Chapter III: The Metal (2)

"Imagine Isabella!" Jim Polder exploded. "It's quite the thing," that individual asserted. "Isabella," her mother declared, "it is twenty-five past seven. I wish you'd go out and see where dinner is." She rose with an expression of mingled surprise and pain. "Really, mother," she said, "that is an extraordinary request." Her brother snorted. There was a sudden muffled clamour of chimes from below, and Mrs. Polder gave a sigh of relief. "I didn't want it spoiled," she explained, descending; "Jim would be wild after all his eagerness to have things nice."

The dining room, resembling all the interior, was long and narrow, and had a high ceiling in varnished light wood. Byron Polder faced his wife at the opposite end of the table. Howat Penny sat beside Mariana, with Jim Polder across; Isabella was on her mother's right; and a waiting place was filled by a dark, surprisingly beautiful girl. "This is Kate," Mrs. Polder said proudly. Howat thought he had not seen such a handsome female for years. She wore a ruffled, transparent crepe de Chine waist that clung in frank curves to full, graceful shoulders; her hair was a lustrous, black coil, and she had sultry, topaz eyes and a mouth drooping like her father's, but more warmly bowed. Kate Polder met the direct pleasure of his inspection with a privately conveyed admission that she understood and subscribed to it. Here, at last, was a girl up to the standard of old days, the divinity of Scalchi herself. She would have created a sensation in Delmonico's, the real Delmonico's. Gary and the Colonel--

"We think they're elegant," Mrs. Polder's voice broke in on his revery. He looked up and saw a great fish on a huge platter before his host, a fish in surprising semblance to life, had it not been for the rosettes of lemon, the green bed, which surrounded it. "Gracious, no," she answered Mariana's query; "we don't do it home. Mr. Polder has them sent from a Rathskeller down town. He'll make a meal off one." The latter was plainly chagrined at this light thrown on his petty appetites. He assumed an air of complete detachment in the portioning of the dish; but, at the same time, managed to supply himself liberally. The conversation was sporadic. Howat Penny found the dinner lavish, and divided his attention between it and Kate Polder. James and Mariana addressed general remarks to the table at succeeding intervals. Mr. Polder gloomed, and Isabella went through the gestures, the accents, of the occasion with utter correctness. Howat studied Mariana, but he was unable to discover her thoughts; she was smiling and cordial; and apologized for losing her slipper. "I always do," she explained. James Polder hastily rose, and came around to assist her. The dinner was at an end, and she stood with a slim, silken foot outheld for him to replace the fragile object of search.

They reassembled above, and Mrs. Polder suggested music. "My son says you are very fond of good music," she addressed Howat Penny. "I can tell you it is a lovely taste. We have the prettiest records that come. Isabella, put on _Hark, Hark, the Lark_." She obediently rose, and, revolving the handle of the talking machine, fixed the grooved, rubber disk and needle. Howat listened with a stony countenance to the ensuing strains. Such instruments were his particular detestation. Mrs. Polder waved her hand dreamily. "Now," she said, "the _Sextette_, and _The End of a Perfect Day_. No, Mr. Penny would like to hear _Salome_, I'm sure, with all those cymbals and creepy Eastern tunes." An orgy of sound followed, applauded--perversely, he was certain--by Mariana. James, he saw, was as uneasy as himself; but for a totally different reason. He gazed at Mariana with a fierce devotion patent to the most casual eye; his expression was tormented with concern and longing.

"When do you return to Harrisburg?" Byron Polder inquired. "My son," he went on to Howat Penny, "is a practical iron man. I say iron, although that is no longer the phrase, because of natural associations. The present system of the manufacture of steel, as you doubtless know, evolved from the old Ironmasters, of whose blood James has a generous share. We look to him to re-establish, er--a departed importance. I need say no more." His women's anxiety at this trend of speech became painful. "Play a right lively piece," Mrs. Polder interjected, and an intolerable cacophony of banjoes followed, making conversation futile.

The evening, Howat Penny felt, was a considerable success; by heaven, Mariana would never get herself into this! Byron Polder's innuendoes must have annoyed her nicely. When the mechanical disturbance ceased, Mrs. Polder said, "I believe that's the bell." Evidently she had been correct, for, immediately after, a young woman with bright gold hair, and a mobile, pink countenance unceremoniously entered the room. "Oh!" she exclaimed, in an instinctively statuesque surprise; "I didn't know you were entertaining company."

"Come right in, Harriet," Mrs. Polder heartily proclaimed. "Miss Jannan, Mr. Penny, this is Isabella's friend, Harriet de Barry, a near neighbour and a sweet girl. She's an actress, too; understudies Vivian Blane; and is better, lots say, than the lead."

Harriet de Barry made a comprehensive gesture. "I wanted to say good-bye to you all," she announced. "I am going on tour. Leave at midnight. Just had a wire from Mrs. Blane." There were polite Polder exclamations, regret, congratulations; through which the son of the house moodily gazed at the carpet. "Haven't you anything to say to Hatty?" his mother demanded. "And after all the passes she sent you." Howat Penny saw Mariana's gaze rest swiftly on the latest comer's obvious good looks; and the scrutiny, he was certain, held a cold feminine appraisal. As they descended to leave Mariana lingered on the stairs with Jim. The latter closed the door of the public motor with a low, intense mutter; and, moving away, Howat Penny lit a cigarette with a breath of audible relief.

"I don't know which I detest most," Mariana declared viciously, "you or myself."

"You might include that fish," he added plaintively. She gazed at him in cold contempt, with an ugly, protruding lip. Nothing else was said until they were in the opened room at the Jannans. Mariana flung herself on a broad divan, with her narrowed gaze fixed on the points of her slippers. "Comfortable, isn't it," she addressed him; "this feeling of superiority?" He placidly nodded, inwardly highly pleased. "I wish I'd married Jim the first week I knew him, without trying to be so dam' admirable. Howat, what is it that makes people what they are, and aren't?" It was, he told her, difficult to express; but it had to do with inherited associations. "Mrs. Polder is as kind as possible," she asserted; "and I could see that you were absorbed in Kate."

"Really, Mariana," he protested, "at times you are a little rough. She is a very fine girl; in fact, reminds me of Scalchi. Old Byron, though, what--a regular catafalque!" A blundering step mounted to the stair; Kingsfrere entered and stood wavering and concerned, the collar wilted and a gaiter missing. "Ought to do something about the front door," he asserted; "frightful condition, no paint; and full of splinters. Very plump splinters," he specified, examining a hand. Mariana surveyed him coolly, thoroughly. "Sweet, isn't he?" she remarked. "Kingsfrere Gilbert Todd Jannan."

"That's absolutely all," that individual assured her. "Except if you want to add Sturgeon; some do. Hullow, Howat! Grand old boy, Howat," he told her. "But if he says I'm drunk, I will tell you one of Bundy's stories about him. This--this elegant deception tremendous noise with the song birds." He sat abruptly on a providentially convenient chair. There, limply, he hiccoughed. "Sweet," Mariana repeated. Kingsfrere finally rose, and, with a friendly wave, wandered from the room.

"It was good of you to take me, Howat," she told him wearily. "Although, now, I can see that you went willingly enough. You thought it would cure me. But of what, Howat--of love? Of a feeling that, perhaps, I'd found a reason for living?"

A decidedly uncomfortable feeling, doubt, invaded him. He had an unjustified sense of meddling, of blundering into a paramount situation to which he lacked the key. He had done nothing debatable, he assured himself; Mariana's inherent, well--prejudices, couldn't be charged to him. In the room where he was to sleep the uneasiness followed him. She was his greatest, his only concern. Howat Penny reviewed his desire for her, his preference for a Mariana untouched by the common surge of living. He recalled the discontent, the feeling of sterility, that had lately possessed him; the suspicion that his life had been in vain. All his philosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.

He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself, that consciousness was disturbing. It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect. He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner and cold. Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association. Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites, showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing pointedly wrong; he had--the inversion repeated itself--done nothing.

XXVII

At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the _Evening Post_ that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the moment.

Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder appeared.

"I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan," the latter stated frankly and at once. Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply. "I believe she is well," he stated formally. "You will find it cooler here." It struck him that the young man was not deficient in that particular. More, of still greater directness, followed. "I suppose you know," Polder stated, "that I want to marry her ... and she won't."

"I had gathered something of the sort," the other admitted. "It's natural, in a way." Polder proceeded gloomily: "I'd take her away from so much. And, yet, look here--you can shut me up if you like--what's it all about? Can you tell me that?" Howat Penny couldn't. "I'm not to blame for that old mess any more than you. And it's not my fault if something of--of which you think so much came to me by the back door. I've always wanted what Mariana is," he burst out, "and I have never been satisfied with what I could get. And when I saw her, hell--what's the use!

"Any one in Harrisburg will tell you I am a good man," he reiterated, at a slightly different angle. "When you kick through out of that racket of hunkies and steel you've done something. Soon I'll be getting five or six thousand." He paused, and the other said dryly, "Admirable." The phrase seemed to him inadequate; it sounded in his ear as unpleasantly as a false note. Yet he was powerless to alter it, change its brusque accent. The personal tone of Polder's revelations was inherently distasteful to him. He said, rising, "If you will excuse me I'll tell Rudolph you will be here."

"But I won't," Polder replied; "there's a train back at eleven. I have to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow. I came out because I had to talk a little about Mariana." He had deserted the more formal address. "And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have gimp of my own. I know why she won't marry me, and it's a small reason; it would be small in--"

"Hold up," Howat Penny interrupted, incensed. "Am I to understand that you came here to complain about Miss Jannan's conduct? That won't do, you know."

"It's a small reason," the other insisted hotly. "Hardly more than the idiotic fact that I'm not in the Social Register. I am ashamed of her, and I said so. It was so little that I told her I wouldn't argue. She could go to the devil."

"Really," the other observed, "really, I shall have to ask you to control your language or leave."

"I wonder if she will?" the surprising James Polder sombrely speculated. "I wonder if I am? But there are other women, with better hearts."

"Are we to construe this as a threat?" Howat asked in a delicately balanced tone.

"For God's sake," he begged, "can't you be human!" The other suddenly recalled Mariana's imploring anger at the Polders. "Don't be so rotten, Howat." The confusion of his valuations, his habitual attitudes of thought, returned. His gaze strayed to the obscured ruin of Shadrach Furnace, at once a monument of departed vigour and present disintegration. Perhaps, just as the energy had expired in the Furnace, it had seeped from him. It might be that he was only a sere husk, a dry bundle of inhibitions, insensible to the green humanity of life.

"I couldn't go on my knees to anything," the younger took up his burden. "Wrong or not it is the way I'm made. I'd not hang about where I wasn't wanted. Although you mightn't think it. And I am sorry I came here. I do things like that all the time; I mean I do, say, exactly the opposite of what I plan. You'll think I am a braying ass, of course."

"Stop for a breath," Howat Penny recommended; "a breath, and a cigarette." He extended his case; and, in place of taking a cigarette, Polder examined the case resentfully. "There is it," he declared; "correct, like all the rest of you. And it's only old leather. But mine would be different. I could sink and Mariana wouldn't put out a hand just on account of that. It's wrong," he insisted. Expressed in that manner it did seem to Howat Penny a small reason for the withholding of any paramount salvation. Yet, he told himself, he had no intention, desire, to undertake the weight of any reformation. A futile effort, he added, with his vague consciousness of implacable destiny, his dim sense of man moved from without, in locked progression. Polder was young, rebellious; but he could grow older; he would grow older and comprehend; or else beat himself to death on obdurate circumstance. What concerned Howat was the hope that Mariana would be no further involved in either process. She too had this to learn--that, in the end, blood was stronger than will; the dead were terribly potent. He had, even, no inclination to say any of this to the man frowning in the dusk at his side. It would be useless, a mere preaching. An expression, too, of a slight but actual sympathy for James Polder would be misleading. In the main Howat was entirely careless of what might happen to the other; it was only where, unfortunately, he touched Mariana that he entered into the elder's world. He would sacrifice him for Mariana in an instant. Polder rose.

"I must leave," he announced. Howat Penny expressed no regret, and the other hesitated awkwardly. "It's no use!" he finally exclaimed. "I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces. James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more articulate than the thin whirring of the locusts. He went quickly into the house, to the warm glow of his lamp, the memories of his pictures, the figurine in baked clay with Hermes' wand of victory.

XXVIII

The heat dragged through the remainder of August and filled September with steaming days and heavy nights, followed by driving grey storms and premonitory, chill dawns. A period of sunny tranquillity succeeded, but crimson blots of sumach, the warmer tone of maples, made it evident that summer had lapsed. Honduras mulched the strawberries, and set new teeth in his lawn rakes. The days passed without feature, or word from Mariana, and Howat Penny fell into an almost slumberous monotony of existence. It was not unpleasant; occupied with small duties, intent on his papers, or wandering in a past that seemed to grow clearer, rather than fade, as time multiplied, he maintained his erect, carefully ordered existence. Then, among his mail, he found a large, formal-appearing envelope which he opened with a mild curiosity. His attitude of detachment was soon dispelled.

Mrs. Corinne de Barry desired the pleasure of his attendance at the wedding of her daughter, Harriet, to James Polder. Details, a church and hour, were appended. The headlong young man, he thought, with a smile, Mariana was well out of that. He had been wise in saying nothing to Charlotte; the thing had expired naturally. But, irrationally, he thought of Polder with a trace of contempt--a man who had, unquestionably, possessed Mariana Jannan's regard marrying the pink-faced understudy to a second-rate emotional actress! In a way it made him cross; the fellow should have shown a--a greater appreciation, delicacy. "Commonplace," he said decisively, aloud. The following day Mariana herself appeared, with a touch of sable and a small, wickedly becoming hat.

He was at lunch; and, without delay, she took the place smilingly laid for her by Rudolph. It was characteristic that she made no pretence of concealing the reason that had brought her to Shadrach. "Jim's going to marry that Harriet de Barry," she said at once, nicely casual. "I had a card," he informed her. "It's to be on the thirtieth," Mariana proceeded, "at eight o'clock and in church. Of course you are going."

"Not at all of course," he replied energetically. "And you'll stay away for the plainest decency."

"We will go together," she proceeded calmly. "I want to see Jim married, happy." She gazed at him with narrowed eyes.

"Mariana," he told her, "that's a shameful lie. It is cold, feminine curiosity. It's worse--the only vulgar thing I can remember your considering. I won't hear of it." He debated the wisdom of recounting James Polder's last visit to Shadrach and decided in the negative. "Let the young man depart with his Harriet in peace."

"It's sickening, isn't it?" she queried. "And yet it is so like Jim. He had a very objectional idea of his dignity; he was sensitive in a way that made me impatient. He couldn't forget himself, you see. That helped to make it difficult for me; I wasn't used to it; his feelings were always being damaged."

Howat Penny nodded. "You'll recall I emphasized that." Mariana looked worn by her gaiety, he decided, white; for the first time in his memory she seemed older than her actual years. Her friends, he knew, her existence, bore the general appellation, fast; Howat had no share in the condemnatory aspect of the term, but he realized that it had a literal application. Their pace was feverish, and Mariana plainly showed its effects. Her voice, already noted as more mature, had, he was sure, hardened. She dabbled her lips thickly with a rouge stick. "Mariana," he said querulously, "I wish, you'd stop this puppet dance you're leading. I wish you would marry."

"I tried to," she coolly replied, "but you spoiled my young dream of happiness."

"That isn't true," he asserted sharply, perturbed. "Anything that happened, or didn't happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you are. I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of the Sunday papers. I--I am opposed to your present existence; it's gone on too long. I believe I'd rather see you orating on the streets, like Eliza Provost. And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that! Champagne and those damnable syncopated tunes played by hysterical niggers make a poor jig." He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any reversal of previous judgments, opinions.

"You are so difficult to please, Howat," she said wearily; "you were aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining of the natural alternative. The truth is," she added brutally, "you are old-fashioned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of Music was the centre of your world. And nothing is the same." She rose, and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic step of sensuous abandon. "You see," she remarked, pausing. An increasing dread for her filled his heart. He felt, in response to her challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day. Things, Howat Penny told himself, were marching to the devil. He said this irritably, loud, and she laughed. "I'm going in by an early train," she proceeded. "We have left the country. Will you stop for me on the thirtieth? Early, Howat, so we can be sure of a good place."

His helplessness included the subject of her remarks; he would, he realized, be at James Polder's wedding, but he persisted in his opinion. "A low piece of business," Howat declared. When she had gone he felt that he had not penetrated her actual attitude toward Polder's deflection. He had not for a moment got beneath her casual manner, her lightness, pretended or actual. He wished vehemently that he were back again in the past he comprehended, among the familiar figures that had thronged the notable dinner to Patti, the women who had floated so graciously through the poetry of departed waltzes. He got out his albums once more, scrutinized through his polished glass the programmes of evenings famous in song. But he went to bed a full two hours earlier than customary; his feet positively dragged up the stairs; above he sat strangely exhausted, breathing heavily for, apparently, no reason whatever.

He retraced, with Mariana, the course over the broad, asphalt way into the north end of the city early on the evening of the thirtieth. They found the church easily, by reason of a striped canvas tunnel stretched out to the curb; and a young man with plastered hair and a gardenia led them, Mariana on his arm, to a place on the centre aisle. The church had a high nave newly vaulted in maple, and stained glass windows draped with smilax, garish in colour against electric lights. Above the altar a great illuminated cross maintained an unsteady flickering; and--it was unseasonably cold--heating steam pipes gave out an expanding racket.

The pews through the centre filled rapidly; there was a low, excited chatter of voices, and a spreading tropical expanse of the dyed feathers and iridescent foliage of womens' hats. An overpowering scent of mingled perfumes rose and filled the interior. The strains of an organ grew audible, contesting with the rattle of the steam pipes. Howat Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent, incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be so--so concerned. He suppressed an impatient exclamation, and returned to the scrutiny of the culminating ceremony.

Here was a sphere, vastly larger than his own, to the habits and prejudices of which he was complete stranger. It was as James Polder had said--as if one or the other spoke Patagonian. He had no wish to acquire the language about him; a positive antagonism to his surrounding possessed him, beyond reason. He thought--how different Mariana is from all this, and was annoyed again at her serious bearing. Then he was surprised by his presence there at all; confound the girl, why didn't she play with her own kind! Yet only the other day the glimpse she had given him of her natural associates had filled him with dread. His mind, striving to encompass the problem of Mariana's existence, failed to overcome the walls built about him by time, by habit. He gave it up. The louder pealing of the organ announced immediate developments.

There was a stir in the front of the church, a clergyman in white vestment advanced; and, at a sudden murmurous interest, a twisting of heads, the wedding procession moved slowly up the aisle. The ushers, painstakingly adopting various lengths of stride to the requirements of the organ, passed in pairs; then followed an equal number of young women, among whom he instantly recognized the handsome presence of Kate Polder, in drooping blue bonnets, with prodigious panniers of celestial-hued silk, carrying white enamelled shepherd's crooks from which depended loops of artificial buttercups. An open space ensued, in the centre of which advanced a child with starched white skirts springing out in a lacy wheel about spare, bare knees, her pale yellow hair tied in an overwhelming blue bow; and holding outstretched, in a species of intense and quivering agony, a white velvet cushion to which were pinned two gold wedding bands.

After that, Howat Penny thought, the prospective bride could furnish only the diminished spectacle of an anti-climax. Led by the virginal presence of Isabella Polder she floated forward in a foam of white tulle and dragging satin attached below her bare, full shoulders. A floating veil, pinned with a wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed, statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. "Why don't they turn them off?" Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he designated as the performance.

He cast the participants in their inevitable roles--the bride as prima donna, James Polder the heroic tenor. Mrs. Corinne de Barry, a thin, concerned figure in glistening lavender, supported a lamenting mezzo, the bulky, masculine figure at her side, with an imposing diamond on a hand like two bricks, was beautifully basso--

His train of thought was abruptly upset by James Polder's familiar, staccato utterance. The precipitant young man! It stamped out all Howat Penny's humorous condescension; his sensitive ear was conscious of a note, almost, of desperation. He avoided looking at Mariana. Damn it, the thing unexpectedly cut at him like a knife. James Polder said, "I will." The clear, studied tones of Harriet de Barry, understudy to Vivian Blane, were spoiled by the crackling of steam. Howat moved uneasily; he had an absurd sense of guilt; he hated the whole proceeding. What was that Polder, whose voice persisted so darkly in his hearing, about, getting himself into such a snarl? He recalled what the younger had said on his porch--"women with better hearts." He had implored him, Howat Penny, to be "more human." The memory, too, of the shaken tone of that request bothered him. Now it appeared that he might have been, well, more human. He composed himself, facing such sentimental illusions, into a savage indifference to what remained of the ceremony; he ignored the passage of Polder, with Harriet Polder on his arm; the relief of the unspeakable child carrying the white velvet cushion no longer in the manner of a hot plate; the united bridesmaids and ushers. "Thank heaven, that's over!" he ejaculated in the deeply-comfortable space of the Jannan's motor laundalet. "But it isn't," Mariana said briefly. She sat silent, with her head turned from him, through the remainder of the short drive about Rittenhouse Square. Then she went abruptly to her room.

Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the living room. The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance, squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned, had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was assertive and final. Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana, was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now. They were discussing, he discovered, the family.

"It's an outrage, Howat," Charlotte told him, "you never married, and that the name will go. Here's Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have another child. I wish now I'd had a dozen. It is really the duty of the proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling. Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about votes for no reason under heaven but superior associates."

"Howat will feelingly curse the present with you," Sophie said rising. "I must go. Borrow the motor, if you don't mind. I saw in the paper a Polder was married." Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid. "A name I never repeat," Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left. He heard again the echo of James Polder's intense voice, "I will." Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated. Howat thought of Mariana, in her room--alone with what feelings? He realized that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that direction. He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a connection. However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a multitude of similarly futile imaginings.

Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too--too worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was, at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name. Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had been caught in an ugly net of circumstance. A great deal had been upset since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content; social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection. It was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued. It was bound to. An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged, surrounding trees.

XXIX

Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately. She stood before him in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women. But he soon forgot her garb.

"Howat," she told him, "I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake. I was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn't. Perhaps I have ruined his life. Mine will be nothing without him." They were in the middle room, and a fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth. She dropped on a chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames. Here it's all to do over, he thought, with a feeling of weariness. "He may get along very well with his Harriet," he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.

"You know he won't," she replied sharply. "He loves me; and I love him, Howat. I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered, until I was in my room, after his wedding. It wasn't a wedding, really," she declared. "All that doesn't make one. He'll find it out, too. Jimmy will be desperate, and I'm afraid he will drink harder. He told me they were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works. And there's that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn't made superintendent. He has worked splendidly for it. That woman he--he went off with is a squash," she said vindictively. "She will be in bed when he goes away in the morning, and in crepe de Chine negligee when he gets back. Perhaps it won't last," she added thoughtfully.

The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage abruptly departed. He fumbled with his glass, directed it at Mariana. "What do you mean by that?" he demanded. "I would go to him like a shot, if he needed me," she coolly returned. The dreadful part of it was that he was sure she would. "Nonsense," he asserted, hiding his concern; "there will be no fence climbing." All this came from the letting down of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables. Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings. In his day a bad woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn't tell them apart now. It was the dancing, too. Might as well be married to a man, he thought.

Mariana was haggard, the paint on her face crudely--paint. He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he turned away confused, rose. The slot in his cigarette box refused to open, and he shook it violently, then put it back with a clatter. "Tell Rudolph you're here," he said disjointedly; and, miserable, left the room. Dressing he stood at a window; the west held a narrow strip of crimson light under a windy mass of cloud. The ruin of Shadrach Furnace was sombre. Within, the room was almost bare. There was a large, high-posted bed without drapings, a vermilion lacquered table, dark with age, supporting a glass lamp at its side; a set of drawers with old brass handles; a pair of stiff Adam chairs with wheel backs; and a modern mahogany dressing case, variously and conveniently divided, a clear mirror in the door.

The day failed rapidly, and he lit a pair of small lamps on the set of drawers. The sun sank in no time at all. Mariana, crying. The girl ought to go to her mother, and not come out to him, an old man, with her intimate troubles. "A name I never repeat," Charlotte had said. That was just like her. Small sympathy there, and no more understanding. He knotted his tie hurriedly, askew; and gathered the ends once more. It tired him a little to dress in the evening; often he longed to stay relaxed, pondering, until Rudolph called him to dinner. But every day something automatic, tyrannical, dragged him up to his room, encased him in rigid linen, formal black. Mariana, against the fireplace, ate listlessly; and, later, he beat her with shameful ease at sniff.

"You can't do that," he pointed out with asperity, when she thoughtlessly joined unequal numbers. "Why not?" she asked. She must be addled. "It's against the rule." Mariana said, "I'm tired of rules." She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace, burning to impalpable, white ash.

What a procession of logs had been there reduced to dust, warming generations of men now cold. The thought of all those lapsed winters and lives soothed him; the clamour of living seemed to retreat, to leave him in a grey tranquillity. His head sank forward, and his narrow, dark hands rested in absolute immobility on the arms of his chair. He roused suddenly to discover that Mariana had gone up, and that there were only some fitful, rosy embers of fire left. In November it had been his custom to go into town for the winter; and it was time for him to make such arrangement; but, all at once, he was overwhelmingly reluctant to face the change, the stir, of moving. The city seemed intolerably noisy, oppressive; the thought of the hurrying, indifferent crowds disconcerted him. At Shadrach it was quiet, familiar, spacious. He had had enough of excursions, strange faces, problems.... He would speak to Rudolph. Stay.

XXX

The countryside, it appeared to Howat Penny, flamed with autumn and faded in a day. Throughout the night he heard the crisp sliding of dead leaves over the roof, the lash of the wind swung impotently about the rectangular, stone block of his dwelling. At the closing of shutters the December gales only penetrated to him in a thin, distant complaint. The burning hickory curtained the middle room with a ruddy warmth. It was a period of extreme peace; he slept for long hours in a deep chair, or sat lost in a simulation of sleep, living again in the past. The present was increasingly immaterial, unimportant; old controversies occupied him, long since stilled; and among the memories of opera, of Eames as a splendid girl, forgotten roles, were other, vaguer associations, impressions which seemed to linger from actual happenings, but persistently evaded definition. At times, his eyes closed, the glow of his fireplace burned hotter, more lurid, and was filled with faintly clamorous sounds; at times there was, woven through his half-wakeful dreaming, a monotonous beat ... such as the fall of a hammer. He saw, too, strange and yet familiar faces--a girl in silk like an extravagant tea rose; a countenance seamed and glistening with pain floated in shadow; and then another mocked and mocked him. Once he heard the drumming of rain, close above; and the illusion was so strong that he made his way to the door; a black void was glistening with cold and relentless stars.... Now he was standing by a dark, hurrying river, nothing else was visible; and yet he was thrilled by a sense of utter rapture.

He developed a feeling of the impermanence of life, his hold upon it no stronger than the tenuous cord of a balloon straining impatiently in great, unknown currents. The future lost all significance, reality; there were only memories; the vista behind was long and clear, but the door to to-morrow was shut. Looking into his mirror the reflection was far removed; it was hollow-cheeked and silvered, unfamiliar. He half expected to see a different face, not less lean, but more arrogant, with a sharply defined chin. The actual, blurred visage accorded ill with his trains of thought; it was out of place among the troops of gala youth.

A wired letter, a customary present of cigarettes, came from Mariana on Christmas, gifts from Charlotte and Bundy Provost. There was champagne at his place for dinner; and he sealed crisp money in envelopes inscribed Rudolph, Honduras, and the names of the cook and maid. He drank the wine solemnly; the visions were gone; and he saw himself as an old man lingering out of his time, alone. There was, however, little sentimental melancholy in the realization; he held an upright pride, the inextinguishable accent of a black Penny. His disdain for the commonality of life still dictated his prejudices. He informed Rudolph again that the present opera was without song; and again Rudolph gravely echoed the faith that melody was the heart of music.

The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened. There was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was accomplished. A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house; and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place. Mariana soon appeared.

"I wouldn't miss the spring at Shadrach for a hundred years of hibiscus," she told him. He gathered that she had been south. She brought him great pleasure, beat him with annoying frequency at sniff, and was more companionable than ever before. She had, he thought, forgot James Polder; and he was careful to avoid the least reference to the latter. Mariana was a sensible girl; birth once more had told.

She was better looking than he had remembered her, more tranquil; a distinguished woman. It was incredible that a man approximately her equal had not appeared. Then, without warning--they were seated on the porch gazing through the tender green foliage of the willow at the vivid young wheat beyond--she said:

"Howat, I am certain that things are going badly with Jimmy. He wrote to me willingly in the winter, but twice since then he hasn't answered a letter."

He suppressed a sharp, recurrent concern. "It's that Harriet," he told her, capitally diffident. "You are stupid to keep it up. What chance would he have had answering her letters married to you?"

"This is different," she replied confidently. He saw that he had been wrong--nothing had changed, lessened. Howat swore silently. That damnable episode might well spoil her entire existence. But he wisely avoided argument, comment. A warm current of air, fragrant with apple blossoms, caught the ribbon-like smoke of his cigarette and dissipated it. She smiled with half-closed eyes at the new flowering of earth. Her expression grew serious, firm. "I think we'd better go out to Harrisburg," she remarked, elaborately casual, "and see Jimmy for ourselves."

He protested vehemently, but--from experience in that quarter--with a conviction of futility. "She'll laugh at you," he told Mariana. "Haven't you any proper pride?" She shook her head.

"Not a scrap. It's just that quality in Jim that annoyed me, and spoiled everything. I'd cook for them if it would do any good." Irritation mastered him. "This is shameful, Mariana," he declared. "Don't your position, your antecedents, stand for anything? If I had Jasper Penny here I would tell him what I thought of his confounded behaviour!" He rose, and walked the length of the porch and back.

"The first part of next week?" she queried. "I won't go a mile," he stated, in sheer bravado. "Then," said Mariana, "I must do it alone." He muttered a period in which the term hussy was solely audible. "Which of us?" she asked, calmly. "Actually," he exploded, "I feel sorry for that Harriet. I sympathize with her. She got the precious James fair enough, and the decent thing for you is to keep away."

"But I'm not decent either," Mariana continued. "If you could know what is in my head you'd recognize that. I seem to have no good qualities. I don't want them, Howat," her voice intensified; "I want Jim."

He was completely silenced by this desire persisting in spite of every established obstacle. It summoned an increasing response at the core of his being. Such an attitude was, more remotely, his own; but in him it had been purely negative, an inhibition rather than a challenge; he had kept out of life instead of actively defying it. In him the family inheritance of blackness was subsiding with the rest.

Howat maintained until the moment of their departure his protest, his perverse community with Harriet Polder. "You'll find a happy house," he predicted, "and come home like a fool. I hope you do. It ought to help make you more reasonable. She will tell James to give you a comfortable chair, and apologize for not asking you to dinner." She gazed through the car window without replying. He realized that he had never seen Mariana more becomingly dressed--she wore a rough, silver-coloured suit with a short jacket, a pale green straw hat, like the new willow leaves, across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced waist of thinnest batiste. A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove, showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds.

The morning was filled with dense, low, grey cloud, under which the river on their left flowed without a glimmer of brightness. Howat was aware of an increasing sulphurous pall, and suddenly the train was passing an apparently endless confusion of great, corrugated iron sheds, rows of towering, smoking stacks, enormous, black cylinders, systems of tracks over which shrilling locomotives hauled carloads of broken slag, or bumped strings of trucks, with reckless energy, in and out of the grimy interiors. The overpowering magnitude of the steel works--Howat Penny needed no assurance of its purpose--exceeded every preconception.

Shut between the river and an abrupt hillside, where scattered dwellings and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives. Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended roar of an infinity of strident sounds--the screaming of whistles, a choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and jolting wheels and connective power. He passed rusting mountains straddled by giant gantries, the towering lifts of mammoth cranes, banks of chalk-white stone, dizzy super-structures mounted by spasmodic skips.

As the train proceeded with scarcely abated speed, and the vast operation continued without a break, mill on mill, file after file of stacks, Howat Penny's senses were crushed by the spectacle of such incredible labour. Suddenly a column of fire, deep orange at the core, raying through paler yellow to a palpitating white brilliancy, shot up through the torn vapours, the massed and shuddering smoke, to the clouds, and was sharply withdrawn in a coppery smother pierced by a rapid, lance-like thrust of steel-blue flame.

These stupendous miles were, to-day, the furnaces and forges that Gilbert Penny had built and operated in the pastoral clearings of the Province. Howat recalled the single, diminutive shed of Myrtle Forge, the slender stream, the wheel, its sole power; the solitary stack of Shadrach Furnace, recreated in his vision, opposed its insignificant bulk against the living greenery of overwhelming forests. Now the forests were gone, obliterated by the mills that had grown out of Gilbert's energy and determination, his pioneer courage. His spirit, the indomitable will of a handful of men, a small, isolated colony, had swept forward in a resistless tide, multiplying invention, improvement, with success until, as Howat had seen, their flares reached to the clouds, their industry spread in iron cities. James Polder had a part in this. Here, under the ringing walls of the steel mills, he got a fresh comprehension of the bitter, restless virility of the younger man.

Out of the station Mariana furnished the driver of a public motor with James Polder's address, and they twisted through congested streets, past the domed Capitol, rising from intense green sod, flanked by involved groups of sculpture, to a quieter reach lying parallel with the river. They discovered Polder's house occupying a corner, one of a short row of yellow brick with a scrap of lawn bound by a low wall, and a porch continuous across the face of the dwellings.

The door opened after a long interval, and a woman with bare arms and a spotted kitchen apron admitted them to an interior faintly permeated with the odours of cooking. There were redly varnished chairs, upright piano, a heavily framed saccharine print of loves and a flushed, sleeping divinity; a table scarred by burning cigarettes, holding cerise knitting on needles one of which was broken, glasses with dregs of beer, a photograph in a tarnished silver frame of Harriet de Barry Polder with undraped shoulders and an exploited dimple, and a copy of a technical journal. A fretful, shrill barking rose at their heels; and Howat Penny swung his stick at a diminutive, silky white dog with matted, pinkish eyes, obsessed by an impotent fury.

An indolent voice drifted from above. "Cherette!" And a low, masculine protest was audible. Mariana Jannan's face was inscrutable. The woman continued audibly, "How can I--like this? You will have to see what it is." A moment later James Polder, drawing on a coat, descended the stairs. He saw Mariana at once, and stood arrested with one foot on the floor, and a hand clutching the rail. A sudden pallor invaded his countenance and Howat turned away, inspecting the print. But he could not close his hearing to the suppressed eagerness, the stammering joy, of Polder's surprise.

"And you, too," he said to the elder, with a crushing grip. Howat immediately recognized that the other was marked by an obvious ill health; his eyes were hung with shadows, like smudges of the iron dust, and his palm was hot and wet. "Harriet," he called up the stair, "here's Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny to see us." A complete silence above, then a sharp rustle, replied to his announcement. "Harriet will be right down," he continued; "fixing herself up a little first. Have trouble finding us? Second Street is high for a foreman, but we're moving out against the future."

The dog maintained a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her, in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out. "Cherette doesn't appreciate callers," he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness of his words. His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed. And Mariana smiled back with a penetrating comprehension and sympathy. The proceeding made Howat Penny extremely uncomfortable; it was--was barefaced. He hoped desperately that something more appropriately casual would meet the appearance of Harriet. Mariana said:

"You haven't been well." Polder replied that it was nothing. "I get a night shift," he explained, "and I've never learned to sleep through the day. We're working under unusual pressure, too; inhuman contracts, success." He smiled without gaiety. "You didn't answer my letter," the outrageous Mariana proceeded. Howat withered mentally at her cool daring, and Polder, now flushed, avoided her gaze. The necessity of answer was bridged by the descent of his wife. Her face, as always, brightly coloured, was framed in an instinctively effective twist of gold hair; and she wore an elaborately braided, white cloth skirt, a magenta georgette crepe waist, with a deep, boyish collar, drawn tightly across her full, soft body.

"Isn't it fierce," she demanded cheerfully, "with Jim out as many nights as he's in bed?" She produced a pasteboard package of popular cigarettes and offered them to Howat Penny and Mariana. "Sorry, I can't smoke any others," she explained, striking a match. "I heard you saying he doesn't look right," she addressed Mariana. "And it's certainly the truth. Who would with what he does? I tell him our life is all broke up. One night stands used to get me, but they're a metropolitan run compared with this. Honest to God," she told them good naturedly, "I've threatened to leave him already. I'd rather see him a property man with me on the road."

"It must be a little wearing," Mariana agreed; "but then, you know, your husband is a steel man. This is his life." Howat Penny could see the cordiality ebbing from the other woman's countenance. Positively, Mariana ought to be ... "I can get that," Harriet Polder informed her. "We are only hanging on till Jim's made superintendent. Then we'll be regular inhabitants. Any other small thing?" At the sharpening note of her voice James Polder hurriedly proceeded with general facts. "You'll want to see the Works, as much as I can show you. Hardly any of the public are let through now. It will interest you, sir, to see what the Penny iron trade has become. I can take you down this afternoon. Harriet will find us some lunch." The latter moved in a sensuous deliberation, followed by a thin, acidulous trail of smoke, into inner rooms. "When do you have to go back?" Polder asked.

"This evening," Howat told him; "we just stopped to--"

"To see how you were," Mariana interrupted him baldly, studying the younger man with a concerned frown. "You ought to rest, you know," she decided. "That's possible," he returned. "I thought of asking for a couple of weeks. I hurried back right after I was married. They are coming to me." She enigmatically regarded Howat Penny; he saw that she was about to speak impetuously; but, to his great relief, she stopped. "It's been pretty hard on Harriet," he said instead. "After the stage and audiences, and all that." Mariana's expression was cold. Confound her, why didn't she help the fellow! Howat Penny fidgeted with his stick. What a stew Polder had gotten himself into. This was worse, even, than the marriage threatened.