by Max Brand
And yet there was no feeling of remorse in Gerald, even though it was he whose cunning suggestion had thrust Tom out of the camp. His creed was a simple one: Get what you can from the world before the world gets what it can from you.
In his own life he had never encountered mercy, and for mercy he did not look in his dealings with others. He gave no quarter, because he expected none. And if, from time to time, the honest and happy face of Tom Vance rose before him, Tom Vance with his eyes shining with the thought of Kate—if that thought rose for a moment, it was quickly forgotten again. Did not an old maxim say that all was fair in love or in war?
And he loved Kate profoundly, beyond belief. He could no longer be alone. The thought of her followed him. It fell like a shadow across the page of the book he was reading. It whispered and stirred behind his chair. It laid a phantom hand upon his shoulder and breathed upon him in the wind.
Yet for all the vividness with which he kept the thought of her near him, she was always new. And on this bleak morning, as December grew old, it seemed to Gerald that it was a new girl who welcomed him at the door of her cabin.
He studied her curiously. All these days he had been waiting and waiting. There was something in her that kept certain words he was hungry to say locked behind his teeth. But this morning, with a bounding heart, he knew that there was a change. He told her so in so many words.
“Something has happened,” he said. “There’s been some good news since I saw you yesterday. What is it, Kate?”
“Didn’t you see when you came up the steps?”
“Nothing,” he said thoughtfully. “I saw nothing changed.”
She brought him to the door again and threw it open. The strong wind, sharp with cold from the snows, struck them in the face and tugged her dress taut about her body.
“Don’t you remember the boulder that used to be beside the door?” she inquired.
“I remember now,” he said, looking down to the ragged hollow near the threshold, where the great stone had once lain.
“Now look down the hillside. Do you see that big wet brown stone among all the black ones?”
A hundred yards away, across the road and down the farther slope, he saw the stone she pointed out.
“I pried the boulder up this morning,” she said. “All last night I lay awake thinking about it, but finally I made up my mind. This morning I pried it out of its bed, and it rolled down the mountain. It sprang across the road in one bound, and then it fell with a crashing and smashing away off yonder.”
She closed the door. They turned back into the room, and Gerald sat down with her near the fire.
“Well,” she cried at last, “aren’t you going to ask me what it all means?”
“I’d very much like to know,” said Gerald.
“You’re always the same,” Kate Maddern said gloomily. “You keep behind a fence. You’re like a garden behind a wall. One never knows what is going on inside. And it isn’t fair, Gerald. It’s like reading a book that has the last chapter torn out. One never has the ending of the yarn.”
He smiled at her anger and said nothing.
“Well, the stone was in the way when we built the shack,” she went on at last, still a little sulky. “Dad is very strong, and yet he couldn’t budge it. He was about to blast it when Tom Vance came up from the mine. He laid hold of the stone … he’s a perfect Hercules, you know … and he tugged until his shoulders creaked. He stirred it, but he couldn’t lift it.
“‘It’s no good,’ Dad said. ‘You can’t budge the stone, Tommy. Don’t make a fool of yourself and break your back for nothing.’
“Tommy simply looked at him and at me. Then he jumped back, caught up the stone, and staggered away with it. He dropped it yonder, and when we built the house the stone was by the door.” She paused. Gerald had leaned forward, and she said the rest looking down to the floor. “I’ve never been able to see that boulder,” she said, “without thinking of Tommy. It meant as much to me as the sound of his voice, and it was just as clear. Can you understand what I mean?”
“Of course,” Gerald said sadly. “Of course I can understand.”
“But finally,” she went on, “I made up my mind last night. Tommy was not coming back. Perhaps he had found some other girl. Perhaps he was tired of me, and he hadn’t the words or the courage to tell me about it. So he simply faded away. And this morning I got up and pried out the stone and watched it roll away.”
He could raise his eyes no higher than her throat, and there he saw the neckband of her blouse quiver ever so faintly with the hard beating of her heart.
“And after the boulder rolled away,” said Gerald at last, “what did you do then?”
“What do you think I did?”
He looked up to her face. She was flushed with a strange excitement.
“You came back and lay on your bed and cried,” said Gerald.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I did.”
“And then …” continued Gerald. He interrupted himself to draw out a cigarette, and he smoked a quarter of it in perfect silence before he completed his sentence. “And then,” he concluded, “you jumped up and wiped the tears out of your eyes and vowed that you were an idiot for wasting so much time on any man. Is that right?”
“My father saw me, then … and he told you all about it.”
“Not a word.”
“But how do you know so well?”
“I make a game of guessing, you see.”
She stared at him with a mixture of anger and wonder. “I wonder,” she said, “if there is something about you … something queer … and do you really see into the minds of people?”
“Not a bit,” he assured her.
“Do you think I believe that?”
Her head canted a bit to one side, and she smiled at him so wistfully that his heart ached.
“Now that the boulder is gone, Kate, won’t you be lonely?”
“On account of a stone? Of course not. And then I have you, Gerald, to keep the blues away, except when you fall into one of your terrible, terrible, endless silences. I almost hate you then.”
“Why?”
“Because, when a man is silent too long, it makes a girl begin to feel that he knows all about her.”
“And that would be dreadful?”
“Dreadful,” Kate Maddern said, and laughed joyously. As though she invited the catastrophe.
“But I’m only a stuffed figure, I’m afraid,” said Gerald. “You’re like a little girl playing a game. You call me Gerald to my face, but you call me Tommy to yourself, and when you are talking to me you are thinking of him.”
She flushed to the eyes. “What a terrible thing to say!” cried Kate.
“Then it is true?”
“Not a word.”
“Ah, Kate,” he said, “I guessed it before, but that doesn’t lessen the sting of knowing that my guess was right.”
She sprang out of the chair. “Do you imagine that I’m still dreaming about him?” she challenged him.
“I know you are.”
“You’re wrong. I won’t be treated so lightly by any man!” She added: “Besides, I think I always cared for him more as a brother than a sweetheart. We were raised together, you know.”
“Ah, yes,” Gerald said.
“You’re not believing me again?”
“I haven’t said that.”
“It’s gospel truth! And I’ll never care for him again. I really never want to see him again. I’m only furious when I think of all the sleep I’ve lost about his going away.”
How easy, now, to say the adroit and proper words. She had opened the way for him. That was plain. She had thrust the thought of Tom Vance away from her, and she wanted Gerald to fill the vacant room. And yet there was an imp of the perverse in him. He fought against its promptings, but he coul
d not fight hard enough.
He found himself studying her shrewdly. Would it not be delightful to show her how truly weak she was—and make her in another moment weep at the very thought of Tom Vance? He spoke against his saner, inner promptings.
VIII
“I’m going to tell you a true story,” he said. “It will change your mind about Tommy, and it will make you hate me, among other things.”
“Do you want me to do that?”
“I can’t help telling you,” said Gerald. “The devil seems to be in me this morning, making me undo all my hard work. But let’s go back to that first evening when I passed you on the hillside.”
“Of course I remember.”
“I never told you why I came back. But naturally you guessed.”
“Naturally,” she said. “There aren’t many girls in Culver City.”
He raised his thin-fingered hand and brushed that thought away. He waved it into nothingness.
“I heard you call,” he said, “and then I had a shadowy glimpse of your face in the lamplight. That was enough to catch me. Mind you, it doesn’t take much … just the right touch, the right stir of the voice, a glimmer of the eyes, and a man is gone forever. I was riding on a bus in London once. A girl crossed the street and looked up to me with a smile. Not that she was smiling for me, you understand … but there was an inner joyousness …”
He paused to recall it. And Kate Maddern was still as a mouse, listening, her fingers interlaced.
“She was very beautiful,” said Gerald. “And if there had been something more, I think I should have climbed off that bus and followed her. But something was lacking.”
“A second look, perhaps,” suggested the pagan heart of Kate.
He smiled at her. “You miss my point,” he said. “What I am trying to say is that men are sometimes carried away by shams. They think they have found the true thing, and they wake up to learn that their hands are full of fool’s gold. But when the reality comes, it has an electric touch. And when I saw you and heard your voice, Kate, I knew that you were the end of the trail.”
“Gerald,” she said, “you are making love to me shamelessly.”
“I am,” he said, and lit another cigarette. “But to continue my story … unless it bores you?”
“I am fascinated. Of course I am.”
“Very well. That night I went into Canton Douglas’ place, and almost at once I heard someone speak to Tommy. Of course I looked, and the moment I laid eyes on him I knew that this was the man you had called to. He was handsome, clean-eyed, young, strong. He was everything that a man should be. And I managed it so that I should be asked to sit in at their game. I wanted to know more of Tommy Vance. I wanted to test the mettle of my enemy.”
“Enemy?”
“Because I knew that one of us had to win, and the other one had to lose.”
She sat, stiff and straight, and watched him out of hostile eyes. Whatever kindliness she might feel for him now, might she not lose it if she learned the rest of his story? And yet he kept on. That imp of the perverse was still driving him as it had driven him, on a day, to lead his army of brown-skinned revolutionists into the jaws of death, tempting chance for the very sake of the long odds themselves.
“I watched Tommy Vance like a hawk,” he went on. “I was hunting for weaknesses. I was hunting for something that would prove him to be unworthy of you. And if I had found it”—here he raised his head and met her startled glance squarely—“I should have brushed him from my path with no more care than I feel when my heel crushes a beetle. But as the game went on I saw that he was a fine fellow to the core, brave, generous, kind, and true as steel.”
He wrung those words of commendation from himself one by one.
“And I saw,” he went on, “that as long as he was on the ground my case was hopeless.” He paused again. “Well, in love and in war, Kate, men do bad things. I managed it so that I could leave the card game when he did. He was walking up the hill to meet you, and I set myself to prevent him from coming to your cabin. I told myself that if I succeeded, there was still a fighting chance for me. But if I failed, I would pack up and leave town and forget you if I could, or at least try to obscure the memory of you with other faces and other countries. But luck helped me. There is a jealous string in every lover. I plucked at that until I had Tommy in agony.”
“How horrible,” breathed Kate Maddern.
“Yes, wasn’t it? But I was fighting for something better than life, and I took every weapon I could lay my hands on. He was a wide-eyed young optimist. But I planted the seed of eternal doubt in him. He began with an unquestioning faith in you. And before half an hour had passed, I had made a wager of a thousand dollars with him that if he left Culver City for a while and let you wonder why he had gone, when he returned, he would find that you had forgotten him. Well, he made the wager, and he left the town that same night. And that’s where he is now.”
“Oh, poor Tommy!” she cried. “And I’ve doubted him and hated him all these days, when all the time …”
“When all the time he was simply making the test. But he was right, after all, and I was hopelessly wrong. At least, Kate, I’ve made a good hard fight out of it. And the other day when I taught you how to manage Sorrow … just for an instant when you leaned and laughed down to me, I thought my dream was to come true after all.”
He rose from his chair and confronted her courteously.
“But to send him away by trickery … and all these days to let me think … oh, it was detestable!”
“It was detestable,” he admitted gravely.
And, encountered by that calm confession, her fire of anger was smothered before it had gained headway. She began to regard him with a sort of blank fear.
“What is it that you do to people?” she asked suddenly, throwing out her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “There is Red Charlie, who stood as though his hands were chained while you shamed him. And there is poor Tommy, of whom you made a fool and sent away. And then there is Cheyenne Curly, who you have turned from a brave man into a coward. Is it hypnotism?”
“Do you think it is?” he asked. “At least, they have seen the last of me around here.” He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. “Perhaps the devil inspires me to mischief, but the good angel who guards you, Kate, forced me to confess, and so all the evil I have done to Tommy is undone again. I’ll leave tonight and trail him until I find him. I’ll give him back to you as I found him. And, having been tried by fire, you’ll go on loving each other to the end of time.”
He picked up his hat. “You see that I retain one grace in a graceless life. I shall not ask you to forgive me, Kate.”
“You are going … really?”
“Yes.”
“To get Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“For heaven’s sake, Gerald, don’t do that.”
The hat dropped from his fingertips. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean … nothing. Only, don’t you see …?” She had fallen deeper and deeper into a confusion of words from which she could not extricate herself. Now she looked around her as though searching for a place of retreat. “Won’t you understand?” she pleaded.
“Understand what?” Gerald asked huskily.
Then, as some wild glimmer of hope dawned in his brain, he sprang to her and drew her to the window so that the gray and pale light of the winter day beat remorselessly into her face.
“Kate!” he cried. “Speak to me.”
She had buried her face in the crook of her arm.
“Let me go,” whispered Kate.
Instantly his hands fell away from her. And there she stood, blindly swaying.
“Oh,” she said, “it is hypnotism. And what have you done to me? What have you done to me?”
“I’ve loved you, my dear, with all the strength that
is in me.”
“Hush.”
“It is solemn truth.”
She broke into inexplicable tears and dropped into a chair, and Gerald, white-faced, trembling as Cheyenne Curly had trembled in Canton’s place, stood beside her.
“Tell me what I can do, Kate. Anything … and I’ll do it. But it tortures me with fire to see you weep.”
“Only don’t leave me,” she whispered.
He was instantly on his knees beside her.
“I didn’t know until you spoke of going,” she sobbed. “And then it came over me in a wave. I had never really loved Tommy. He was simply a big brother. I was simply so used to him. You see that, Gerald?”
“I’m trying to see it, dear. But my mind is a blank. I can’t make out what is happening, except that you are not hating me as I thought you would, Kate. Is that true?”
“Come closer.”
He leaned nearer her covered face. And suddenly she caught at him and pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
“How can you be so blind?” she breathed. “Oh, don’t you see, and haven’t you seen almost from the first, that I have loved you, Gerald? And, oh, even when you tell all that is worst in you, it only makes me care for you more and more. What have you done to me?”
“Kismet,” Gerald murmured, and, raising his head high, he looked up to the raw-edged rafters and through them and beyond them to the hope of heaven.
IX
An hour later, Gerald was riding Sorrow straight into the heart of a snow-laden wind, for some action he must have to work out the delirious joy that filled him, and that packed and crammed his body to a frenzy of recklessness. The very edge of the wind was nothing to him, and, when the driven snow stung his lips, he laughed at it. For this was his home land, his native country, and all that it held was good to him, for was it not the land, also, that held Kate Maddern?
Lord bless her, and again, Lord bless her. He laughed to himself once more, and this time with tears in his eyes, to think how blind he had been to the truth. And he remembered how, with tears and with laughter, she had confessed that the rolling away of the boulder and the telling of that story to him had all been anxiously planned before in the hope that he would speak then, if ever.
