Hare and Tortoise
KEBLE EVELEY'S voice, rising and falling in graceful patterns, had lulled his wife's mind into a tranquil remoteness. She had got more from the sinuosity of the sentences he was reading than from the thesis they upheld. Walter Pater had so little to tell her that she needed to know. This vaguely chagrined her, for Keble thought highly of Pater; Pater and he had something in common, something impeccable and elusive, something—
She checked her musings in alarm at the menacing word "affected."
Was it affectation on Keble's part? Or was there perhaps a winnowed level of civilization thousands of miles east of these uncouth hills and beyond the sea where precious phrases like Pater's and correct manners like Keble's were matter of course? In any such milieu what sort of figure could she hope to cut?
No doubt a pitiful one. And her thoughts drifted wistfully but resignedly down the stream of consciousness.
It was not the first time she had failed to keep stroke with Keble in the literary excursions he conducted on cool evenings before a log fire that had been burning since their marriage in the autumn, six months before. Only a few evenings past he had read a poem by Robert Browning, who was to Louise merely a name that had fallen from the lips of her English teacher at Normal School. She had felt herself rather pleasantly scratched and pommeled by the lines as Keble had read them, but they had failed to make continuous sense. And next morning, when she had gone to the book-shelves to read and ponder in private, she hadn't even been able to identify the incoherent poem among the host of others in the red volume.
Once, too, when he had been playing the piano she had been humiliatingly inept. For an hour she had been happy to lie back and listen to harmonies which, though they had signified no more to her than a monologue in a foreign tongue, had moved her to the verge of tears. Then he had played something he called a prelude, a pallidly gay composition utterly unlike many others called preludes, and on finishing it had turned to ascertain its effect upon her. She hadn't been listening carefully, for it had set an old tune running in her head. "It's pretty, dear," she had commented. "It reminds me of something Nana used to hum."
Her remark was inspired, for the suave prelude in question was no more than a modern elaboration of a folk-theme that was a common heritage of the composer and Nana. But the association between a French-Canadian servant-girl and the winner of a recent prix de Rome had been too remote even for her musically discerning young husband, who had got up from the piano with a hint of forbearance in his manner. That had cut her to the quick, for it had implied maladdress on her part, and gradually, through an intuitive process that hurt, she had gained an inkling of the incongruity of her comparison. She had wished to state the incongruity and turn it off with a touch of satire aimed at her headlong self, but chagrin had held her mute. It was one of those occasions where an attempted explanation would only underline the regrettable fact that an explanation had been needed. Her ideas, she felt, would always be ill-assorted; her comments, however good per se, irrelevant. Her mind was a basket tumbling over with wild flowers; it must be annoying for Keble to find pollen on his nose from a dandelion in the basket after he had leaned forward at the invitation of a violet.
Rising from her couch she crossed the room on tiptoe and sat on the arm of Keble's chair, leaning her head on his back as he continued to read.
"After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air," read Keble.
The faint sweet airs of a Western Canadian spring,—the first after a sharp long winter,—were at the black open window, stirring the curtains, cooling her cheek; and Keble was with Marius the Epicurean in Rome, seven thousand miles and many centuries away.
". . . Marius climbed the long flights of steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newest mode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavy. . . ."
Louise placed her hands across the page and leaned forward over Keble's shoulder to kiss the cheek half-turned in polite interrogation. "Are fasciae puttees, darling?" she inquired. Not that she really cared. Indeed she was dismayed when he began to explain, and yawned. Penitently she sank to an attitude of attention upon a stool at his feet. Keble got up for his pipe, placing the book on a large rough table beside neat piles of books and reviews.
Louise remained on her footstool looking after him; then, as he turned to come back, transferred her gaze to her hands, got up, biting her lip, and crossed the room for her needlework.
Keble's influence during the last year had been chastening. Her own ideas were vivid, but impetuous; they often scampered to the edge of abysses—and plunged in. At times she abruptly stopped, lost in wonderment at her husband's easy, measured stride. Keble, like Marius, mounted flights of thought in dainty fasciae,—never in plain puttees,—and always step by step. She dashed up, pell-mell, and sometimes beat him; but often fell sprawling at the emperor's feet. Whereupon Keble would help her up, brush her, and pet her a little, only to resume the gait that she admired but despaired of acquiring. Beyond her despair there was an ache, for she had come to believe that, as Lord Chesterfield put it, "Those lesser talents, of an engaging, insinuating manner, or easy good breeding, a gentle behavior and address, are of infinitely more advantage than they are generally thought to be." Even in Alberta.
She herself had written pages and pages of prose, and had filled an old copy-book with incoherent little poems of which Keble knew nothing. They sang of winds sweeping through canyons and across sage plains, of snowy forests and frozen rivers; they uttered vague lament, unrest, exultation. Through them surged yearnings and confessions that abashed her. She kept them as mementoes of youthful rebellion, shut them up in a corner of the old box that had conveyed her meagre marriage equipment hither from her father's tiny house in the Valley, and then watched Keble's eyes and lips, listened to his spun-silver sentences in the hope of acquiring clues to—she scarcely knew what.
Keble had come to the second lighting of a thoughtful pipe before the silence was broken. He looked for some moments in her direction before saying, "What sort of tea-cozy thing are you making now, dear?"
Tea-cozy thing! It was a bureau scarf,—a beautiful, beautiful one! For the birthday of Aunt Denise Mornay-Mareuil in Quebec. And Louise sacrilegiously crossed herself.
"So beautiful," he agreed, "that Aunt Denise will take it straight to her chapel and lay it across the altar where she says her prayers. You know your father's theory that despite oneself one plays into the hands of the priests. How are you going to get around that, little heretic?"
"By writing to Aunt Denise that it's for her bureau! My conscience will be clear. Besides, I'm making it to give her pleasure, and if it pleases her to put it on the altar where she prays for that old scamp, then why not? She loved him, and that's enough for her,—the poor dear cross old funny!"
"Would an atheist altar cloth intercept Aunt Denise's Roman prayers? Perhaps turn them into curses?"
Louise ignored this and bit off a piece of silk. "Besides, I'm not such a limited heretic as Papa. I'm a comprehensive heretic."
"What kind of thing is that, for goodness' sake?"
"It's a kind of thing that pays more attention to people's gists than to whether they cross their i's and dot their t's. It's a kind of thing that's going out to the pantry and get you something to eat before bed time, even though it knows it's bad for you."
From a recalcitrant little garden in front of the log house, Louise could follow the figure of her husband on a buckskin colored pony which matched his blond hair. He was skirting the edge of the lake toward the trail that led up through pines and aspens to the ridge where their "Castle" would ultimately be built. Keble had still three months of his novitiate as rancher to fulfil before his father's conservative doubts would be appeased and the money forthcoming from London for the project of transforming the mountain lake and plains into something worthy the name of "estate": a comfortable house, a farm, a stock range, and a game preserve. He was boyishly in earnest about it all.
When Keble had disappeared into the trail, Louise's eyes came back along the pebbly strip of shore, past the green slope that led through thinning groups of tall cottonwood trees to the superintendent's cabin and the barns, resting finally upon the legend over her front door: Sans Souci. She remembered how gaily she had painted the board and tacked it up. Had the blows of her hammer been challenges to Fate?
She sighed and bent over the young flower beds. At an altitude of five thousand feet everything grew so unwillingly; yet everything that survived seemed so nervously vital! She dreaded Keble's grandiose projects; or rather, the nonchalance with which he could conceive them intimidated her. There was something jolly about things as they had been: the cottage and the horses and dogs, the two servants, the rattling car, and the canoe. She thought, indulgently, of the awe in which she had originally held even this degree of luxury.
Her ditch was now fairly free of pebbles, and she placed the dahlia bulbs in line. As she worked, the thin mountain sunshine crept up on her, warming, fusing, gilding her thoughts. Spring could do so much to set one's little world aright. In the winter when the mountains were white and purple and the emerald water had frozen black, when supplies from the Valley were held up for days at a time, one was not so susceptible to the notion of a universal benevolence as one could be on a morning like this, with its turquoise sky, its fluffy clouds that seemed to grow on the tops of the fir trees like cotton, and its rich silence, only intensified by the scream of a conceited crane flying from the distant river to the rock in the lake where he made a daily "grub-call" at the expense of Keble's trout.
There was one other alien sound: the noise of a motor, a battered car from the Valley that brought mail on Tuesdays and Fridays. But this was Monday. The driver was talking to one of the hands; and a young stranger, quite obviously a "dude" and English, was looking about the place with a sort of eager, friendly curiosity. Then Mr. Brown appeared, and after a short consultation took the stranger in the direction of a road that led around by another route to the ridge.
An hour later, from her bedroom window she saw Keble approaching the cottage, his arm about the shoulders of the visitor. They might have been two boys dawdling home from school: boys with a dozen trifles which they had saved up for each other, to exchange with intimate lunges and gesticulations. She had never seen Keble thus demonstrative. Indeed, she had never seen him before in the company of a friend. She ran downstairs two steps at a time.
"Oh, Louise, here's Windrom out of a blue sky,—you know: Walter Windrom who was at Marlborough with me."
Keble had become suddenly casual again and shut off some current within him in the manner that always baffled her. She knew Walter Windrom from Keble's tales of school life in England, and she had a quite special corner in her heart for the shy young man who had been his friend. She envied him for having been so close to Keble at a time when she was ignorant of his very existence. Walter could remember how Keble had looked and talked and worn his caps at that age, whereas she could only imagine. She remembered that Keble had marched off to war instead of going up to Oxford with his chum, as they had planned, and that Windrom had recently been given a diplomatic post in Washington. The image of Keble in a Lieutenant's uniform awakened another memory: Keble had once told her that he and Windrom had played at warfare with their history master, and with her usual impetuosity she got part of this picture into her first remark to the new man: "You used to play tin soldiers together!"
"And Keble always won the battles, even if he had to violate the Hague conventions to do it!" Walter's tone was indulgent.
"Oh!" exclaimed Louise. "But he would break them so morally! Even the Hague would be fooled."
"The history of England in a nutshell," agreed Walter. "We played battles like Waterloo, and I had to be Napoleon to his Wellington."
"But you didn't mind really, old man, you know you didn't."
"Not a bit! The foundation on which true friendship rests is that one of the parties enjoys to beat, and the other rather enjoys being beaten."
"Walter has turned philosopher and poet and says clever things that you needn't believe at all."
"Oh, but I do believe him," said Louise quickly, alarmed at the extent to which she did. To cover it she held out her hands with an exuberant cordiality and drew them into the house.
The luncheon table was drawn near windows framed by yellow curtains which Louise had herself hemmed. Through them, beyond the young green plants in the window-boxes, beyond the broken trees that Keble called the Castor and Pollux group, from their resemblance to the pillars in the Roman Forum, the two mountains that bounded the end of the lake could be seen coming together in an enormous jagged V, one overlapping the other in a thickly wooded canyon.
"And to think that all this marvel belongs to you, to do with as you see fit!" exclaimed Windrom. "It's as though God had let you put the finishing touches on a monument He left in the rough."
"We're full of godlike projects," said Keble. "This afternoon I'll find a mount for you and take you over the place."
"Let it be a gentle one," Windrom pleaded. "Horses scare me,—to say nothing of making me sore."
"Sundown won't," Louise quickly reassured him, then turned to her husband. "Let him ride Sundown, Keble . . . He's mine," she explained. "The only thing left in the rough by God that I've had the honor of improving, apart from myself! Like lightning if you're in a hurry, but wonderfully sympathetic. I'll give you some lumps of sugar. For sugar he'll do anything. He's the only horse in Alberta that knows the taste of it. But don't let Keble see you pamper him, for he's getting to be very Canadian and very Western and calls it dudish and demoralizing and scolds you for it."
She paused, a little abashed by the length to which her harmless desire to help along the talk had taken her, and smiled half apologetically, half trustfully as her husband resumed inquiries about the incredible number of unheard-of people they knew in common: people who thought nothing of wandering from London to Cairo, from New York to Peking: rich, charming, clever, initiated people,—people who would always know what to do and say, she was sure of it.
If it was the natural fate of a tenderfoot that Sundown should have been lame from a rope-burn that afternoon and that his understudy should be a horse that had not been ridden since the previous summer, it was carelessness on the part of Keble Eveley that allowed the visitor to climb the perpendicular trail to the ridge in a loosely cinched saddle. In any case, when Windrom, in trying to avoid scraping a left kneecap on one pine tree, caught his right stirrup in the half fallen dead branch of another, the horse, reflecting the nervousness of his rider, began to rear in a manner that endangered his foothold on the steep slope, and almost before Keble knew that something was amiss behind him, a sudden forward motion of the horse, accompanied by a slipping motion of the saddle, threw his friend against a vicious rock which marked a bend in the trail.
Keble turned and dismounted anxiously when Windrom failed to rise. The body lay against the rock, the left arm doubled under it. Keble lifted his victim upon his own horse and after great difficulty brought him to the cottage, where an astonishingly calm Louise vetoed most of his suggestions, installed the patient as comfortably as possible in bed, and commanded her husband to get in communication with the Valley.
Despite the halting telephonic system, the twenty miles of bad road, the prevalence of spring ailments throughout the Valley requiring the virtual ubiquitousness of the little French doctor, it was not many hours before he arrived to relieve their flagging spirits. For his son-in-law's naïve wonderment at Louise's efficiency, Dr. Bruneau had only an indulgent smile. "But why shouldn't she know what to do?" he exclaimed. "Is her father not a doctor, and was her mother not a nurse?"
When the broken ribs had been set, Louise remained in the sick-room, and the two men were smoking before the fire downstairs. The situation had put the doctor in a reminiscential humor. His daughter grown up and married, in the rôle of nurse, set in train memories of the epidemic that had swept through the Valley when Louise was nine years old. Her mother had insisted on helping, had gone out night and day nursing and administering.
"And I was so busy tending the others that she went almost before I knew she was ill. . . . Until that day, Death had been only my professional enemy. . . . It was an excellent woman, very pratique. Louis is pratique, too, but au fond romantic. That she holds from me. I'm not pratique. I don't collect my bills. But out here, at least, the priests don't get what I should have, as they did in Quebec. Down there they take from the poor people whatever there is, and nothing is left to pay the bills of a heretic médecin. The priests thought that was fair, since the médecin gave them nothing for their embroideries and their holy smells!
"Here at least one is not molested,—if one were permitted to enjoy one's freedom! All my life I have wanted to sit by my fire and read, one after the other, every book discouraged by Rome. . . . But always when I get out my pipe and take down Renan or Voltaire there is a call: little Johnny has a fit, come quick; Madame Chose is having a baby,—Cré Mâtin: Madame who has had already twelve! If the baby lives they thank God; if he dies they blame me. And that's life. . . .
"All one can do in this low world, my son, is work, without asking why. We are like clocks that Nature has wound up to keep time for her, and it's enough that Nature knows what we are registering. The people who are always trying to read the hour on their own dials keep damn poor time. Witness my excellent sister. Denise burns expensive candles for her drôle of a husband, that rusé Mareuil who marched his socialists up the hill to give him a fine showing, then, unlike the King of France, stayed on the hill and let them march down by themselves when they had served his ambition, and got himself assassinated for his treachery. And his devout widow, after fumbling her beads in the parlor, goes into the pantry to count the gingersnaps for fear the hired girl has taken some home to her family. Denise is too spiritual to be a good human clock, and too full of wheels to be of any use to eternity. It's a funny world, va!"
When Dr. Bruneau had gone, Keble reflected that it was indeed a funny world. Not the least ludicrous feature of it being that he, the product of many generations of almost automatic gentility, should have happened to make himself the son-in-law of a garrulous, fantastic, kind-hearted, plebeianly shrewd, Bohemian country physician, who, more like his sister than he knew, was too spiritual to be successful in his profession, and too close to the earth to be a valid sage,—a man of the people, of the soil from which Louise had come forth as the fine flower.
He recalled with a faint smile the pretexts he used to devise for dropping into the doctor's little house on his long ski-journeys to the Valley: a fancied ailment, the desire to borrow a book or offer a gift of whisky from a recently-arrived supply. He recalled his reluctant leave-takings and the very black, mocking eyes, tantalizing lips, and jaunty curls of the girl who accompanied him to the door. He recalled the shock of his sense of fitness on realizing during the spring the significance of his visits; his abrupt pilgrimage to the family fold in England to repair his perspective; the desolating sense of absence; the sudden cablegram; and her proud, challenging reply. It had been brought to him just before dinner, and he could yet feel the thrill that had passed through him as he entered the dining-room formulating his revolutionary announcement.
He recalled with a little twinge the scared expression that had come over his mother's face, the hurt and supercilious protest voiced by his sister, the strained congratulations offered by Girlie Windrom, Walter's sister, who had been visiting them, and the ominous silence from the paternal end of the table. A few days later his father had seen him off to Southampton, with the final comment: "Till the soil by all means, my boy. I can understand a farmer. We've all farmed. But we've never gone so far afield for our wives."
Then, with a more sympathetic impulse his father had said, "Your mother and I had rather set our hearts on Girlie Windrom for you. One of these days you will have to assume responsibilities as head of the family, whether it bores you or not, and it is not wholly reassuring to know that our name will be handed on to nephews of a French-Canadian traitor." Keble had reflected that Louise could scarcely be held to account for her aunt's marriage to a man who had brilliantly satirized some of his father's most pompous Imperialistic speeches, but he had seen that nothing would be gained by pointing this out.
He could almost wish he had had a brother who might have satisfied the family by marrying Girlie, understudying his father in the ranks of the diehards, and going through all the other motions appropriate to the heir of a statesman, a landlord, and a viscount.
Walter was at first embarrassed by having his chum's wife assume all the duties of a nurse, but gradually under her deft regime the two men, and later Mrs. Windrom, who had set out from Washington on receiving news of the accident, took Louise's ministrations as matter of course. Louise saved her pride by announcing that she was a born Martha, but privately resolved that, for the future, her Mary personality should not so easily be caught napping.
Except for strangers who at rare intervals had strayed thither on hunting trips, Mrs. Windrom was the first woman of Keble's world who had entered their house. After her first maternal anxiety had been allayed and she had been assured that Dr. Bruneau had not mis-set her son's bones, Mrs. Windrom made a point of being pleasant to the young woman who was filling the place she had always expected her own daughter to occupy. Unfortunately, Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom made a point of it. Being a woman of restricted imagination, Mrs. Windrom was at a loss for ways and means to be friendly with a girl who had scarcely heard of the routines and the people comprising her stock-in-trade. There was not much to say beyond "good mornings" and "my dears," and the very lack of an extensive common ground made it necessary for Mrs. Windrom to fill the gap with superfluous politenesses. She never failed to commend Louise's tea and cakes, her pretty linen patterns, and her bouquets of wild flowers, but for the quick intuition, the embarrassed private cogitation, and the tortuous readjustments of manner by means of which Louise achieved absence of friction, Mrs. Windrom had necessarily only a limited appreciation.
Once or twice Louise, whose patience was particularly tried by Mrs. Windrom's incomprehensible habit of remaining in her bedroom until eleven, experienced a sensation of deep, angry rebellion, for which she ended by chiding herself and went on grimly fulfilling her self-appointed tasks sustained by an undercurrent of pride that would not have been lost on Keble had he not been caught back into the past for the moment, to rebreathe the faded but sweet odors of the hawthorne hedges and the red-leather clubs he had abandoned nearly three years ago.
Walter, towards the end of his recovery, more than once sensed the loneliness of Louise's position. Being conscientious as well as shy, he was at some pains to conjure up discreet words in which to couch his feeling. Meanwhile his glances and gentle acknowledgments gave her the stimulus she needed to carry her through.
On the day set for their departure, Walter made a meticulous avowal of gratitude which reached a chord in her nature that had never been made to vibrate. "Sometimes, at least once in the course of a woman's married life," he said, "I imagine there is some service, perhaps trifling, perhaps important, that only a man other than her husband can render. If such an occasion ever arises for you, I shall be there, eager to perform it. I think I can be impersonal and friendly at the same time. It's my only real talent. Moreover, I'm older than Keble, in imagination if not in years, and am more acutely conscious of certain shades of things that concern him than he can be."
The unspoken corollary was that Walter was also more acutely conscious than Keble of certain shades of herself, and in that moment a ray of light penetrated to an obscure recess of Louise's mind, a recess that had refused to admit certain unlovely truths and heterodoxies,—a recess that had declined, for instance, to put credence in the change of heart of so many women in books and plays: Nora Helmer, Mélisande, Guinevere; and for the first time in her life she understood how there could be a psychology of infidelity. For the first time she understood that one might have to be unfaithful in the letter to remain faithful in the spirit. Just as one might have to break a twenty-dollar bill to obtain a twenty dollars' worth. It was a strangely sweet, strangely unhappy moment, but only a moment, for almost immediately she was recalled to a consciousness of hand-bags, cloaks, veils, and small, nameless duties of eyes and hands and lips. Then Mrs. Windrom kissed her goodbye, with an emphasized friendliness that only set her mind at work wondering what it was that Mrs. Windrom had left unsaid or undone that she should feel obliged to emphasize the kiss. Louise could find no words to define the gap that lay between them; but she was sure that Mrs. Windrom defined it to a T, and had stated it to a T in letters to Girlie, who would restate it to Alice Eveley and the Tulk-Leamingtons!
As the car mounted the hill beyond Mr. Brown's cottage, Keble turned to her, with the absent-minded intention of thanking her, following the cue of the others, for everything she had done. The visit of his friends breaking into their long days had been for him an exciting distraction, and he could be only cloudily conscious of the strain it had put upon her, whose life had been socially humble and barren. His face still bore traces of the mask which people of his world apparently always wore. He found Louise pale, with brows slightly drawn together, the mouth with its arched lips relaxed, as of one suffering a slight with no feeling of rancor.
One instinct, to take her in his arms and reassure her by sheer contact, was held in abatement by another, an instinct to stop and reason out the elements that had produced the momentary hiatus. This procrastination on his part had an almost tragic significance for the impulsive girl. She lowered her eyes, pressed her teeth against her lip, straightened her arms, and walked into the house. If he had followed more quickly on her steps she would have succumbed to a passionate desire to be petted. As it was, he reached her side only after she had had time to put on her pride.
There was still a chance, had he been emotionally nimble enough to say something humorous about the visit, something gently satiric about Mrs. Windrom's exaggerated fear of missing connections with the stage from the Valley to Witney, something natural and relaxed and sympathetic,—if only her old nickname, "Weedgie,"—to reinstate her in the position to which, as his most intimate, she felt entitled.
A great deal, she felt, depended on what his tone would be. She held herself taut, dreading an echo of the hollow courtesies that had filled her rooms for days with such forbidding graciousness.
Keble had a congenital aversion to demonstrations. Tenderness might coax him far, but it would never induce him to "slop over." As he went to the table for his pipe, his eyes encountered an alien object which he lifted thankfully, for it served as a cue.
"Hello, Mrs. Windrom left her pince-nez behind . . . I'll have them put into the mail for Sweet to take out this afternoon. Hadn't you better write a note to go with them, my dear?"
She turned and faced him. In her eyes he saw something smoldering, something whose presence he had on two or three occasions half suspected: a dark, living subtlety that he could attribute only to her Frenchness. Her nostrils were slightly dilated, her lips quietly composed. She walked very close, looked directly into his eyes, and with a little sidelong shrug that brought her shoulder nearly to her chin, whipped out the words, "If I weren't so damn polite I'd smash them!"
The slam of the door, a few seconds later, drove her exclamation at him with a force that, after the first thrill, left him vexed and bewildered.