Chapter EIGHT: The Thing Is on Them

§ i

There was a very great deal that young Stephens didn’t know about himself, some of it that was obvious to other eyes. He did not go away the next morning; Edna met him after breakfast and entreated him not to do so.

“We’re so dull and miserable here,” she said. “And you’re the only hope. Do you know what Mother calls you? The Breath of Life! Now after that you can’t go, can you?”

He smiled, a little inattentively. There she stood, so pretty and serene, one of those women who considered it their right to make outrageous demands upon men.... He saw suddenly how difficult it must be to withstand their demands. He did not want to refuse Edna; he liked her very much, because she was frank and friendly; he didn’t suspect that her frankness held a hundred times more reserve than Andrée’s silences, that she, so smiling and affable, was infinitely more aloof, more mysterious, more unknowable, than her dark sister.

“The Breath of Life!” he said. “Why?”

“Because we’re all very nearly dead, and you’re so much alive,” she said, tranquilly. “Can’t we have one more nice day together?”

“I don’t see ...” he said, doubtfully. “After--well--your father, you know....”

He had no clear conception of Gilbert’s position; he had certainly seen many husbands and fathers who were bullies, but in a more primitive society this bullying carried weight and was not defied. He knew little of the civilized expedients of women; he didn’t imagine that Claudine would stoop to deceive. Yet he didn’t think her quite capable of independence.

“Oh, Father!” said Edna, carelessly. “He’s just melodrama.... And we won’t tell Mother, and she’ll pretend not to know where we’ve gone. We can--”

“But I don’t like it!” he protested. “It’s a humiliating position for me.”

“It really isn’t, Mr. Stephens. We’re the humiliated, deceitful ones, and we don’t care. Do you know the country round here?”

“I was born a few miles down the river,” he answered, soberly. “In Brownsville Landing.”

Andrée came sauntering out of the house, and caught his words.

“I’d like to hear about you,” she said, but he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “That’s a mistake. What used to be me isn’t me now. It’s--well, it’s like these books--they start off when the fellow’s a baby, and they tell you all the things he thought and all the ways he grew and changed, until you can’t see him at all. I’m darned glad you never saw me or heard of me before, and you’ve got to see only what I am now.” He smiled ingenuously. “It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s what I’ve worked twenty-eight years on, anyway.”

“Come on; let’s start somewhere,” said Edna. “Or Mother’ll come out and have to not ‘countenance’ it. Let’s take a ‘ramble’; that’s what Father calls a walk.”

“It is a ‘ramble,’ too, with him,” said Andrée.

“Well,” said Stephens, “there’s a nice place up the road five or six miles--nursery for all kinds of evergreens, and a little hotel. If you think you can do it--? It’s a steep climb.”

Edna ran in to leave a message for her mother with Mrs. Dewey, and they set off. It was a sultry, hazy morning; it seemed unaccountably oppressive to Stephens. He felt unpleasantly like a new toy to these greedy children; they looked to him to provide amusement; they weren’t interested in his ideas, which were his life, and they had no faint idea of the wonder of him. He glanced down at his white flannel legs and buckskin shoes; he thought of his appearance in general, his immaculate cleanliness, the comfort of fine raiment, of himself strong, confident, carrying a cigarette case of purest gold and walking by these fabulous girls. And he thought of a sallow youth, ten years ago, lounging outside a pool room in Brownsville Landing, in a dirty grey flannel shirt and a villainous cap, dazed and stupid with incessant cigarettes, engaging in candid persiflage with the mill girls who passed. He had bridged that gulf all alone....

The making of his money he regarded as a minor achievement. It was the regeneration of his spirit that was so remarkable; that, he felt, was little less than a miracle; he would have liked to tell that.

He had been in the hospital with a broken head, justifiably got in a saloon brawl; he had lain in the ward two days, suffering and resentful because he couldn’t smoke. No one came to see him; who was there to come? His father, who worked in the brick yards, was always drunk when he wasn’t busy, and he had no other relatives; he didn’t know what a friend was. He went about in a pack, a gang of youths of his own age, bound by no other tie than that of the pack instinct, all of them more or less vicious, in a pitiful way. They lacked ambition, that is, at eighteen or so, they showed a lamentable disinclination to work every day and all day in mill or factory. They wanted something better, and even now Stephens fancied that their sordid distractions _were_ better, had a little more of the stuff of life in them.

In his restlessness and misery, he had turned his attention to the man in the next bed, a portly, pallid fellow of forty-five or so, with a black beard and a severe and dignified manner. He looked like a physician, some sort of professional man; he was actually a mill hand, an Englishman named Simms, a Manchester Socialist of the old school, austere and fanatic. He sat propped up in bed reading Huxley, but he was very willing to talk. And in five days he had expounded the world to the sallow “corner boy.” Gesturing forcibly with his bandaged hand--he had been badly mangled at his machine--he set forth his Quixotic and beautiful doctrines. He had little humanity, no flexibility; he was uncompromising and stern as a Calvinist.

They had lived together for two years. It was Simms who had shown young Stephens the charm of cleanliness; he had a bare little room on the outskirts of the town which he scrubbed himself; his habits were fastidious and ascetic. He taught young Stephens sobriety and continence and his own worth, and he taught him to read. His pupil was not docile; he joined the Y. M. C. A., which was anathema to Simms; he took courses in everything, he frequented the gymnasium. He made use of what the older man disdained; his ideas were more practical and less sublime.

He felt now that he was justified and he wished poor Simms were alive, to be argued with. He stole a glance at Andrée, and he felt a curious mixture of despair and defiance. He _was_ good enough--but she would never think so.

§ ii

Claudine had watched them go from her window, with some uneasiness. People of his sort were so hard to handle! Why hadn’t he the tact to go away? It was so difficult to keep a middle course between offending him and offending Gilbert; she dwelt with dismay, not for the first time, on the uncompromising nature of men, how rudely they upset all feminine niceties. Nothing might be implicit or vague with them. Even Bertie, her marvelous boy, had to tell her things, and be frank about his feelings, in a way Andrée and Edna never were.

She spent a peaceful day, reading and writing letters. The letters did her good, put her in touch with her own little world again, restored to her some measure of complacency. She was unhappy and her life very futile and insignificant, but it might have been so much worse; it might have been harmful. She re-read Lizzie Wiley’s letter, full of the atrocious Bernardine Perceval, who had left her husband.

“I saw Bernardine,” she wrote, “on the street car with the little girl. What she will drag the child into I don’t know. I thank God there are still a few like yourself left.” And so on. Lizzie Wiley was a wealthy spinster of passionate moral views and her approval was not without weight. Claudine thought with a faint smile of her own bad moment, twenty years before, when she had wanted to leave Gilbert; she had a fairly definite idea that those moments occurred in most marriages; for an instant she wondered what had made her resist it. Duty? Fear? Lance? She didn’t much want to know, and put the thought aside. The fact remained that she had stayed and done well, for Gilbert, for herself, for her children.

She wrote a plaintively humorous letter to Nina Sidell, whose Violet was just Andrée’s age. Violet was a frightful worry, in a way her daughters would never be. Wasn’t that something else to her credit? Then there was Connie Martinsburgh, whose four exuberant and handsome children were all troublesome. Perhaps, although she seemed to herself so entirely negative, she did after all exert a good influence over her family.... That absurd young Stephens had upset her, with his terrific vitality; he had made her feel so pallid, so helpless, so useless. Poor Breath of Life, with his gold cigarette case!

§ iii

They returned from their “ramble” early in the afternoon, and the girls at once went upstairs to lie down. They were much more fatigued than they cared to admit.

“Lord! What a cyclone!” said Edna, taking the pins from her crisp, reddish hair and letting it fall about her bare shoulders. “He can do everything and he knows everything. That lecture about coniferous trees ...! And yet he’s amusing.”

Andrée was stretched flat on her back on the bed.

“He’s more than amusing,” she said, with a frown. “He’s very fine. He’s a man.”

“Oh, hardly that!” said Edna, slipping into her kimono. She was startled by her sister suddenly sitting upright.

“You silly little snob!” she cried. “You make me tired! You don’t know anything--you can’t see anything!”

“Oh, Gosh!” thought Edna, in alarm. “I _do_ see something now!”

Andrée went on, to point out to her younger sister the mental or moral excellencies of young Stephens; all in vain. She neglected to mention his endearing smile, that odd, tender look in his blue eyes.

Edna kept whatever she thought to herself.

“He said he was absolutely going away to-morrow,” she reflected. “And she’ll forget.”

And by the light of this, the relations between Andrée and the Breath of Life seemed rather funny than anything else. Edna didn’t mention her discovery to her mother, nor did she attempt to stop them or to go with them when they left the veranda that evening. She looked after them as they crossed the lawn, with a benevolent smile.

“That poor man’s going to get a jolt,” she reflected. “I dare say Andrée ’ll get engaged to him this evening, just as she did to Johnnie Martinsburgh last winter. Then she’ll get into a panic, and I’ll very probably have to get her out of it, the same way. Well! It can’t be helped! That’s Andrée, all over. She’s so darned sincere every time.”

“Let’s take a walk over to your Fern Glen,” Andrée was saying.

“I don’t think--” he began, doubtfully.

“Yes,” she insisted. “There’ll be a moon, won’t there, later on?”

“Your mother--”

“It’s your last evening.”

“I know,” he said. “But we can talk here--”

“I believe you’re afraid of me,” she said, laughing.

“I am,” he answered, and she suddenly stopped laughing.

“You’d better let me alone,” he went on. “I don’t understand your ways. Things you think are funny make me miserable.”

“I don’t want a bit to make you miserable, and I certainly don’t see anything funny in--in this thing. Do come on! Mother and Edna will be home, and then we can’t go.”

She went on, and he reluctantly followed her white figure. They went along the road, walking quietly on its grassy border, he always a little behind her. It was a mild beautiful night, a night on which one could walk forever. Behind the pine trees there was a marvelous faint radiance, the path of the coming moon. The breeze blowing across the apple orchard they were passing brought a wine-like perfume and an exquisite rustling of leaves. The young man looked steadfastly down at his white tennis shoes moving soundlessly over the grass.

They came to the pasture through which Andrée had once refused to go, and they saw the great, dim shapes of the cows standing motionless in there.

“I suppose you want to go around--” said he.

“No; I shan’t be afraid, if you’ll stay near me,” she answered.

He let down the bars, and carefully replaced them when they had gone through.

“Don’t run,” he said, “and they won’t pay any attention to you.”

To his surprise she took his arm and held it lightly.

“I do hate them!” she said. “What would you do if they were to run after us?”

“They never do,” he answered, briefly, and fell silent. But she was amazed to feel his arm, his firm, strong arm, tremble beneath her touch. She smiled to herself in the dark.

They came at last to the glen, and sat down on a rock. The moon had risen just above the crags; the air was tremulous with its light.

“It’s too bad there are nothing but owls here,” she said. “I’d love to hear a nightingale sing.”

“I’ve heard ’em, in England. I was there four years.”

“Now, you see! With all the interesting things you’ve got to tell me, and that I want so much to hear, you talk about going away to-morrow. You can’t!”

“I must!”

“Are you--going to write to me?”

“No. What would be the use?”

“Don’t you want to go on being friends?”

“Look here--are you going to make me say--what I don’t want to say?”

“Yes, if I can! I want everything clear and plain between us. You’re the first real friend I’ve ever had, and I’m not going to lose you through any stupid misunderstanding.”

“Well, then; I _couldn’t_ go on being friends. I’d ... it would have to go on--to something else.”

She was perfectly still.

“You know what I mean, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes ... I know,” she answered, in an odd, flat voice.

“And you don’t want that....”

“I don’t know,” she said, “whether I do or not.”

He was so startled that he sprang to his feet.

“What!” he cried. “I don’t believe you do understand!”

“I do! You mean you think--you might--later on--fall in love with me.”

Her sublime candour touched him almost beyond endurance. He walked a few paces away from her, to the very edge of the pool, and tried to calm his heart with that unutterable beauty, that fall of water, like bright silver hair in the moonlight, like a stream from the moon itself, over the face of the cliff, without sound, into the radiant brightness of the pool. If there had been a nightingale to sing there, he thought, it would have broken his heart.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, in a low voice, “I am in love with you now. I shouldn’t have told you if you’d let me alone.”

“Why shouldn’t I know?”

“Because--I don’t feel like amusing you that way.”

“Oh, but I don’t--really I don’t look at it like that! How can you always think so of me? I’m not trivial and shallow,” she cried, very much wounded. “You ought to have seen that I wasn’t!”

“All right!” he said, grimly. “Now you know.”

“And you’re going away?” she asked.

“I am.”

“Suppose I don’t want you to go?”

“That would make me go all the quicker.”

“You have a--a rather funny way of being in love,” she said. “I should think--”

“Now, see here,” he said, with a sort of desperation. “Won’t you let me alone? I’ve told you. I didn’t want to, but you made me. You can have all the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve--hurt me and humiliated me. And nothing’s going to be any good any more.”

“Why?” she enquired, in a reasonable tone. “There are so many things in your life.”

“I don’t want them. I don’t want anything but you. I’m--of course you don’t know and you don’t care. You’ll go home and laugh at the impudence of that vulgar--”

Andrée faced him, very angry.

“That _is_ vulgar, if you like,” she said. “To imagine my doing that--laughing at you.”

She had come down to the edge of the water, beside him, very near him. She was contemptuous, she was indignant and hurt. And suddenly all that went. There, in that enchanted glen, with the moon on him, he was transfigured, or it may be revealed. There was nothing mean about him; his sensitiveness was no longer paltry, but tragic. He was no more and no less than a man; forlorn in his strength and his youth; betrayed by the world he fancied he had conquered. Tears came into her eyes; she laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Oh ...! _I_--laugh at _you_!” she said.

He started away suddenly.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do that!”

A fatal and overmastering curiosity possessed her; her arm went round his neck, her fingers gently touching his cheek. She was amazed, delighted to feel him tremble under that shadow of a caress; she was exultant with a sense of her miraculous power, never before suspected. In all innocence, she could comprehend his passion, in a great measure because she herself was quite devoid of passion, was able to look on at this. She was impressionable, terribly susceptible to the magic of love in others, intoxicated by the emotion she could so easily inspire in others; but within her was always a grain of something hard and cold, never to be touched. An artist, was Andrée, always a little aloof; she could never lose herself.

But she loved him then, humanly enough, with an immature and cruelly exacting love. If he had said one word, made one gesture, to offend her critical and fastidious spirit, she would have hated him. Fortunately he didn’t know this, and was not on his guard, not wary. He was as much concerned with his own feelings as she with hers; they were scarcely aware of each other.

“You can’t really like me,” he said, miserably.

“I do!” she said. “I do!”

“But not--love?” he said, looking at her with profound anxiety. Her glance fell and with eyes veiled, she was no longer so august. “You don’t love me?” he insisted. “That couldn’t be!”

She had no answer to make, but the very droop of her shoulders was acquiescent. He was astounded, incredulous, more appealing to her in his humility than in any other attitude he could have taken.

“Be honest with me!” he entreated. “I don’t ask you for anything but that.”

“I love you,” she said, quietly. It was to them both a priceless boon conferred.

“But think what I am!” cried the pitifully honest lover. “I’m not in--your class. I don’t know your ways. I couldn’t live like you--”

Their arms were about each other, and what did all that matter? The strength and tenderness of his embrace, the reassurance she felt in his unalterable sympathy and kindness, made her weep. He was not strange to her; he was dearer and more familiar, even than her mother. There was security in him, and her deepest instinct required security.

“Don’t cry, darling little Andrée,” he said. “Are you afraid we can’t be happy?”

He was, very greatly.

“No!” she said, scornfully. “Of course I’m not afraid.”

They sat down, side by side, on a fallen log; he looked into her dark eyes, glittering with tears; he didn’t know how to tell her how precious, how adorable she was.

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Tell me just what you want, and what you don’t like.... I can’t help making you happy, when I love you so, can I, darling Andrée? I’ll be the best kind of friend and lover I can to you, always. I’ll never interfere.”

“If you only won’t,” she said, eagerly. “I’ve grown to rather hate the idea of ever marrying, because it means so much interfering. I want to be myself.”

Stephens privately didn’t believe in marriage at all; he had even written a brochure on the subject; he thought it an evil; he would tell you, asked, or unasked, that he had never seen a happy marriage, or even many endurable ones. He didn’t believe in women being dependent; he loathed domesticity; he revolted at the idea of vows and promises. And now, at this moment, he became completely an apostate. What else could be done with a creature like Andrée? Of course they must be married; more than that, he voluntarily made to her then and there all those vows he condemned; he promised to make her happier than he possibly could, he promised eternal love and constancy, he promised that as this moment, so should all their lives be; he believed it, and so did she.

“We’ll be friends, Andrée, always,” he said. “We’ll each have our own life and our own interests. We’ll make it a different sort of marriage.”

“Oh, let’s!” said Andrée.

But while he was already envisaging the next ten years, she was held in thrall by this one minute. She listened to him for some time, but the intolerable feeling grew on her that he was wasting precious time.

“We don’t know how it’ll come out,” she said, impatiently. “Let’s not bother about it, but just be as happy as we can.”

He was silenced by this admirable recklessness. He took her in his arms and kissed her, and this time she kissed him; then he rather abruptly said it was time for them to go home.

“No; why?” she said.

But he was quite firm about it. He knew himself better than she did. He was alarmed at his total lack of views and opinions just then; he was not as reasonable as he wished to be. He was mortally afraid that by some expression of his ardour he might offend his glorious Diana. They walked home with their arms about each other, through the fields and the woods, a walk in a dream, in moonlight and shadow.

He went up to his hot little room and sat there in the dark, heart-sick with the ecstasy of it. He was more troubled and unhappy than he had ever been before in his cocksure existence. This thing, made up of moonlight and Andrée’s dark eyes, had come crashing into his life, to break it in two. He had not wanted or imagined anything of the sort; he with his talk about biologic necessities. He was appalled at the idea of going on, because everything within him had stopped.

He was not easily daunted, but it was a long time before his courage was fully restored. He lighted a cigarette, and it tranquillized him.

“All right!” he said, aloud. “I made a new man of myself once. I’ll do it again. I’ve got to.”

That was what he thought.