Chapter XI

The Whirlpool.--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women.

The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory desolation.

Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary--unexpected; an emptiness between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound.

"To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in the subtle sex? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an addled egg."

"We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be Knights Hospitallers."

"What do you mean?"

"All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"

"I dare say we could."

"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"

Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute. It was necessary to be young, or else to forget--at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument.

"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"

"That isn't what people want in nurses."

"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'"

"How should you know what you would do?"

"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"

It did not all seem to Mrs. Mavering a direct argument to go hospitalling; only it seemed to fall in line with other questionings about the fallen curtain, and whether it might not again be raised. One might be content with a minor part.

They went up to Hagar at the end of June, and spent the blue-and-green summer together in the widow's house behind the militant church. Thaddeus came every Saturday, invented new paradoxes, to watch them fall helplessly on the widow's comprehension, and went down the hill after tea in the wide sunset--an immaculate gentleman, with eye-glass, cane, and smooth-shouldered coat--to talk with Mr. Paulus.

"Ain't goin' to get married again, are ye?"

"To whom, Peter? To whom?"

"Mrs. M--Mav--the one that looks like she cost a dollar an inch."

"Mrs. Mavering is, unfortunately, not as yet a widow."

"He gone to the war? 'Tain't any more'n reasonable she might get to be. Fine-lookin' woman--looks expensive. Well, I done it three times, an' then guessed I'd quit. I got too fat--don't figure as well at weddin's as I once did. But--Well, I don' no'--the women's got in the habit of marryin' me."

"Pete," said Thaddeus, softly, "was not the first time, in fact, the best? When one is young!"

"Umm--She was--well, I'll tell ye. Old Parson Gerry was here then, an' the candidest man in Hamilton County, an' I went to him. 'Who is she?' says he. I says, 'Hilda Armitage.' 'Shucks!' says he, 'she won't have you.' 'She will, too,' says I, pretty mad. 'Well, well, I'll marry you, but she ought've done a sight better'n that.' But by-and-by the parson and me was both widowers, an' I went to him again. 'Who is she?' says he. 'Esther Allen.' 'Good land alive!' says he, 'I was going to ask her myself next week!' An' he appeared to think Essie's bad luck was odd--remarkable odd."

"I was asking, Peter, for reminiscences of your young romance, tending on to your--a--doctrine of practical matrimony, and so to your theory of--of woman. We were at the point of young romance. May I suggest--the clergyman appears to take up too much room. Hilda Armitage--"

"Well, she was roomy, too. She began to lay on flesh after we was married on credit of a hundred acres of Wyantenaug Valley land, came to her from Patton Armitage, till she took a six-by-four coffin, she did, by--"

"Pass on, Pete, pass on. Esther Allen--a--the minister's preference would seem to have argued in her a certain superior attractiveness, a certain--"

"Jus' so. She argued it that way. She'd never believe but what I knew the week the parson had his eye on, an' sort of hurried up and got in underhand. 'Twan't so," said Mr. Paulus, earnestly. "'Twan't so. Didn't know a thing about it till he--"

Thaddeus raised a white hand.

"I beg of you, no more."

In the matter of light on the "subtle sex," what opportunities for study had not Pete Paulus thrown away! Mr. Paulus's drooping left eyelid drooped lower. He heaved with a rumbling chuckle.

* * * * *

It would be not so evil a fate to come to Hagar for the first time, bringing inward wounds to its peculiar balsams. The blue flowers on the green, the lilacs in Widow Bourn's garden. Windless Mountain, that eclectic philosopher, the deep wood avenues, the league length of the Cattle Ridge, the eastern hills where the church spire of Salem village might be seen--one runs easily into cataloguing details, but how convince the inexperienced of their significance, their speech, their daily conversations? Could the children of Hagar tell a stranger the meaning of the mill stream, or ever really explain the moral of the Four Roads? They were not mere objects. They were tangled with living years. One must have seen visions and heard messages. One must have dropped a salt tear by the road-side and sailed that stream to the Celestial City.

And yet it was Mrs. Mavering who seemed to hear the conversations, the meanings, the messages, and not Thaddeus or Helen. Thaddeus was never an instance in point, and Helen was restless. Thaddeus speculated and commented on that restlessness to Mrs. Mavering, who offered few opinions. The impulse and daring which Mrs. Mavering knew as characteristic of Helen's speech seemed to have turned from mental to physical energy, to climbing cliffs instead of merely precipitous ideas. It was as if speech were no longer expressive of facts; as if both were learning an unsyllabled language which the other knew before--Mrs. Mavering learning the language of the rocks and the soil, of growing and flowing things, and Helen the language of human living at a point in its syntax which deals with the more searching idioms, the peculiar question at which point is not merely, "What does this obscure passage mean?" but, "What does it mean to me?" The summer days went like water-drops from the eaves after a rain, that gather and shine and fall swiftly, incessantly. September came, where the green garment of the season runs into embroidery of purple and gold.

The wood-path that runs west from the Cattle Ridge road beyond Job Mather's mill goes by a damp hollow where spotted fungi grow, climbs past bramble patches, clearings, and a bold strip or two of cliff, turns south around a lonely pine-tree, the last of its fellows, down through woods noted for lady-slippers in June, and comes out on the hill meadows along the Red Rock road. You can look south from this wood's edge past the west shoulder of Windless down the Wyantenaug, and to the east see the range of the Great South woods, and near by the spire of the militant church. But Helen and Rachel came there, as a rule, for the sake of the dominance and conversations of Windless.

Helen lay on her back, with her hands under her head and knees in the air. Mrs. Mavering's book was thrown aside.

"Do you really want to go?"

"Yes."

"I don't know but I do. What will your mother say?"

"'Why, Helen!'"

"And Mr. Bourn?"

"Oh, he'll sputter some. I don't mind."

Windless lay in the sunlight, genial, wise, sincere, with the girth of high living and the forehead of high thought. One did not have to specify in the presence of Windless. Everything was understood. Yet Mrs. Mavering asked. "I suppose it isn't Morgan Map at all?"

Helen answered "No," promptly enough, and fell into sombre silence. The eastern slope of Windless darkened in the shadow of the lessening afternoon, while the western only seemed to glimmer the more genially; there was that advantage in being large. "You see," she went on, "it suits Morgan, fighting and ordering and doing things. Nothing ever hurts him. I don't see why I should bother about him when he's having a good time."

"It's enough if you don't."

"Well, Lady Rachel, then that's it. I don't."

"Then we won't say what it is?"

"No, please."

"But I suppose we can know?"

Helen rolled over with a laugh, and hid her mouth a moment in the stubby grass.

"Let's go home."

Widow Bourn said, "Why, Helen!" immediately. Thaddeus went with Rachel into the garden, and walked beside her up and down the path between the porch and the lilac gate.

"It isn't Morgan Map. She doesn't bother about him at all."

"She doesn't? Dear me!"

"But I think it might be better, after all."

"What is it, then? Why can't she be contented? My dear lady, my poor intelligence struggles with the subject, but you and Helen--hospitals, drudgery, dirt, pah! vermin. I knew she had the notion. I labelled it properly, 'Notion.' I was aware the Helen estate was not returning the--a--interest it should. I admit my commission from it has in consequence this summer been very meagre--most irregular. I believe I appreciate, I strive to understand, your difficult sex--my lifelong endeavor--but at present, so to speak, if I may say so, it 'gets me.'"

"Helen has perhaps more nervous energy than is common."

"Nervous! But might we not almost say, of late, feverish?"

"Perhaps we might."

"Then what--or rather, why?"

"If Helen had her secrets it would not follow that she would confess them to me, and surely you would know as quickly as I if she had any. But if I have any intimation you must let me keep it, and only say that, perhaps, it would be good for her."

Thaddeus shrugged his shoulders, and went down, immaculately, to the post-office to consult.

"Pete, the opportunities you've lost to study women! But you might, possibly, say something at random. What's all this for?"

Mr. Paulus's face was like the Sphinx's for extent massiveness and lack of expression, but his left eyelid was variable. He pondered some moments. "What did you an' me steal pigs for? Did we want the pigs? No. Did we want to see Starr Atherton in his nightshirt? Some--not much. Well, it was a way we had of puttin' what was in our minds. What's in will out. That girl'd bust out somewhere. If it ain't measles, it's boils. That's what I say. What's in will out."

* * * * *

Whatsoever supplication or remonstrance Thaddeus may have sent up by himself, he took council of some inward monitor, and did not "sputter." He had his reward from Helen, who fell into a mood of tentative caressing.

In October they went to Washington. Thaddeus sniffed a few weeks about the streets of the capital, and returned to Hamilton, his bank and club and lonely house, in a state of mind to be expressed by a shrug and the lifting of a white hand in deprecation. In his pursuit of happiness the scent seemed to be lost, the hunt all astray. He realized more than ever how much of his fortune in that commodity he had staked on one issue. He doubted, after all, the wisdom of it, but could not find a way, nor in himself any impulse, to draw back. "The new generation, these new times! They are strenuous, and one grows old." The air was full of the war; the suck of the whirlpool was felt in every corner.