to his being dramatic and almost foreign. He had said many amazing things but always remained the civilized man, and never attempted to make a scene. She liked him for that, and she had tried him pretty high, she knew. She did wish that he would be good that night, but there was nothing to say in reply to his appeal. And so she went over to one of the pews and sat down among the cushions.
"I'll give you another hour, then," she said.
But the word had begun to rankle. "Fencing!—Fencing! ..."
He repeated it several times.
She watched him wander oddly about the room, thinking aloud rather than speaking to her. How different he had become. For the first time it dawned upon her that the whole look of the man had undergone a change. He held himself with less affectation. His petulance had gone. He was like a Gilbert Palgrave who had been ill and had come out of it with none of his old arrogance.
He took up a cigarette and began wandering again, muttering her unfortunate word. She was sorry to have hurt his feelings. It was the very last thing that she had wanted to do. "Aren't there any matches?" she asked. "Ring for some."
She was impatient of indecision.
He drew up and looked at her. "Ring? Why? No one will come."
"Are we the only people in the house, then?"
"Yes," he said. "That's part of my plan."
"Plan?" She was on her feet. "What do you mean? Have you thought all this out and made a scheme of it?"
"Yes; all out," he said. "The moment has come, Joan."
No longer did the scent of honeysuckle take Joan back to the sun-bathed cottage and the voice behind the door. No longer did she feel that all this wasn't really happening, that it was fantastic. Stark reality forced itself upon her and brought her into the present as though some one had turned up all the lights in a dark room. She was alone with the man whom she had driven to the limit of his patience. No one knew that she was there. It was a trick into which she had fallen out of a new wish to be kind. A sense of self-preservation scattered the dire effects of everything that had happened during the afternoon. She must get out, quickly. She made for the door.
But Gilbert was there first. He locked it, drew out the key, put it in his pocket and before she could turn towards the door leading to the other rooms, he was there. He repeated the process with peculiar deftness and when he saw her dart a look at the windows, he shook his head.
"You can't jump through those screens," he said.
"It isn't fair," she cried.
"Have you been fair?"
"I shall shout for help."
"The nearest cottage is too far away for any one to hear you."
"What are you going to do?"
He went back to her. He was far too quiet and dignified and unlike himself. She could have managed the old vain Gilbert. A scoffing laugh, and he would have withered. But this new Gilbert, who looked at her with such a curious, exalted expression—what was she to do with him?
"Joan," he said, "listen. This is the end or the beginning. I haven't locked the doors and sent the servants away to get you into a vulgar trap. I might have done it a few weeks ago, but not as I am now. This is my night, my beautiful Joan. You have given it to me. After all this fencing, as you call it, you are here with me alone, as far away from the old foolishness as if you were out at sea. What I have to say is so much a private thing, and what I may have to do so much a matter to be treated with the profoundest solemnity that we must run no risk of disturbance. Do you begin to understand, little Joan?"
"No," she said.
"I will explain it to you, then. You are very young and have been very thoughtless. You haven't stopped to think that you have been playing with a soul as well as a heart. I have brought you here to-night to face things up simply and quietly and finally, and leave it to you to make a choice."
"A choice?"
"Yes, between life with me or death in my arms."
All that was healthy and normal in Joan broke into revolt. There was something erotic, uncanny about all this. Life or death? What was he talking about? Her pride, too, which had never been put to such a test, was up in arms against the unfairness and cunning of the way in which she had been taken advantage of. She had meant to be kind and pay something of her debt to this man, and it was a vulgar trap, whatever he said in excuse. Let him dare to touch her. Let him dare. She would show him how strong she was and put up such a fight as would amaze him. Just now she had placed herself among those old people and old trees, because she had suffered. But she was young, tingling with youth, and her slate was clean, notwithstanding the fool game that she had played, and she would keep it clean, if she had to fight her way out.
She took up her stand behind the table, alert and watchful.
"I don't get you when you go in for melodrama," she said. "I much prefer your usual way of talking. Translate for me." She spoke scornfully because hitherto she had been able to turn him off by scorn.
But it didn't work this time. It was not anger that came into his eyes, only an unexpected and disconcerting reproach. He made no attempt to go near her. He looked extraordinarily patient and gentle. She had never seen him like this before. "Don't stand there," he said. "Come and sit down and let's go into this sensibly, like people who have emerged from stupidity. In any case you are not going back to Easthampton to-night."
She began to be frightened. "Not going back to Easthampton?"
"No, my dear."
She left her place behind the table and went up to him. Had all the world gone wrong? Had her foolishness been so colossal that she was to be broken twice on the same day? "Gilbert," she said. "What is it? What do you mean? Why do you say these odd things in this queer way? You're—you're frightening me, Gilbert."
Young? She was a child as she stood there with her lovely face upturned. It was torture to keep his hands off her and not take her lips. But he did nothing. He stood steady and waited for his brain to clear. "Odd things in a queer way? Is that how I strike you?"
"Yes. I've never seen you in this mood before. If you've brought me here to make me say I'm sorry, I will, because I am sorry. I'd do anything to have all these days over again—every one since I climbed out of my old bedroom window. If you said hard things to me all night I should deserve them all and I'll pay you what I can of my debt, but don't ask me to pay too much. I trusted you by coming here alone. Don't go back on me, Gilbert."
He touched her cheek and drew his hand away.
"But I haven't brought you here to make you humble yourself," he said. "There's nothing small in this. What you've done to me has left its marks, of course, deep marks. I don't think you ever really understood the sort of love mine is. But the hour has gone by for apologies and arguments and regrets. I'm standing on the very edge of things. I'm just keeping my balance on the lip of eternity. It's for you to draw me back or go tumbling over with me. That's why you're here. I told you that. Are you really so young that you don't understand?"
"I'm a kid, I'm a kid," she cried out, going back to her old excuse. "That's the trouble."
"Then I'll put it into plain words," he said, with the same appalling composure. "I've had these things in my mind to say to you for hours. I can repeat them like a parrot. If the sort of unimaginative people who measure everybody by themselves were to hear what I'm going to say, I suppose they would think I'm insane. But you won't. You have imagination. You've seen me in every stage of what I call the Great Emotion. But you've not treated me well, Joan, or taken me seriously, and this is the one serious thing of my life."
He was still under control, although his voice had begun to shake and his hands to tremble. She could do nothing but wait for him to go on. The crickets and the frogs filled in the short silence.
"And now it's come to this. I can be played with no longer. I can't wait for you any more. Either you love me, or you don't. If you do, you must be as serious as I am, tear up your roots such as they are and come away with me. Your husband, who counts for as little as my wife, will set the law in action. So will Alice. We will wander among any places that take your fancy until we can be married and then if you want to come back, we will. But if you don't and won't love me, I can't live and see you love any other man. I look upon you as mine. I created you for myself ten years ago. Not being able to live without you, I am not made of the stuff to leave you behind me. I shall take you and if there's another life on the other side, live it with you. If not, then we'll snuff out together. Like all great lovers, I'm selfish, you see. That's what I meant when I talked just now about choice."
He moved away, quietly, and piled several cushions into a corner of one of the pews. The look of exaltation was on his face again.
"Sit here, my dream girl," he added, with the most wonderful tenderness, "and think it over. Don't hurry. The night belongs to us." He found a match and lit a cigarette and stood at one of the windows looking out at the stars.
But Joan was unable to move. Her blood was as cold as ice. As though a searchlight had suddenly been thrown on to Gilbert, she saw him as he was. "Unimaginative people will think I'm insane." ... SHE didn't think he was insane, imaginative as he said she was. She KNEW it. If she had been able to think of one thing but Martin and that girl and her own chaos, she must have guessed it at Easthampton from the look in his eyes when he helped her into his car.... He had lost his balance, gone over the dividing hue between soundness and unsoundness. And it was her fault for having fooled with his feelings. Everything was her fault, everything. And now she stood on what Gilbert had called the lip of Eternity. "Who Cares?" had come back at her like a boomerang. And as to a choice between giving herself to Gilbert or to death, what was the good of thinking that over? She didn't love this man and never could. She loved Martin, Martin. She had always loved Martin from the moment that she had turned and found him on the hill. She had lost him, that was true, He had been unable to wait. He had gone to the girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle. She had sent him to her, fool that she had been. Already she had decided to creep back to the old prison house and thus to leave life. Without Martin nothing mattered. Why put up a fight for something that didn't count? Why continue mechanically to live when living meant waiting for death? Why not grasp this opportunity of leaving it actually, at once, and urge Gilbert on to stop the beating of her wounded and contrite heart? ... Death, the great consoler. Sleep, endless sleep and peace.
But as she stood there, tempted, with the weight of Martin's discarded armor on her shoulders and the sense of failure hanging like a millstone round her neck, she saw the creeper bursting into buds on the wall beneath the window of her old room, caught the merry glint of young green on the trees below her hill, heard the piping of birds to their nesting mates, the eager breeze singing among the waving grasses and the low sweet crooning of baby voices—felt a tiny greedy hand upon her breast, was bewildered with a sudden overwhelming rush of mother-longing ... young, young? Oh, God, she was young, and in the springtime with its stirring sap, its call to life and action, its urge to create, to build, its ringing cry to be up and doing, serving, sowing, tending—the pains of winter forgotten, hope in the warming sun.
She must live. Even without Martin she must live. She was too young for death and sleep and peace. Life called and claimed and demanded. It had need of the young for a good spring, a ripe summer, a golden autumn. She must live and work and justify.
But how?
There was Gilbert watching the stars with a smile, calmly and quietly and horribly waiting for her to make a choice, having slipped over on the other side of the dividing line. A scream of fear and terror rose to her throat. This quiet, exalted man, so gentle and determined, with the look in his eyes of one who intended to own one way or the other—Live? How was she to live? He had given her a choice between something that was impossible and something that all Nature held her back from. She was locked into a lonely house as far away from help as though they were out at sea.
"We hold it death to falter not to die." The words seemed suddenly to stand out in blazing letters over the mantelpiece, as they did in Martin's room—Martin, Martin.... With a mighty effort she wound the reins round her hands and pulled herself up. In this erotic and terrible position she must not falter or show fear or exaggerate this man's sudden derangement by cries or struggles. He must be humored, kept gentle and quiet, and she must pray for help. God loved young things, and if she had forgotten Him until the very moment of great danger, He might forgive. She must, with courage and practicality, gain time so that some one might be sent. The servants might return. Harry Oldershaw might have followed them. He hadn't liked the look of Gilbert. He had said so. But if that was too good, there was Martin, Martin...
She saw herself sitting in a dressing gown on the arm of a chair in Martin's room in the little New York house. She heard Martin come along the passage with his characteristic light tread and saw him draw up short. He looked anxious. "You wanted me?" she heard him say.
"I did and do, Marty. But how did you guess?"
"I didn't guess. I knew."
"Isn't that wonderful? Do you suppose I shall always be able to get you when I want you very much?"
"Yes, always."
"Why?"
"I dunno. It's like that. It's something that can't be explained...."
Gilbert turned and smiled at her. She smiled back. Martin was not far away, Martin. "How quiet the night is," she said, and went over to a window. Hope gleamed like a star. And then, with all her strength and urgency she gave a silent cry. "Martin, Martin. I want you, so much, oh, so much. Come to me, quickly, quickly. Martin, Martin."
The crickets and the frogs vied with each other to fill the silence with sound. The moon was up and had laid a silver carpet under the trees. Fireflies flashed their little lights among the undergrowth like fairies signalling.
Joan had sent her S. O. S. into the air and with supreme confidence that it would reach Martin wherever he might be, left the window, went to the pew in which Gilbert had arranged the cushions and sat down... Martin had grown tired of waiting for her. She had lost him. But twice before he had answered her call, and he would come. She knew it. Martin was like that. He was reliable. And even if he held her in contempt now, he had loved her once. Oh, what it must have cost him to leave her room that night—it seemed so long ago—she had clung to being a kid and had conceived it to be her right to stay on the girlhood side of the bridge. To be able to live those days over again—how different she would be.
Without permitting Gilbert to guess what she was doing, she must humor him and gain time. She gave thanks to God that he was in this gentle, exalted mood, and was treating her with a sort of reverence. Behind the danger and the terror of it all she recognized the wonder of his love.
"Gilbert," she said softly.
"Well, my little spring girl?"
"Come and sit here, where I can see you."
"You have only to tell me what I'm to do," he said and obeyed at once.
How different from the old affected Gilbert—this quiet man with the burning eyes who sat with his elbows on his knees and his back bent towards her and the light of one of the lanterns on his handsome face. She had played with a soul as well as with a heart, and also, it appeared, with a brain. How fatal had been her effect upon men—Martin out of armor and Gilbert on the wrong side of the thin dividing line. Men's love—it was too big and good a thing to have played with, if she had only stopped to think, or some one had been wise and kind enough to tell her. Who cares? These two men cared and so did she, bitterly, terribly, everlastingly.
Would Martin hear—oh, would he hear? Martin, Martin!
There was a long, strange silence.
"Well, my little Joan?"
"Well, Gilbert?"
He picked up her hand and put his lips to it. "Still thinking?" he asked, with a curious catch in his voice.
"Yes, Gilbert, give me time."
He gave back her hand. "The night is ours," he said, but there was pain in his eyes.
And there they sat, these two, within an arm's reach, on the edge of the abyss. And for a little while there was silence—broken only by the crickets and the frogs and the turning of many leaves by the puffs of a sudden breeze.
Was she never going to hear the breaking of twigs and the light tread outside the window? Martin, Martin.
And then Gilbert began to speak. "I can see a long way to-night, Joan," he said, in a low voice. "I can see all the way back to the days when I was a small boy—years away. It's a long stretch."
"Yes, Gilbert," said Joan. (Martin, Martin, did you hear?)
"It's not good for a boy to have no father, my sweet. No discipline, no strong hand, no man to imitate, no inspiration, no one to try and keep step with. I see that now. I suffered from all that."
"Did you, Gilbert?" Oh, when would the twigs break and the light step come? Martin, Martin.
"A spoilt boy, a mother's darling, unthrashed, unled. What a cub at school with too much money! What a conceited ass at college, buying deference and friends. I see myself with amazement taking to life with an air of having done it all, phrase-making and paying deference to nothing but my excellent profile. God, to have those years over again! We'd both do things differently given another chance, eh, Joan?"
"Yes, Gilbert." He wasn't coming. He wasn't coming. Martin, Martin.
She strained her ears to catch the sound of breaking twigs. The crickets and the frogs had the silence to themselves. She got up and went to the window, with Gilbert at her elbow. She felt that he was instantly on his feet. Martin's face was not pressed against the screen. He had heard. She knew that he had heard, because she was always able to make him hear. But he didn't care. When he had come before it was for nothing. She had lost him. She was un-Martined. She was utterly without help. She must give up. What was the good of making a fight for it now that Martin cared so little as to turn a deaf ear to her call? He had even forgotten that he had loved her once. Death was welcome then. Yes, welcome. But there was one way to make some sort of retribution—just one. She would remain true to Martin.
Gilbert touched her on the arm. "Come, Joan," he said. "The night's running away. Is it so hard to decide?"
But against her will Nature, to whom life is so precious, put words into her mouth. "I want you to try and understand something more about me," she said eagerly.
"The time has gone for arguing," he replied, stiffening a little.
"I'm not going to argue," she went on quickly, surprised at herself, deserted as she was. "I only want you to think a little more deeply about all this."
He drew his hand across his forehead. "Think? I've thought until my brain's hot, like an overheated engine."
She leaned forward. Spring was fighting her battle. "I'm not worth a love like yours," she said. "I'm too young, too unserious. I'm not half the woman that Alice is."
"You came to me in spirit that night in Paris. I placed yuu in my heart. I've waited all these years."
"Yes, but there's Alice—no, don't turn away. Let me say what's in my mind. This is a matter of life or death, you said."
He nodded. "Yes, life or death, together."
"Alice doesn't disappoint," she went on, the words put upon her lips. "I may, I shall. I already have, remember. This is your night, Gilbert, not mine, and whichever step we decide to take matters more to you than to me. Let it be the right one. Let it be the best for you."
But he made a wild sweeping gesture. His patience was running out. "Nothing is best for me if you're not in it. I tell you you've got me, whatever you are. You have your choice. Make it, make it. The night won't last for ever."
Once more she listened for the breaking twig and the light step. There was nothing but the sound of the crickets and the frogs. Martin had forgotten. He had heard, she was sure of that, but he didn't care. Nature had its hand upon her arm, but she pushed it away. Her choice was easy, because she wouldn't forget. She would be true to Martin.
"I've made my choice," she said.
"Joan, Joan—what is it?"
"I don't love you."
He went up to her, with his old note of supplication. "But I can teach you, Joan, I can teach you, my dear."
"No. Never. I love Martin. I always have and always shall."
"Oh, my God," he said.
"That's the truth.... Please be quick. I'm very tired!" She drew herself up like a young lily.
For a moment he stood irresolute, swaying. Everything seemed to be running past him. He was spinning like a top. He had hoped against hope, during her silence and her argument. But now to be told not only that she would never love him but that she loved another man....
He staggered across the room to the sideboard, opened the drawer, and the thing glistened in his hand.
Joan was as cold as ice. "I will be true," she whispered to herself. "I will be true. Martin, oh, Martin."
With a superhuman effort Gilbert caught hold of himself. The cold thing in his hand helped him to this. His mouth became firm again and his face gentle and tender. And he stood up with renewed dignity and the old strange look of exaltation. "I claim you then," he said. "I claim you, Joan. Here, on this earth, we have both made mistakes. I with Alice. You with Martin Gray. In the next life, whatever it may be, we will begin again together. I will teach you from the beginning. Death and the Great Emotion. It will be very beautiful. Shut your eyes, my sweet, and we will take the little step together." The thing glistened in his grasp.
And Joan shut her eyes with her hands to her breast. "I love you, Martin," she whispered. "I love you. I will wait until you come."
And Gilbert cried out, in a loud ringing voice, "Eternity, oh, God!" and raised his hand.
There was a crash, a ripping of window screen. Coatless, hatless, his shirt gaping at the neck, his deep chest heaving, Martin swept into the room like a storm, flung himself in front of Joan, staggered as the bullet hit him, cried out her name, crumpled into a heap at her feet.
And an instant later lay beneath the sweet burden of the girl whose call he had answered once again and to whom life broke like a glass ball at the sight of him and let her through into space.
"You may go in," said the doctor.
And Joan, whiter than a lily, rose from the corner in which she had been crouching through all the hours of the night and went to the doorway of the room to which Martin had been carried by the Nice Boy and Gilbert, the man who had been shocked back to sanity.
On a narrow bed, near a window through which a flood of sunlight poured, lay Martin from whom Death had turned away,—honest, normal, muscular, reliable Martin, the bullet no longer in his shoulder. His eyes, eager and wistful, lit up as he saw her standing there and the brown hand that was outside the covers opened with a sort of quiver.
With a rush Joan went forward, slipped down on her knees at the side of the bed, broke into a passion of weeping and pressed her lips to that outstretched hand.
Making no bones about it, being very young and very badly hurt, Martin cried too, and their tears washed the bridge away and the barriers and misunderstandings and criss-crosses that had sprung up between them during all those adolescent months.
"Martin, Martin, it was all my fault."
"No, it wasn't, Joany. It was mine. I wasn't merely your pal, ever. I loved and adored you from the very second that I found you out on the hill. You thought it was a game, but it wasn't. It was the real thing, and I was afraid to say so."
She crept a little nearer and put her head on his chest. "I was all wrong, Marty, from the start. I was a fool and a cheat, and you and Gilbert and Alice have paid my bill. I've sent Gilbert back to Alice, and they'll forget, but it will take me all my life to earn my way back to you." She flung her arm across his body, and her tears fell on his face.
"Oh, God," he cried out, "don't you understand that I love you, Joany? Send all your bills to me. They're mine, because I'm yours, my baby, just all yours. You were so young and you had to work it off. I knew all that and waited. Didn't you know me well enough to be dead sure that I would wait?"
The burden on her shoulders fell with a crash, and with a great cry of pent-up gratitude and joy her lips went down to his lips.
But the doctor was not so old that he had forgotten love and youth, and he left those two young clinging things alone again and went back into the sun.
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