Her Day of Youth

by G. B. Lancaster

Her Day of Youth

AN AWAKENING TO JOY THAT CAME TOO LATE

By G. B. Lancaster

Author of “His Lady of an Hour,” etc.

 

GARY was hot and very dirty, but for the moment he was indubitably satisfied with himself and with life. He sat on the top rail of the platform fence with his coat slung over his shoulder and his black head bare to the sun. And the pipe that he smoked with long contented breaths made a cloud of incense about him.

This day had been a good day for Gary; for his heavy boots were spattered with mud from the very glacier-top, and the alpenstock at his feet was well scarred by hard usage. And to Gary the joy of life was in conflict; in the pitting of his strength against the strength of others; in breaking, when the odds lay heaviest that he would be the broken.

All around him rose the Selkirks, heavily white with winter. The sun sloped to the west, pointing red fingers down into the canyon where an upcoming train was laboring. The air was sharp like champagne, and unutterably still. Through it Gary heard the grunt and pant of the engine on the upgrade, and almost he believed that he could have heard it so all across the stillness of the prairies, all through the barren Rockies, until the very seal of silence welcomed it among the pine-tree forests around the little station hotel.

A little girl bounced out of the hotel door and ran down the platform to Gary. She was brimming with school-girl life and health and noisiness and fun, and her eyes were frank and merry as she caught up Gary’s hand between her own.

“How perfectly lovely of you to come back to say good-by to me!” she cried. “And I'll see you down at Boston in the winter? Sure?”

Gary pulled out his pipe and regarded her half gravely. “You'll have forgotten all about me by then, Baby,” he said, “and, perhaps, I shall have forgotten all about you.”

The child swung up her hat by one string, clapped it on her curls, and tied it with a jerk under her chin. “You won’t,” she said. ‘People don’t forget me. They certainly don’t. I send them post-cards. Are you going to stay here and climb mountains?”

“Sure,” he said. “All by myself. I'll have no one to play with, Baby.”

The child’s eyes twinkled. She bent forward, mischief breathing from every kink of her bright hair. “You can have the gray lady,” she whispered. “H-sh! She’s just coming.”

The man slid from the rail as the woman passed by. Then he turned down the platform, with the child’s hand shut into his. He did not speak, and Baby looked at him resentfully.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “I think she’s just lovely. Her hands and her hair, everything is just so.”

Since he had boarded the train at Vancouver and found her in it Gary had known that everything about the gray lady was “just so.” Since he had met her first and won her and lost her, all in a brief year, he had known it. More water had run under bridges since that year of madness than he liked to think of, and Virginia was older and he was older. But he had lived since then. There were men who said that he had lived too much. And Virginia? Gary let his eyes rest half quizzically on the gray lady as she passed again, looking neither to right nor to left.

“She has never lived at all,” he told himself. “And that is the trouble, as it always was. She won’t wake up, and it was too much bother to make her wake up.” His hand gripped unconsciously on Baby’s, and his level brows drew down.

Baby jerked herself free in anger. “I don’t like you to-day,” she declared. “You’re no fun at all. And I cert’nly do like people to speak when they’re spoken to.”

Then Gary roused himself, and beneath the thunder and bustle of the train pulling into the station ran the undercurrent of laughter and talk. A little while Virginia watched them with something in her eyes which the man had never seen there. Then she faced about and walked straight into the forest with her gray-gloved hands pressed tight together and her lips set.

“He plays with her,” she said. “He always liked something to play with. She is so young. And I have never been young. I have never been young—and now I am old.”

She stood with head up, the grave gray eyes clouded with the listening look, but there came no answer. Far off a little avalanche crashed; near-by a chipmunk sat up in the leaves with his ears cocked. But the mighty hemlocks and firs were hushed, and the roar of the distant river was just a thread in the great sheet of silence.

“Why, yes,” said Virginia, very slowly. “That is it. I was never young, and it was youth that he wanted. And—I didn’t know it; 1 didn’t know it—until now.”

One of the very truest truths of life is the certainty that we can never evade its big things—the big things of love, of pain, of that sudden body-and-spirit jolt which is called the awakening of the soul. If they come early they generally twist the future current of events awry. If they come late they hurt more. That is the only difference. To Virginia they had come late. They had come late because the creed taught her by her stately old adamantine grandmother in the stately old stone-and-brick mansion among the Maryland plantations had covered externals only. From her babyhood Virginia had known just how to sit and to stand, just how to give an order to a servant, and how to talk to men with the same delicate indifference that she used when dipping her slim finger-tips into the old chased finger-bowls. Through babyhood and childhood into something nearly approaching middle age she had walked with her serene step and her serene white brow and her serene gray eyes.

For a little space Gary had come into her life. He had married her and taken her away, beating on her still coldness with the fierce heat of his boyish, extravagant love, until she grew colder in dislike of his passion, and he grew fiercer in resentment and pain. So they parted, and Virginia went back to the Maryland plantation to dream the rest of her life out alone, and Gary went whither his wild star led him, tasting more of good and evil than Virginia read in all her books, feeling the flame of hot life sear him, and going out to meet joy as a man only does go who has known sorrow.

To Gary the big things of life had come early. To Virginia they had come late. They had come just now. But in the glare of the great light of understanding that swamped her she could not remember when they had not been there; could not remember that that chilly winding-sheet which was all memory could unroll behind her was the thing which she had placidly called “life”; could not remember that the hour had been when she had not longed, fiercely, piteously, for the rounding outlines and the ripe lips and the frank merry heart that Baby carried through the world.

Virginia was a clever woman, but she was not a wise one. In all manner of philosophy, of theology, of metaphysics, she could have distanced Baby in the first lap, but that wisdom which comes of a woman’s knowledge of her womanhood was not hers; that trembling dim realization of the divine which wakes with the first spring of love in a maiden’s heart had never been hers; that all-understanding, all-forgiving comradeship which sets the seal of love on a marriage had never been hers. She had stood aside and dreamed while the world went by, until all the riches that it held for her had gone with it.

And now her day of youth was gone—ended before its dawn. It was Baby’s warm young hand that Gary reached out to hold, as he had once reached out for hers; it was Baby’s laughter and frank friendship that brought the laugh to his lips, as she had never cared to bring it. Virginia stared on the snow-hills that were cold as her own heart had been, and for the first time in her life she was jealous, wildly, impotently jealous.

On the platform Gary stood with bared head and joking lips until Baby’s noisy good-bys and frantic waving hands had gone with the rush of the train. Then he turned and looked up at the gaunt snow-shoulder that lifted through the pines far above him.

“That—or Virginia,” he said. “I wonder—” He chewed his lip a moment, laughed, pulled out a quarter, and spun it up. It raised a little spurt of dust as it dropped, and Gary looked at it intently before he lifted it. He wiped it absently, whistling a little, broken negro melody, and his face was soft with memories. Then he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, squared his shoulders, and marched out on the trail that Virginia had taken.

From the lower lands the snow was gone, and yellow adder’s-tongues and pale violets and budding ferns glimmered on either side of the track where the sun caught them. The air was iced electricity, and the man drew it down into his big lungs until its vigor glowed in his eyes and gave a sharper ring to his step. He was free of the forest-land even as of the cities—free of their lonely snow- plains, and of their narrow black trails, their sunshiny slopes, their delirious, quick-lived avalanche-tracks.

And Virginia? Gary stood a moment with his brows knit. That sorrow was dead. It gave him no pain to see her now and to pass her by as though he had never listened for her step, never held her in his arms. The wound was cauterized, and these two days since they left Vancouver had proved that it would not ache hard again. Why he went to seek her now he did not know. Quite certainly he had no desire to link hands across the past. They had traveled too far on different ways since then. And their steps never had been set in the same trail, anyway. He shook his shoulders and laughed, half ashamed.

“Why, I just want to see her,” he said.

Back in the trail where the first shadows began to loop among the heavy trees Virginia twisted her hands together. “I will be young,” she said desperately. “I will, I will.”

She drew a long breath. Gary was young. He would be young when his shoulders stooped and his black head went gray. Baby was young. And what would Baby do out here among this majesty of tall firs and snow-bound mountains and deep-plunging rivers and ragged spurs that climbed to meet the sky? Virginia knew, for she had seen from a distance. Baby would climb, too; panting, scarlet faced, and joyful. Baby would roll boulders down into the canyons where the water spewed up its white foam. She would shy sticks at the chipmunks; she would gather every tiny flower that lifted its head in the crevices, and she would be glad in it all—because she was young.

Virginia’s white hands, just stripped of the gloves, dropped by her sides. The light dropped as suddenly from her face. “I would hate doing it,” she said. ‘And it wouldn’t make me feel anything but a fool. But—I will try.”

Ten minutes later Gary came over the ridge with a whistle on his lips and his keen eyes taking note of each bar of shadow and light on the track. Suddenly he pulled up. “The-e devil,” he said blankly.

From the low clump of firs that overhung the trail a gray silk stocking and a shoe depended, with the foot inside feeling helplessly for a hold somewhere. Out of the clump-center came sounds of smothered sobbing. The blank look in Gary’s eyes gave place to many emotions. Then he laid hold of the ankle, gently but firmly. The sobbing rose to agitated incoherences, and the devil in Gary was glad. Never before had Virginia been caught at a disadvantage.

“Suppose you wait till I get you down before you talk any more, Virginia,” he suggested. “Then we can meet on an equal footing.”

“Oh!” said Virginia faintly, and no more. She said no more when he swung himself up to her, or when he lowered her down in his strong arms, or when he set her before him on the trail and looked on her bruised hands and her torn dress and her great folds of hair falling loose from the pins.

“Well,” he said blandly. “Got anything to say?”

Virginia flushed, and it was like the breaking of sunrise over an ice-field. The warm glow ran down to her very throat, and her eyes were blazing. She flung out her hands with a sudden vigorous gesture, and her heart was in her voice.

“Yes,” she cried. “Laugh as much as you like. I don’t care. I want to be young. I was trying to be young. I threw sticks at the chipmunks, but I couldn’t hit them. And I tried to roll boulders, but they hurt my hands. And then I tried to climb a tree. I want to do what young people do. I will be young. Now laugh. Say what you like. I don’t care. I will be young.”

Gary stared at her with contracted eyes. There was no thought of laughter in him. If the Virginia of ten years ago had been like this, what might not life have held for them both? And now it was too late.

“You have never been young,” he said slowly, a great bitterness in his voice.

“I know.” Virginia’s heart bobbed in her throat. “I know. But I want to learn.”

For a space the man and the woman faced each other, and the pain was Gary’s yet, because he remembered his young love for her. Then he said, still slowly:

“Baby told me to play with the gray lady. I will play with you if you like, Virginia—for two days.”

“Two days?” said Virginia vaguely.

“Just so. Then I am going on to Banff. We’ve met only once in the last ten years, and maybe we'll meet less in the next ten. But we can play a while in between ‘without to-morrow and without yesterday!’ Shall we?”

The humor had come back to Gary’s face now, and a new recklessness, born of desperation, leaped up in Virginia to greet it.

“We will,” she cried. “And without Baby either.”

Comprehension lit suddenly in the man’s eyes, and he dropped them quickly. The snarl had been made clear on the instant. Baby had touched the spring of womanhood if Virginia, and it had leaped out, uncoiling to its length. He put his hand on her arm.

“Come along, playmate,” he said. “We’ll plan out our games for to-morrow.”

Among all the children of Gary’s circle he was received as an equal by that inner free-masonry which takes no heed of age. The irrepressible humor in the man bubbled up through sorrow, through reverses, through loneliness, and everywhere the youth in the world recognized and met it. The joke in the present situation appealed to him hugely. That he should teach Virginia to play—Virginia, of all women, Virginia with her long, white throat and her chilly fingers and her stately tread. He faced the matter in a curiosity untempered by pain.

“How could she hurt me—once?” he thought, in wonder.

In sudden greed for all that was slipping from her Virginia went into the game and found strange joy in the doing of it. She gathered up the treasure of the hours in both hands, and held it to her, making no attempt at analysis. But she knew that she was awakened, awakened into throbbing, vivid life, with the rose of youth on her cheeks and a dawn—false dawn or true—on the horizon.

Together they made snow-men on the mighty mountain-slopes and pelted them with snowballs until Virginia grew hot in the contest and Gary derided her in frank delight. They piled nuts in open places and watched in corners to see the squirrels come. They found nicknames and life-stories for all the people of the hotel and swapped jokes until Virginia’s eyes ran over with mirth and the smile played constantly round her lip-corners.

It was a strange game that they played—an Indian-summer game with the red leaves too close to their fall and the chill of frost coming near and more near. The man felt it with a keenness that grew more bitter hourly. Once, when he prayed with his soul for this companionship, Virginia had said him no. And such as Gary do not go through their Gehenna and forget it. But, in the new heat of her blood, Virginia felt no chill. A glory was in her life, a glory full blown in a night. She was a woman; she was young; she was fair, and, above all, she was alive—alive. The hours went singing down the day for her, and the nights crept, soft and warm, about her. And through them all she was alive—alive.

On the morning of the third day she drew away her blind and looked out on the rough bridge spanning the tumbling creek and on the mountains standing, a white army of giants, against the pale sky where the dawn ran. The air was like new wine, and it struck on her lips sharp and strong as Gary’s kisses were used to strike. She laughed, gathering up her hair.

“He has made me young,” she said. “And I am young—for him, for him.”

Then she went out to meet him in a gay confidence.

“You said once that it would be two days only,” she cried. “And the evening and the morning are the third day.”

Gary looked at her. The line of his jaw seemed thinner, and his eyes were dark in the brilliant light. There had been no sleep for him in the night that had brought rich dreams to Virginia, and his voice was hard.

“I did what I promised, didn’t I?” he asked her. “I’ve shown you the way to be young, haven’t I?”

Virginia leaned back her head to the opening day. And her eyes were bright as the sun. “Yes,” she breathed.

Gary kept his eyes on her. The throat was so round and white and the red lips were so red. “Then,” he said, “that is all. I am going out by the morning train.”

Virginia straightened. She stared at him, not knowing that her eyes were wide and her lips blanched.

Gary kept his eyes on her still. “I am going,” he repeated.

But yet Virginia did not speak, and with an effort Gary met the question of her silence.

“You never asked me if I were married,” he said. “Perhaps it did not interest you. Or perhaps you knew. I was married two years ago, and I love my wife and my son better than anything on earth—better than I ever loved you, I think.”

Virginia stood very still. Her youth had sprung to full bloom in a day. Now it died in an hour, as the big gorgeous flowers of the tropics die. Fall had come—the fall of red leaves, red as heart’s blood.

Gary spoke again stumblingly. “I—I guess you’re not surprised, are you? It was in all the papers. I thought you’d certainly know. I—”

Here Virginia reached out and took hold of the dignity of her middle-aged womanhood. “‘Of course I heard,” she said. “But I had forgotten. It—it did not interest me, you see. I—I wish you all happiness. Good-by.”

“Virginia! I—it was only last night I guessed that you didn’t perhaps know—”

Virginia faced him with the soul of her stately adamantine grandmother in her eyes. “Do you remember?” she said. “We played ‘without to-morrow and without yesterday.’ It is to-morrow now, and so that day doesn’t belong.”

Then she left him,walking straight and lithely. And she left her day of youth at his feet.