Although Walter and Paul were more inseparable than ever, there was a new reserve in Paul's manner. In the bleak six months during which his pride had kept him aloof, he had strengthened his fortress. Now he peered over the wall and would not be enticed outside by anyone who had once succeeded in wounding him.
This economy of emotion, had he known it, lent a touch of the artistic to his personality, a touch which Walter had sufficient taste to appreciate. When Walter accused John Ashmill of being stupid, he had in mind John's lack of delicacy. The new Paul, more subtly sensitive than ever, faintly derisive at times, challenging, less gullible, obviously trying to discipline his own excess of gentleness, appealed to Walter's cajoling nature.
If Paul had spent the interval in learning arts of repression, Walter had not wasted his time. He had been acquiring stores of knowledge which his imagination had freely dramatized and which he was eager to display before an audience capable of appreciating fine shades. John Ashmill, among others, had put him on the track of discoveries which placed the universe in a new light. Hence at twelve Walter was in possession of all the information—and how much more!—that "a young boy ought to know."
He had absorbed these facts gladly, but to Paul the revelation came with an unutterable sense of horror. For years he was destined to struggle with Walter's facts before they would assume their right proportion. His lack of animal exuberance made it necessary for him to acquire an extensive new acreage of observation before the magnitude of the trees of knowledge could be dwarfed to normal. Walter was interested in facts per se—the more deeply dyed the better. Paul, even at the age of eleven, was interested in facts per the light they shed on the abiding rules of the universe. Night after night, his mind fevered with distorted images, he cursed his chum for having suggested them. For, more than any facts in his life, they seemed to fill the world with discord. Nothing had ever flatted as this discovery flatted. At first he refused to believe but there was no evading Walter's steady accumulation of proofs.
The matter was placed beyond dispute by Mark Laval. "Why, didn't you know?" the French boy commented, when Paul dared broach the subject. To Mark it was a truth as familiar as any other. His indifference had the effect of a cooling stream. If Mark, with his riotous imagination, could be so casual about the overwhelming phenomena of creation, there was surely some hope of a balance for Paul.
More jealously than ever, he guarded the margin of reserve in his companionship with Walter. For there were still dark wells in his chum's mind into which he steadfastly declined to look. He had learned new ways of keeping Walter in place. One of them was to cultivate Mark Laval. This was fair retaliation for Walter's association with John Ashmill, since Paul had agreed to drop his feud with the bully. Nothing humiliated Walter so promptly as a resort on Paul's part to French, which Mark spoke with a strong habitant twang. Walter understood not a word of what he enviously described as a "dirty lingo" and was brought to book by his sense of impotence, whereupon Paul's conscience troubled him at the thought that he had yielded again to his besetting sin of showing off.
Paul's resentment of the new knowledge was at its sharpest when he attempted to reconcile it with the image of girls he knew. It made him sorry for nice girls and increased his dislike of horrid ones. He sincerely hoped Aunt Verona didn't know—though, being quite old, she might have found out by some unlucky accident. Of course all married people knew—Paul blushed—and writhed as the faces of Mrs. Dreer and Mrs. Kestrell came before him.
Walter's scheme obliged every creature to submit to or indulge in nastiness, and Walter found in such a predicament a source of glee! Whereas Paul now looked at his girl acquaintances with a haunting pity, as he might watch a lamb going up the path to the butcher, Walter chortled over the prospect of their fate. Not only that, but he kept on the alert for any sign of knowledge on the part of the opposite sex, and was never happier than when he detected Miss Todd coughing over an equivocal word in the Sunday-school lesson. He was highly pleased with himself when he perceived that Mrs. Wilcove was going to have a baby. "You wait and see," he concluded, when Paul refused to take his word for it.
A few days later when Paul called at Mr. Kestrell's workshop to sharpen his knife, he caught a glimpse of Gritty and Myrtle Wilcove in the showroom. Gritty was stuffing coloured tissue-paper into her pinny and presently began to strut about the room like an actor made up for the part of Falstaff. He heard Myrtle giggle, whereupon he suddenly blushed and fled, without waiting to sharpen his knife. A wave of knowledge seemed to have passed over the village like an epidemic. Trust Gritty to catch it!
The blow drove him out into the fields behind Aunt Verona's house. The only secrets left in the whole world seemed to be the soft green cushions of moss studded with red pins that clung to the roots of the trees. For the first time in many months he thought of Leila, and was passionately glad that she, for one, had escaped the epidemic.
Gradually the new knowledge ceased to be a wholly discordant interruption in the theme of life. At times there were notes in this particular movement which still seemed to flat hideously, just as there had been chords in certain Chopin études which had begun by offending his ear, but which he had learned to incorporate into a wider musical comprehension. On one occasion, when John Ashmill boasted of having done indescribable things with his cousin Hilda, who lived in Halifax and went to a dancing school, the discord had been so great that it fairly drowned the theme. But by the time, a few months later, that Walter Dreer had come with a similar tale involving Bessie Day, a girl whom Paul had always thought of as dirty and bold, the class of facts of which Walter's exploit was an example had taken its place as mere ornamentation in the pattern, and the theme of life was repeating itself triumphantly above the questionable harmonies of this latest variation. Paul had reached the point where he could make sharp distinctions between phenomena such as Mrs. Wilcove's condition and Walter Dreer's immondices. The one was clothed in the miraculous, a little ugly, but necessary and condonable; the other was on a par with all the things in life one ignored.
Yet Paul was still under the spell of his chum. After all, there were long periods when the lurid subject was lost to view in the interest of games and excursions in the fields, and even when it recurred Walter could provide fresh details which filled out gaps in the puzzle. Moreover, Walter had become more discreet in imparting his facts, had lived down his first gloating excitement. He found it more profitable to discuss the world within the restrictions which Paul's instincts made obligatory than with the licence made possible by John Ashmill's coarseness. For coarseness implied a limitation of ideas, the calling of spades spades, the ruling out of all the interesting gradations between black and white.
Although Paul saw with relief that his theme of life could hold its own under the intricacies of the new variation, he found that the upheaval of mind resultant upon the discovery of sex had made it necessary to take a new cognizance of other phenomena which he had never thought to challenge. It was as though van-loads of furniture had arrived at the door of his mind, installation of which could be effected only after a wholesale pulling down of partitions and the discarding of outworn objects. The upheaval had awakened his critical faculty, and he found himself watching the world with a growing scepticism and unprecedented shyness. He, who had been the hero of all the school-concert tableaux, now actually quaked when he walked on the platform.
It was at this period that Miss Todd offered him the post of organist in the church, a post made vacant by the marriage and departure of Miss Ranston. The rush of surprise and elation, a new sense of importance in the community, served for a time to restore his old trustful complacency of outlook. He had also increased his practising to four hours a day, and music absorbed most of his surplus energy, physical and mental.
But under the surface, speculation and mutiny were quietly smouldering, and the fond ladies of the village who pointed to him as a model of the Christian virtues and pagan graces were far from guessing the presence in his nature of anything that would make for a conflagration. Paul himself was just sufficiently aware of his own combustibility to keep raking sods over the smouldering pile. In so doing he for a while deceived even himself.
It was impossible to say exactly when the image of Phœbe Meddar began to be a permanent tenant of Paul's mind. In the far-off days when he and Leila were monitors together, he had, in the thoroughness of his imaginative arrangements, thought of Phœbe as a sort of sister-in-law elect. And since the day of the funeral he had always been a little more sharply conscious of Phœbe's presence in the universe than that of other girls—with the exception of Gritty, the tomboy, who of course never counted. Gritty was a fixture in the universe like himself.
It was not until five years after the funeral, when Leila's memory had faded into the substance of a dream, that Phœbe's image became insistent. And not until a certain summer day when her name was mentioned by Walter Dreer did she leap into his heart with full significance. From that day, however, her personality revealed itself to him as something wondrously sweet, something that partook of the nature of violets and pansies and roses, as fragrant and as delicate.
He had never been close enough to Phœbe to ascertain whether she smelt of coco-nut cookies. Something in his regard for her made him refrain from approaching. For one thing, she had a sister who was an angel. It was as though Phœbe were a goddess who moved in a faery haze which he must not attempt to penetrate. Her brother might pull her golden pigtails and elicit musical squeals of pain and remonstrance, and Walter Dreer might talk about her as though she were like any other pretty girl, might even crowd into her corner of the Sunday-school vestry and roll his eyes at her, but for Paul it was an awe-inspiring privilege to live in the same world as Phœbe. He gave humble thanks that he could see her walking on the opposite side of the road or know she was in the family pew hearing the music he made for her.
Often in the summer afternoons or before falling asleep at night he would be suffused with a sense of well-being that recalled the afternoon of his drive with Dr. Wilcove. And in all such moments a vision of Phœbe Meddar came before him, a tranquil vision in ivory and gold, with eyes of gentian blue and a little tight pink smile.
Phœbe was a year younger than he, and a grade lower at school. This gave him a sense of seniority. His regard for her was at times paternal, always protective. The heavenly hosts had lost their glamour. He was beginning to be sceptical of the pearl and jasper, the pavements of gold. There was something second-rate about the glory of abandoning a Bechstein concert piano on earth for a measly harp on high. But his nature still yearned after the ineffable, yearned all the more by reason of the disintegration of his heavenly visions, and before he knew it Phœbe was a sort of living angel in an earthly paradise from which he was excluded, but of which it was his lot to catch radiant glimpses.
The only sign that his regard for Phœbe bordered on the terrestrial was a growing dislike for Walter Dreer's society. He hated Walter when he spoke of Phœbe Meddar as "darn good-looking" or wondered whether Phœbe would be "game." Gritty Kestrell, champion of truth at any price, once said right out that Phœbe was Walter's "girl." Walter acknowledged the impeachment with an easy smile, for which Paul gave him another black mark. For he knew that Phœbe disapproved of Walter. He had seen her shrink when Walter had tried by ruse to obtain her as partner at Myrtle Wilcove's birthday party. The ruse had been discovered in time and the girls had finally drawn lots for partners and were called into a room one by one and cross-examined by the assembly, whose duty it was to establish the identity of the partners by eliciting descriptive details in three queries. Phœbe, by some miracle, had drawn the slip bearing Paul's name, as he guessed from a sudden demure glance she directed at him, and he waited with studied negligence and wild pulses.
"What colour is his hair?" inquired the first questioner in the circle, as the assembly sucked their lead pencils in anticipation of guessing the name.
"Black," Phœbe promptly replied.
"What colour are his eyes?" demanded the next.
Phœbe was lost. She had to think. "Uh—blue. I'm not sure," she finally pronounced.
Paul's eyes were black as coals, but the vicissitudes of childhood had already inured him to the pain of wounded vanity, and his adoration was proof against his goddess's carelessness in matters of observation. Besides, from her pew she saw more of the back of his head than she did of his face. He quite forgave her shortcoming when, at the close of the game, she evinced no reluctance at joining hands with him for the "Ring around the Rosy." The outstanding fact was that she had avoided Walter, and yet Walter could smile confidently when Gritty spoke of Phœbe as his girl. The world was like that.
The night before the Sunday-school picnic Walter told Paul of a rose garden which flourished in the Ashmill grounds. He proposed that they make a raid on it. "Girls like 'em," Walter said vaguely. Paul waived his scruples in the excitement of adventure, and they set forth.
"You go and get 'em," Walter suggested when they stood before the Ashmill cedar hedge. "I'll be sentinel."
This was an irregular suggestion, since Walter had proposed the expedition. But Paul made no demur, lest Walter should suspect that he dreaded the dark. Walter whispered directions concerning a particular bush of pink tea-roses.
"Get four or five," he instructed.
The grass was damp and the earth loose under Paul's feet. The grounds stretched darkly away toward the orange windows of the Ashmill house, partly concealed behind black clumps of shrubbery. He crept beside the bushes, starting at vague sounds. His nerves were prepared for anything that might come bounding out at him. A dog's bark would have been welcome, for it would have dispelled the weird silence. Walter would not have understood his fears—no other boy would have—only he was afraid of the dark, and no one in the world must ever suspect.
The air was heavy with a nameless blend of odours. He closed his eyes and pictured Phœbe Meddar, white and gold, blue and pink, fresh, cool and mysterious. The tea-roses were in the farthermost corner. Dewdrops ran down his sleeve as he cut the stems. Thorns pricked his wrists. One; two, three, four, and a lovely bud. It seemed a pity, but there were hundreds left. He stole back and presented his flowers in timorous triumph. Walter concealed them under his coat and they regained the road.
Before Walter's gate they made an arrangement to meet early in the morning, then said good night.
"I'd like to have the bud," Paul said, as Walter closed the gate.
Walter detached the bud from the bouquet and Paul ran home.
In the morning Walter failed to appear at the rendezvous and Mrs. Dreer said he had already gone to the post office, where the waggons were to start. With the rose-bud and a picnic basket in his hand, Paul hurried to the post office. Among the boys and girls already assembled he detected the form of Phœbe Meddar. She stood there with the pale morning light gilding her pigtails. Her head was bare, for Gritty Kestrell was trying on Phœbe's new leghorn hat trimmed with heliotrope ribbon, Gritty's passion for dressing up was one of the few weaknesses that betrayed her sex. Ever since she had seen Uncle Tom's Cabin she had shown a tendency to strut about as Topsy or Aunt Ophelia. She could also impersonate Miss Todd singing her solos, and was particularly successful as Pokey Ned, the village idiot.
Walter was playing marbles with Bob Meddar and Skinny Wiggins. Paul was about to hurry forward with his rosebud and slip it into Phœbe's hand while the others were watching Gritty's antics, when Phœbe leaned down toward her basket and picked up a bouquet that was resting on it—a bouquet of four tea-roses—and buried her nose in it.
Paul swung on his heel.
Aunt Verona was astonished to see him. She knew how eagerly he had been looking forward to the trip to Slate Beach and hoarding pennies for ice-cream.
"I'm not going," he said, and Aunt Verona took the basket without further inquiry.
"I tell you what," she proposed. "Let's you and I have a picnic all by ourselves in the field by the brook. I'll make some doughnut men and animals."
He acquiesced with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, for he realized that Aunt Verona, in offering to go as far as the field, was making an unprecedented concession to comfort him, and he felt he ought to support her effort. But in the playroom, with the door shut, he leaned forward on the keyboard of the big piano and wept.
Although Paul continued on friendly terms with Walter Dreer, he contrived to see less of him, and only his distrust of his own stubbornness saved him from a repetition of the old wordless estrangement. During the remainder of the summer vacation he divided his time between music and reading. His progress in the former was becoming rapid as his hands grew broader, and the excitement of being able to play Chopin scherzos, which Aunt Verona assured him nobody in Hale's Turning and very few people even in Halifax could have played, made him willing to practise five or six hours a day. In consideration of this extra application he was relieved of all household tasks, and even abandoned Mr. Silva's cow.
Aunt Verona had had Mr. Silva bring down a crate of books from the attic to swell the list in the playroom. There were novels and collections of poetry in German and French and English, text-books on harmony, treatises in philosophy, books of memoirs—a stimulating miscellany. On the title-page of a beautifully bound volume entitled Confessions d'un Vieux Musicien, there was an inscription which read: "A la gracieuse Verona Windell, souvenir amical et affectueux de l'auteur, qui n'oubliera jamais ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne. A l'admirable artiste tout bonheur et tout succès!"
Here was a field rich in possibilities. Yet he knew that a direct question would merely have the effect of vexing Aunt Verona or driving her into one of her brooding reveries. It was thrilling to learn that Aunt Verona had known a musician who had written a book, thrilling to know that she had been a person of consequence in Munich and Vienna, thrilling to know that she had been thought of as an admirable artist. He knew that Aunt Verona could play superbly, though he had never heard her, except for occasional phrases when she was teaching him how to produce certain effects. It was all intriguing and heart-warming, and with glowing eyes he plunged into the volume, taking care to read it in the playroom so that Aunt Verona's attention should not be attracted to the inscription on the title-page. It might arouse some disagreeable memory, and he wished to avoid that, for she had been unnaturally depressed for several weeks.
It was a dull book, except for the parts in which the author spoke of composing symphonies and travelling over Europe to conduct them. There were grand pages relating his triumphs, and touching accounts of his disappointments and the treachery of his colleagues.
Then there came a page of crashing, glittering splendour—a page that set Paul's heart beating and wrapped his immediate world in a magic scarf. For he read: "It was at this selfsame concert that the public of Vienna first heard the young Canadian pianist, Mlle. Verona Windell, who performed the Schumann concerto in a manner that aroused the highest pitch of interest and curiosity. This artist undoubtedly has a brilliant future. As for my own concertos, not even Clara Schumann has played them with a finer sense of proportion and a more appealing charm. Mlle. Windell is of that rare company of musicians who abandon themselves to the composition in hand, without trickery, without ceremony, so that it becomes for the moment the channel for the deepest reservoirs of feeling of which the human organism is capable. Such artists should never be constrained to interpret petty music. Their energies need to be conserved for the great works."
With the open book in his hand and his eyes as widely open as the pages, Paul passed down the playroom into the kitchen. It was all very well to repress one's wonderment about Aunt Verona on ordinary occasions, but this!
Aunt Verona paused in the act of wringing out a dish-cloth, and her face tightened as she saw the eager inquiry in Paul's eyes.
"What have you there?" she asked, coming to meet him and reaching for the book with wet hands. She glanced at the page, pressed her lips together, snapped the covers to, and placed the volume on the table.
"Aunt Verona—" Paul commenced tentatively, and waited.
"That's a silly book, child," she said, trying to keep a harsh note out of her voice. "I'd rather you didn't read it . . . Run out and play a while before the sun goes down."
Reluctantly, Paul left the room, giving an apprehensive glance over his shoulder at the crate on the floor with its scores of books in disorderly array. His apprehension clung to him out of doors, and he sat on a chopping block by the woodshed, wondering and wondering.
A few moments later his attention was caught by the changed colour and increased volume of smoke issuing from the chimney. He ran back and peeked into the kitchen. Aunt Verona had five or six books in her apron and was stuffing pages and bindings into the stove with the poker. She was muttering to herself, so engrossed in destruction that she failed to observe the intruder.
When the last volume in her apron was disposed of, she replaced the kettle over the flames, and Paul stole away to the woodyard, frightened, outraged, and sad. Life had gone terribly off-key again, and this time it was Aunt Verona who had deliberately played a false chord in her own theme. He was sure that many precious clues had been consumed in the flames, many an enchanting tale irrevocably pressed back by Aunt Verona's drawn lips. It was small consolation that thirty or forty books had been spared. None of them, he felt, would breathe any hint of a more personal significance than ordinary books; their title-pages would be without penned inscriptions.
One volume from the crate he had brought away in his pocket, a tiny German book with small print and a miniature wall-paper pattern inside its flexible covers. It was called Die Leiden des jungen Werther. He found a comfortable seat on the pile of cord-wood and began to read.
Paul's hopeless wonderment regarding Aunt Verona added to the weight of hopeless love for Phœbe Meddar and the weight of Walter's betrayal pressed heavily on his mind. Fortunately his long hours at the piano and organ, the choir rehearsals at Miss Todd's, and his literary treasure-trove gave him the opportunity of merging his perplexities in an endless stream of fancy. Music was the most satisfactory outlet. He could even imagine, for instance, that he was Mlle. Verona Windell, and that the chairs and engravings in the playroom were the rapt and gaping citizens of Vienna. A yellow silk handkerchief tied round his head unaccountably heightened the illusion.
Or, when that rôle palled, he could imagine he was a grown-up Monsieur Minas, playing sonatas which he had made out of his own head, and that his audience was Mlle. Phœbe Meddar, a charming young lady from Canada whose pale gold hair and heliotrope gowns were the admiration of swarthy foreigners. At the end of the piece, when Mlle. Meddar had expressed her approval and averted her violet-blue eyes, he would lean forward and whisper, "Ah, my dear Mademoiselle Meddar, I am going to write a beautiful book, and on the front page I will write an inscription to you. Never shall I forget our evenings together in Munich and Vienna."
And Mlle. Meddar would reply, "Oh, Monsieur Minas, will you?"
With the reopening of school in September, Mark Laval made his reappearance. He had shot up and spread out, and in his coating of tan looked like some great shaggy dog. His eyes Paul observed for the first time—with a sudden realization of the oversight, he smiled subtly at his recent condemnation of Phœbe's carelessness with respect to his own eyes. One of the books in Aunt Verona's box had been called Les Fleurs du Mal, a series of poems for the most part incomprehensible. In one poem about a cat, he had been struck by the description of the animal's eyes—"a mixture of metal and agate." That was the quality of Mark Laval's eyes. They magnetized your gaze and then, like a clairvoyant's crystal, held it in focus. But unlike the eyes of Baudelaire's cat, Mark's eyes were kind and loyal, even when his words were unyielding.
Coming into Paul's lonely and abstracted mood, Mark was doubly welcome. He walked home with Paul after the first morning at school, which had been devoted to an announcement of the year's programme of studies. Mark, despite his bare thirteen years, was almost grown-up, and in his presence Paul felt small, yet singularly secure, as secure as he had felt with Mr. Silva. The summer in camp had increased the older boy's awkwardness, without diminishing his intensity. A certain moodiness, however, like a dark cloud, had settled over him, making Paul feel his forlornness more acutely than ever. It was to be Mark's last year at school, and already he foretasted the exclusion which withdrawal from his schoolmates must entail for him. He was like a strong swimmer setting out towards the open sea knowing the waters must ultimately close over his head.
With a blunt thumb and a blunt forefinger Mark turned the pages of a characteristically grubby copy of Evangeline and read aloud from it. His voice and his belief in the poetry had the effect of transforming a singsong tale into a glowing apotheosis of sentiment. At school Paul had taken slight interest in the tame Acadian lovers who had lived at Grand-Pré, only a few miles distant from Hale's Turning, but under the spell of Mark's enthusiasm the old Norman days came to life and reminded him of his hereditary interest in their fate.
"Has a funny effect on you, poetry," Mark ventured, when the book had been closed and they were seated under the cherry tree in Aunt Verona's orchard. "Makes you feel sort of—more alive but all weak and runny too."
"And sad," added Paul.
"But nice sad—not gloomy."
"No, not gloomy. It's like music, kind of. Makes you feel serious but excited—and ready for something to happen . . . which usually doesn't," he added with precocious cynicism.
"Like cryin' because you're happy, the way women do."
"Men too, sometimes."
"I never seen a man cry."
"Werther did—often."
"Who's he?"
"In a German book. He killed himself at the end."
"You stay in Purgatory if you do that."
"Oh, pooh! That's what the priests say."
"Well, they know."
"You think they do, you mean. There's another thing I read, in a French book, that said something about priests in poetry. I remembered to tell you. It said:
Notre credulité fait toute leur science."
"Must a been a book of sin."
"Oh, you say that because you're narrow-minded. All Catholics are narrow-minded."
"Are they! What about you? You're narrow-minded for runnin' down Catholics. You think you're right about everything just because you're rich."
Paul was as snobbish as most boys of eleven, but he was also truthful. John Ashmill's father was rich, but to think of himself as rich was the height of absurdity.
"I am not," he contradicted.
"Yes you are," Mark insisted. "You own this house and a ship and the wharf and lots of things."
Paul laughed at his friend's ignorance. "My father did, but he's been dead ten years. He died at sea with yellow fever."
"Sure, and he left everything to your mother. When she died she left everything to you. There wasn't nobody else. It's all yours now."
"It is not." Paul had nothing to go by but a sense of the grotesqueness of his owning anything so big and useless. "He left me the gold watch that the queen gave him, but I'm not to have it till I can play the Liszt sonata."
"You ask Miss Windell."
Paul considered this. It would do no harm to ask Aunt Verona, and he certainly meant to. But he preferred to wait, for in the event of her saying yes he would lose the argument, which would be humiliating.
"I have to practise now," he finally announced.
Mark's appreciation of his music was the corner-stone of their friendship, and his eyes now dwelt on Paul in a sort of wistful envy, free from any taint of grudge.
"Can I stay here and listen?" he asked.
Paul melted. He could concede even an argument to such an eager friend. "Sure you can," he said, "if you want to."
"Play the Impromptu," Mark coaxed.
"The Schubert in A-flat?" Paul inquired. He couldn't resist this little parade of specialized lore.
"Yes—all runny."
"Oh, it's easy," Paul deprecated. "I know dozens of things harder than that."
"I like it," Mark insisted. "Play it—go on."
"It's rather monotonous—too much repeating."
He closed the door behind him with an elation he wouldn't have betrayed to Mark for worlds, and proceeded to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. Aunt Verona was mending stockings.
"Aunt Verona, Mark Laval says I own a ship and a shipyard. I don't, do I?"
She waited a moment, then replied:
"Don't let people put notions into your head. Here are some cookies before you practise."
Paul blushed. He was thinking of the notions Walter had put into his head.
At the open window of the playroom he tossed a cookie out to his friend, who was pulling at the grass. "You're wrong, Mark," he whispered, "about the ships and things. I asked my aunt."
Mark merely shook his head in indulgent contradiction, accommodating the cookie in two bites.
"Play the Impromptu," he returned.
The opening of the crate of books had consequences more far-reaching than Paul could have foreseen. From the day when Aunt Verona had consigned the souvenir volumes to the fire, the disconcerting blank moods had gained a new ascendancy. With increasing frequency and at the most unexpected moments she repaired to the playroom to stare unseeingly through the window. She confused the days, too, and spoke German oftener than French. Occasionally she disappeared upstairs and Paul, listening breathlessly, could hear the faint rumbling of drawers, the shutting down of boxes, the crunching of keys in rusty locks. But Aunt Verona collected texts with the same meaningless precision, and there were now two drawers overflowing with the bescribbled scraps of paper.
As the winter advanced a new habit was formed. Aunt Verona took to writing at a furious rate on sheets of foolscap. At times her ideas lagged and she would sit staring at the paper in an abstraction which was proof against even the smell of burning bread. Paul found himself saddled with a new responsibility regarding the proper running of the small ménage. When Aunt Verona's ideas failed her, she would end by locking away the sheets of foolscap in the dresser. Perhaps five minutes later, as she was carrying a kettle from stove to sink, the recalcitrant ideas would come to her, whereupon she would abandon the task in hand, bring out the foolscap, and commence scribbling.
One evening after supper, when she had left her seat at the kitchen table to consult a dictionary in the playroom, Paul looked up from his arithmetic exercise and glanced at the sentences on her page. He succeeded in reading this:
"But Heinrich, though he could feel that one was an artist in every fibre, would never have understood how one might be so thoroughly and abysmally an artist as to be unable to succeed in art, once one's faith in one's higher ego were jeopardized. For him the fulfilment of an artistic aim would be gaged by public proclamation that the aim had been fulfilled, by public recognition of mere dexterity, or whatever. For the motto 'To thine own self be true' he would have substituted 'To the world's preconception of you, be true.' Art for him was a compromise between the individual and the community, just as his status was a compromise between the monarchical whip-hand and the grovelling of the masses, their willing or unwilling allegiance to his numbskull sire. In a sense his myopia was less ridiculous than my idealism. He at any rate was under no illusions as to his inherent princeliness, whereas I most whole-souledly was. And my belief in his inherent princeliness, my devout, mad, piteous belief in it superseded and gradually strangled my belief in my singleness of purpose, in my—God save the mark—genius. He considered himself a prince because he was the son, the grandson, the great-grandson, the nephew, the cousin of kings, and for no other reason. For me he would have been a prince had I met him mounting guard at the palace gates instead of mingling with guests of State. Whereas had I come to him unheralded, with nothing but my belief in myself to support whatever grace God had given me and a French dressmaker had accentuated, who knows"
Aunt Verona's step cut short the surreptitious perusal, and Paul glued his eyes on his task. The ciphers swam, and the exercise became abracadabra. He wondered and wondered, until the mystery and the glamour emanating from the end of Aunt Verona's stubby pencil became a positive pain. His cheeks were flushed and his head ached. On the blurred page of his arithmetic, in the softly yellow circle of light made by the kerosene lamp, he saw a youthful version of Aunt Verona gowned in "white samite, mystic, wonderful," curtsying to a blonde youth in gold braid, with ribbons and medals on his breast and a gleaming sword at his side. He saw her pale and pretty, with the faint, serious smile modifying the austerity of her face, sitting at a long piano, while in curved ranks, beyond shiny spaces of floor, under millions of glittering prisms, flanked by mirrors and marble columns, in a warm flood of perfume, potentates and bejewelled ladies listened spellbound to the fabulous strains of the Liszt sonata. He saw the arms fall away from the piano, he saw the young artist lift a red rose from the lid and carry it to her lips, he heard complimentary murmurs and the patter of white gloves, he saw the blonde prince advancing across the shiny space
Suddenly he broke the spell and cast a furtive glance toward the end of the table. There was Aunt Verona, quite old-looking, over forty, her dark eyes burning, her face drained of colour, her lips tightly pressed together, her grey-streaked hair parted in a manner that recalled the picture of the lady who had written Daniel Deronda, her figure muffled in a green woollen dressing-jacket, her cramped, cold, scarred, veined, nervous, bony fingers racing across the page.
He got up from his seat and went to throw himself down on a sofa in the dark playroom. His departure was unnoticed. Life was vast and terrifying: a great stormy adventure illuminated by brief flashes which only accentuated the blackness. One would go on groping, always groping, for ever and ever, alone. An endless fugue that got harder and harder to play. One could not hope even to trace the line of the theme, much less master the intricacies of subsidiary voices.
To-night he knew he would have to keep his back pressed against the wall all the way up the dark stairs.
When Aunt Verona was not given over to the fever of writing, she moved about in a cloud, working mechanically, or staring through the playroom window at nothing. In bewildering sallies she emerged from her abstraction and returned to the old routine, making hot scones, mending stockings and mittens, sweeping, polishing, dusting, asking questions, and presiding over the early-morning music lesson. These intervals, however, found Paul unresponsive, for he had adapted his manner to Aunt Verona's growing impersonality and found it difficult to step out of his shell without warning.
Thrown on his own resources, he had become precociously self-sufficing, and as his mind became more and more stocked with images from books—books like Candide, Vanity Fair, Eugénie Grandet, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Last Days of Pompeii, Adam Bede, Hypatia, The Light of Asia, Knight Errant, The First Violin, Ben Hur—he found that life was changing from a fixed thing, as it appeared on the afternoon when he had driven into Hale's Turning with Dr. Wilcove, into a shifting drama, with ever new characters and settings. Even customs and institutions which he had always thought of as irreproachable, and in their nature immutable, he found were arbitrary. Everything under the sun, he made out, was challengeable.
At first this truth made him hold to his surroundings to see if he was steady. But as his critical faculty spread tentative wings a little thrill went through him, and he surmised that life was going to consist in an endless flitting, a long quest for the honey of truth, broken by intervals of recreation in the choicest flower-beds.
As a small child he had felt that all the security and permanence of life were harboured within Aunt Verona's kitchen and his playroom and bedroom. Now the gaunt old house was becoming an abode of ghostly ideas, and he saw it as a waning phase in the progress of his life, a single variation of the big theme, while a richer security, the culminating variations were to be sought outside this house, outside this village, beyond the farthest horizon. The value of life would be great or small in the measure that one's faring forth in search of its treasures were bold or timid. In exalted moments, moments when the truths buried in books came out of their graves to dazzle him with an astral radiance, he promised himself that he would fly carefully, but high and far. And his smouldering scepticism, the concealed sparks that ever gnawed at the roots of his daily habits, gave signs of bursting through in flame. So far the fire was known only to himself, and he still made a point of raking dead leaves over the scorched roots. He was too conscious of his weakness to risk provoking opposition as yet, but the day would come—of that he was confident—and he went back to his books and solitary dialogues with renewed concentration.
The only outward sign of a growing self-reliance was a new indifference to companionship of the only sort available. Even his regard for Phœbe Meddar became a half symbolic sentiment which played the rôle of a kindly moon as contrasted with the burnished sun of his mental activity. He could dispense with the society of boys who had had little to offer in return for the painstaking efforts he had made to get on a footing with them. He no longer hovered on the edge of the circle. He drew a circle of his own, somewhat superciliously, and with a tinge of bitterness noticed that no one but Mark Laval sought the privilege of stepping inside its circumference—Mark whose value was largely discounted, even while it was enhanced, by his uncritical devotion. Not even Mark could reach the centre of the circle, and Paul often voluntarily stepped over the line, carrying his best ideas into a territory more accessible to his uncouth friend. In this act he was making a sincere attempt to live down an accusation of Mark's which he had at first resented; his wider reading had proved to him not only that he had been narrow-minded, as Mark had alleged, but that the gaining of the whole world was positively contingent upon his becoming broad-minded. He felt like a mole, burrowing steadily towards the light, yet still embedded in deep strata of inherited prejudice. His only tools were his critical claws, and he dug the more fiercely to sharpen them.
There had been some talk of his entering a Baptist preparatory school in Wolfville. At first he had favoured the project, welcoming the breath of adventure implied in a change of scene and neighbours. On reflection it occurred to him that Wolfville must be only a sort of glorified Hale's Turning, that the very safety and regularity implied in Dr. Wilcove's partisan approval of the school in question augured ill for one's chances of finding therein companions akin to the stimulating people in books. Dr. Wilcove was kind but Dr. Wilcove was an usher and dearly loved that moment when it was time to get up and pass the plate—a moment which Paul had grown to despise. He had learned, aided, as always, by hints from Aunt Verona, that mere showing-off can become mortally dull and barren. He was suffering from the reaction of a long exhibition of virtuosity. Doxologies and postludes had grown sour, like milk, from standing still; his responses in Sunday-school had become parrot-like; his intimate relationship with the Holy Ghost was extinct. He could therefore muster little enthusiasm for the proposed school on the ground of its being a continuance of the traditions of the family set. Rather than sink into that bog he would shock the village by subscribing to Mark Laval's arguments in favour of the college of St. Francis Xavier. After all, what he objected to in Dr. Wilcove's proposal was precisely what Mark had objected to in his former cocksure assertions: namely, complacency and a casual assumption of infallibility. "Anything for a change," was his motto for the time being, but the change must be real and not merely apparent.
Becky States, the black washerwoman, had come to live in the house as general servant. Dr. Wilcove had insisted on the arrangement and the decision was arrived at one cold day in January when Paul had come in for his skates to find Aunt Verona flushed and strangely tense, in conference with the doctor. The latter was preparing to leave, and while Paul was on the porch putting new laces in his skating boots he overheard their final remarks.
"But your nerves will have to pay for it in the end," the doctor was expostulating. "Neuralgia will then be the very least of your troubles. There's no such thing in nature as utter inflexibility."
"Nuns fret not at their convents' narrow room," Aunt Verona commented in a brittle tone.
"Ah, but you do fret without knowing it. It's like bleeding inwardly. Besides, you're the last woman who should ever have dreamed of turning your back on life."
"I gave it a trial."
"Not a fair one. You dived into a shallow pool, stunned yourself, then concluded that the pool had been deep and that you had been stunned through incompetent diving—which is grossly unjust to yourself. Since then, by disdaining little pools and shrinking from big ones, you've shirked the issues of life. Be warned while there's still time."
When Paul returned from skating two or three hours later, he paused at the gate, thinking he had heard the sound of a piano. But he doubted his ears, for they tingled from the cold wind on the frozen marsh ponds, and the sound might have been a distant sleigh-ball or the clinking of skates slung over his shoulder. He hurried down the icy board-walk to the kitchen door, stood still a moment to listen, then though the window saw Aunt Verona lighting the lamp.
It was Friday night and he had to hurry through supper in order not to be late for choir practice. He was tired after the afternoon's exercise and would have preferred to sit at home with a book. He could play the silly anthems at sight and resented the necessity of going over and over the separate parts to accommodate tenors and contraltos whose musicianship was of the hit-or-miss variety. Mr. Silva was the only member of the choir who invariably sang the right note. Even Miss Todd—whom Walter Dreer spoke of as "gurgling Gertrude"—fumbled for the notes when sight-reading and beat time with her head. There was one point—E or E-sharp—where her voice passed without warning from molten brass into brass wire, and if the finale of her solo called for a sudden jump to G-sharp or A she trembled for a moment like a distraught hot-water pipe, then emitted the same sort of pinched moan—sometimes painfully faint, sometimes squawkingly shrill, When her solos were written higher than usual, Paul mercifully transposed the music without her knowledge. He couldn't transpose the anthems, because then the bassos got beyond their depth; besides, Mr. Silva always knew when one took liberties with the key.
It was time Miss Todd gave place to a new soloist, but nobody had the nerve to tell her so, for she was sweet and gentle. Moreover, it was time he chucked his job, and some bright morning he would. Already he could hear the minister say in his oily voice, "Why, what now, my little man!" Little man—Gee-rusalem! In church, as soon as he had memorized the text, he fooled everybody by reading books behind a high choir seat—books that would have horrified the minister's wife.
Sunday-school was becoming intolerable too. Year in and year out, the same cycle of lessons and golden-texts, with an attempt to enliven the dreary proceedings by coloured cards and chalk pictures of lilies on the blackboard. Decidedly he had outgrown it, as he had outgrown everything else in this sleepy village. There wasn't a grown-up in Hale's Turning who had read books like Werther!
He was developing the habit of playing hookey. One morning, instead of going to school, he and Gritty had pooled their savings, sneaked into the train, and gone to Bridgetown to see a thrilling matinée performance of Hazel Kirke. During the return journey they had stood on the platform and each smoked half a Sweet Caporal. Gritty had even suggested that they should run away and go on the stage.
As the winter progressed and the long thaw set in, Aunt Verona's time was almost wholly devoted to her manuscripts. Becky was in control, and her unearthly growls and rich baritone bursts of song brought an unaccountable note of cheer into the depression of the house. "Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile," Becky would drone as she scrubbed, and once Aunt Verona looked up to exclaim, with an old-time gleam of humour, "Mercy, Becky, what a gloomy tune!"
But Becky, who was a law unto herself, went on, de plus belle, "a long ways from ho-o-ome, a long wa-ays from home." It was plain to her, as it was to Paul, that Aunt Verona liked the song. Besides, Becky's lugubriousness was one of Hale's Turning's stock diversions. Its comic value was enhanced by the long glass prisms hanging from her ears and resting on her calico shoulders.
One morning in April, after weeks of wind and rain, a flicker of sunlight broke through the clouds and a breeze stole into the village with the news that Spring was coming. The trees whispered the message; the sparrows, eavesdropping in their branches, overheard it and flew up and down and around in excitement. Paul guessed it and ran out of the house, brandishing his book-bag and leaping high over the mud-puddles. Aunt Verona must have known it too, with the experience of many a barren change of season. She had spent a sleepless night and was suffering with neuralgia, an ailment of long-standing. When Becky had cleared the breakfast table, Aunt Verona went into the playroom and stood at the window to wave Paul the usual good-bye. The trees in the neglected orchard were palely gilded. The clouds above were being rolled back like some billowing curtain in order that the sun might have full play upon the vast stage where the annual drama of creation was commencing. Over the fields there was a faint green halo of growth. In a few weeks the trees would be spilling over with leaves and blossoms; summer would come at one stride, then autumn with its fruits, and winter again with its blizzards and silences and delays—world without end, Amen. Nature was showing off to-day, Nature the virtuoso. The genius of God was putting to the blush anything man might hope to accomplish.
When Paul passed through the gate on his breathless return for dinner, he stopped short in amazement. This time there was no mistaking his ears, and he went around to the orchard side of the house and listened under the playroom window.
Great chords were tumbling forth with a profusion beyond anything he had ever heard. From the idiom of the music he recognized it as Beethoven, but it was as though the instrument—his child piano—had grown up and burst into song with the deep-throated voice of maturity. The music screamed, roared, rumbled, pleaded, wailed, grieved, sighed, and suddenly subsided to a singing plaintiveness. His heart was in his mouth as he listened, and tears stung his eyelids. To think of all that eloquence having been repressed for years and years and years, buried like the false steward's talent, like the precious books packed into crates, like the untold treasures locked in trunks and drawers!
The music broke off, recommenced, broke off again at the same point, recommenced, impatiently. Aunt Verona, he reflected, must be so badly out of practice after all the silent years that she found those mordents difficult. He could have played them—easily! Ah, but he couldn't have given the piano a soul as she had done.
At the same spot the music again came to a halt, then without warning a frightful jangling chord which seemed to have been struck with four or five hands at once was wrenched out, as though some gigantic claw had reached down and ripped the wires across the whole width of the piano. The cruel, thunderous discord made Paul jump. With a queer presentiment he stepped back from the window, hesitated, then ran around the house to the kitchen door. On opening it he caught sight of Becky standing agape, her eyes on Aunt Verona, who, with feverish energy, was snatching piles of manuscript from the drawer of the dresser and tossing them on the floor. When the last sheet of foolscap had been added to the pile, she thrust in the drawer and began to gather the sheets into her arms. Her manner reminded Paul of the day when she had destroyed the books, and he stepped forward apprehensively.
"Out of my way, child!" commanded Aunt Verona, pushing him aside as she proceeded toward the stove.
Her face! He was too astounded by it to be terrified.
He resisted and caught her arms. "No, no, Aunt Verona," he implored, in hysterical tones. "Please, please don't burn the story!"
His resistance was in vain. She had seized the poker and prodded up the stove-lid.
"Story!" she cried, with a harsh laugh. "Story! It's me—me! My cremation! There! There! There!" She fed the flames with one hand and poked at the burning pages with the other, while Paul succumbed to an overwhelming sense of impotence.
"It isn't right to do that!" he reproached in a despairing sob. "It's wrong!"
She gave no heed. Her eyes were glittering, her grey lips pressed together.
"Oh," he finally wailed, "I think you're mean, mean, mean!"
Something infinitely precious, something supremely vital had gone. It was as though one of his own limbs had been amputated. He recalled now something he had heard Aunt Verona mutter a few days back about her manuscript, about its being "wicked" and "futile." Life appeared for the first time menacing, sardonic.
Aunt Verona went upstairs to her cold bedroom, and Paul tried to eat some dinner, ignoring Becky's croaking, growling, throat-scratching commentary. Some instinct warned him to report the morning's happenings, and he called at Dr. Wilcove's house on the way to school.
On his return at four o'clock he found that his instinct had been more than justified. Becky's eyes were rolling and she was as incoherently voluble as some hybrid of dog and monkey. Mr. Silva was sitting in the kitchen, cap in hand, shaking his head solemnly, waiting, as he cryptically announced, until he was needed, and there was a note in the doctor's handwriting:
"Dear Paul,
"Go at once to Mrs. Kestrell's and stay there for the night. Your aunt is very ill, but there is nothing you can do. I'll come and explain matters to you at Mrs. Kestrell's to-morrow. Show her this note, and say I'm relying on her kindness."
"Where is he?" Paul finally succeeded in saying, though his voice was faint and his mind nothing but an empty, buzzing box.
Mr. Silva jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the stairs. "You're not to go up," he said. "They've telegraphed to Bridgetown for the ambulance."
Paul supposed the "ambulance" was some especially skilful sort of doctor. Into the blankness of his mind was creeping an old memory, long dormant—the memory of his mother tearing herself away in the night, heedless of his fears.
He couldn't trust himself to ask questions, could scarcely formulate any. With the note in his hand and his book-bag still slung across his shoulder, he left the house and turned up the road towards Gritty Kestrell's. He had never spent a night under any roof but Aunt Verona's, and suddenly a sort of awkward, despairing friendliness for the sinister old house clutched at him—despairing, for he seemed to be saying farewell to it, tearing himself away from it as his mother had done nine years ago. Something mysterious was transpiring in Aunt Verona's bedroom, something more ominous than mere sickness, for anything that affected Aunt Verona was somehow more ominous than phenomena affecting other people. He was sure it was the end of a variation. Nothing had flatted this time. A movement had just been hopelessly interrupted. And with its cessation he realized that he had loved it.
His eyes were drowning in tears and he trudged on, oblivious of the ruts and puddles.