“Tell them what you like,” she said. “I can’t talk to you any longer,” she added. “It will be noticed.”
“I won’t tell them anything,” he said. “But I’ll be here a week from tonight at this time if it doesn’t rain, and the week after that if it does, and every week for the rest of the summer until you say positively you will not come.”
“Haven’t I said that?” she asked.
“No.”
She got up, shrugged her shoulders and walked away.
Silly!... Silly!... Silly!...
That was what John kept saying to himself without subject or predicate. It was the way he felt. The situation was absurd. His part in it was ludicrous. They were all a lot of sillies,—save one. What he really minded was the sense of having come off badly with her. She was not the wistful, longing prisoner people imagined her to be. He could not make out precisely what she was. She was under restraint. Not only had she not denied this; she had treated it as a fact. But her attitude seemed to be simply that it was nobody’s business. Meddling was unwelcome. And such puerile interference as he represented had been treated as it deserved, with high disdain. Never had he met a girl with so much bite and tang. Well, however, it was not all to the bad. She might have cut him away clean. Instead, she had left it as it was.
“I think she will come,” he said to his friends.
“Have you seen her?” they asked.
“Yes. I’ve talked to her.”
“Oh, what is she like?”
“Like a grain of salt,” he said, rather absently.
At this several girls looked at him anxiously, and although they pretended to be as keen as ever for the party, even more than before, still, misgivings assailed them and secretly their enthusiasm fell. John was an unenclosed infatuation on which everyone had rights of commonage. Numbers preserved him. And here he was keeping tryst with a girl they knew nothing about. It was not his fault. But it was too romantic.
Another thing youth knows is that there are sudden, leaping, dare-me-not moments, wild moments of yes, in which the most improbable events come naturally to pass. It did not rain Thursday. John waited in the boxwood. She came slowly, in the magnetized direction, went back, returned, loitered about for some time, then sat on the grass again.
“Aren’t you ashamed to be standing there?” she asked.
“I feel a perfect fool,” he said.
“Oh, do you?” she retorted, and with not another word she rose and walked away.
Whistling softly John departed. It became interesting. Thursday he was there again, and so was she.
“Then why do you do it?” she asked, resuming the conversation at the point where she broke it, as if a week had not elapsed.
“I’ve told you why,” he said. “Can you see me?”
“No.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. Only that you said you would be,” she answered.
“That meant last Thursday,” he said.
“Do you mean to annoy me like this all summer?”
“As long as you will come to talk with me,” he said.
“Or until I say positively I won’t come to the party. That’s what you said before.”
“Will you come?” he asked.
So they went on in a spirit of banter, touching invisible strings, attending less and less to the meaning of words and more to the language of sound.
Scientists ask: Is there such a thing as biactinism?—vital animal magnetism, producing an effect apart from itself with no mechanical means of transmission? Is personality radio-active? Does the human organism possess the property of radiating an influence capable of acting at a distance upon another human organism? Ask youth.
The barrier gave way the next week.
John dwelt as usual in the boxwood. The girl was tardy. Portent one. She wore a pretty dress and high heeled French boots. Portent two. She was on terms of amiability with the gaoler woman. Portent three. It was a musky, August evening, coming twilight. For half an hour or more she walked in an aimless, listless way, stopping, starting, plucking here and there a flower until she had a handful, and then with steps unhurried, with still an air of sauntering, she came straight on.
“Oh, here you are,” she said, in the cool, entrancing way youth has of doing an audacious thing.
“I’ll have to hand you down,” said John.
Below them in the road, twenty paces off, a horse and buggy waited.
XVI
THE party took place in John’s rooms. First there was a dainty supper; then dancing. It was a heart breaking failure. Everyone tried to save it. A party that needs to be saved is already hopeless. The more everyone tried the worse it was until the lovely, dark-eyed little matron who chaperoned it was on the verge of tears, the girls were divided between sulks and hysterics and the men wondered vaguely what was wrong. It was inevitable. The fluids were perverse.
In the first place, the guest of honor flatly declined the rôle of Cinderella. She was not in the least grateful. The little matron on receiving her said: “We’ve tried so long to get you.”
What could be more innocent.
She replied, “Oh-h!” with ascending accent.
The wreck began there. The matron’s tone and manner revealed to her the light in which she was regarded. She was an object of curiosity and a subject of commiseration. One figure she hated as much as the other. To be pitied—particularly that,—was intolerable. She was stung with chagrin and humiliation. It was nobody’s fault,—at least, no more theirs than her own. She might have known it would be so; she had placed herself in this position. None the less, or perhaps all the more for that reason, she could not help behaving in that way which is meant when one says she took it out of them. She took it out of her own sex of course. Her power to do that was extraordinary.
The matron did not know what next to say. That was generally the trouble. None of the women knew how to talk to her. There was nothing in common to talk about, except the circumstances, and these could not be mentioned. At the slightest reference to them she coldly cut the conversation.
“If she couldn’t get into the spirit of it why did she come at all?” one girl asked another.
“That’s easy to see, I should think,” the other said.
What was easy to see was that she was too good looking. No other girl was anywhere near so attractive to the male principle. That was why she could carry off a reckless part. She became more heedless and dangerous about it as the psychic tension increased. She did not care in the least what happened.
It was nothing she did,—nothing you could isolate as an example and criticise. Her behavior was basically naïve. It was what she was. It was what she had been for thousands of threaded years. It was life at a pitch of intensity, life of a certain quality, looking out of her eyes, seeking itself.
“Don’t you see what she is doing?” asked a feline girl, speaking to John in the dance.
“No,” he said. “I don’t see what she is doing. I see only that you are treating her badly. I suppose it can’t be helped.”
“She’s having a very good time, all the same,” the girl retorted.
Most of the young men felt as John did and took pains to keep her supplied with attention. She received it not ungraciously, but lightly, with an amused and cynical smile. She seemed to be saying to herself: “All grapes are a little sour.”
The party was rapidly approaching a state of distress when a call for Mr. Breakspeare was handed in from the office. He went out. A feeling of suspense went all around. It seemed only at that moment to have occurred to anyone that there might reasonably be some sort of sequel. John returned in ten minutes, claimed his partner and entered the dance as if nothing had happened. But there was an uneasy look on his face. When the dance was over he went about looking for someone. Then he began to ask.
No one had seen her go. She had taken no leave. She had simply vanished.
When the fact was definitely established John excused
himself and went in pursuit. He hoped to overtake her on the road home, supposing, as was true, that she had scented trouble and wished to meet it alone. That much of her character he understood. His anxiety was real.
The man who had called for him at the inn was no other than his corrupted gardener. And what he had come to say was that whoever brought the young lady home had better be careful. He would do much better not to bring her at all. For Enoch Gib, in waiting with a blunderbuss, yearned to abate his existence.
“An’ he is after findin’ out who be takin’ th’ young laday away,” the news bringer said at the end of his tidings.
All that had happened might have been foreseen if anyone had been thinking of consequences.
When the gaoler woman discovered that Agnes was gone the first thing she did was to go to her room and search it. She found John’s notes—all of them. As the whole exhibit made too strong a case against her gaolership she destroyed all but the last two. These, which referred only to the surreptitious meetings at the boxwood, she took to Enoch, saying she was sure from certain other evidence that it was not an elopement but an escapade. Agnes would return before daylight.
The result upon Enoch may be imagined.
This was Aaron again,—the same Aaron who stole Esther away from him. The terrible wound fell wide open. The pain of it wrecked his mind. It would have killed him, perhaps, but for the solacing thought that revenge was near.
So John pursued Agnes, Agnes was lost, and Enoch waited with death in his heart.
XVII
AGNES expected to be followed.
Instead of going directly home she made a wide detour, skirting the town, and ascended the west hill obliquely by a path the mill workers used. Nobody would think to look for her there.
She meant to enter the grounds by the main gate, defiantly, but she would take her time. As for the consequences,—well, the worse the better. Any change would be welcome.
What made the feud with her father unendurable was its monotony. She had meant to fight it out with him alone to the end, with no outside help or interference. That was the true impulse of her nature. But it had begun to be like fighting it out with some colossal stone image. What terrified her was nothing he did, or could do, but the sheer glacial mass of his hostility. No,—not hostility. It was something else. It was a kind of malevolent indifference.
The feud was about nothing. It rested on their mutual obstinacy. A word would deliver her. That word she could not utter, or would not, which is all the same matter.
At school she had been one of ten girls suspected of having taken part in a frolic much more exciting than wicked yet deserving the extreme penalty. The nine denied it. When she was asked she said yes, she had done it. When they asked who the others were she refused to tell. They disciplined her. Still she refused. They offered her immunity if she would tell. She refused all the more. They sent for her father. He rashly said he would make her tell, and walked head-on into an impassable wall. After an hour alone with her in the reception room he marched her off, just as she was, saying as he crossed the threshhold that her things were to be sent after her. Defiance was something he knew little about. Disobedience he could not comprehend at all. All the way home he pondered it.
“I understand why you refuse to tell on the others,” he said. “Now I waive that. You do not have to tell on them. But you shall tell me you are sorry.”
She wouldn’t. She would say she was wrong; she had broken rules. But she would not say she was sorry, for the reason that she wasn’t. This she explained. That made no difference.
“You shall tell me you are sorry,” he said.
She refused.
“You will,” he said. “When you do you may have your liberty again.”
With that he banished her beyond the white line that had divided the household in her infancy, set a woman to be her keeper, and then apparently forgot her. She sometimes saw him at a distance. He never looked at her.
The girls on whom she would not tell sent her a beautiful present. She sent it back. That was the last of her contacts with the outside world. Her mail was cut off. No one was permitted to see her. More than a year had passed in this way. Once she sent word she wished to see him. He answered: “If she is sorry she may come.” That ended her overtures. Fighting it out with him apparently meant living it out, as her mother did, and that for her was grotesque. Besides, in that kind of contest he had the advantage of age. Age has all the time there is. Youth has neither past nor future,—only the present. The situation was impossible. It could not go on. Yet she had found no clear way out. She was too proud to seek refuge with anyone she knew. Moreover, she was a minor with no rights of her own. And as for casting herself free upon the wide world,—well, she had not yet come to that desperate thought.
As she ascended the hill a mood that had been rising in her for several days became suddenly intense and exulting. It made her short of breath. The excitement of breaking bounds, of going to the party, of what she did there, now a feeling of utter contempt for all the human values it represented, an emotion of trampling upon her adversaries among whom to her surprise was foremostly John, a sense of unknown power, particularly that voluptuous unconcern with consequences—all these different actions and reactions were as one effect. The cause was the mood. She recognized it. She knew about how long it should last. Never before had it been so tormenting. Never had she let it possess her entirely. Surrendering to it was like a physical experience, fearful and sweet.
She sat on a stone at the edge of the path, on the lower side, with a wide view of the valley and gave herself up to ecstasy. She was attuned to wonder and understood it. The hymn of night bewitched her. Becoming luminous, her thoughts touched objects and subjects alike and returned to her charged with sensation. In the vastness of space, in one’s impulse toward it, in the thrust of the church spire through the black panoramic foliage, in the tearing way the moon sliced his path through the clouds, in the shapes of the clouds, in convexity, concavity, temptation, and selfness, in hereness and thereness, in all that one saw and felt there was one meaning,—and she almost knew what it was. But the thought that excited her to suffocation was the thought of all that had not yet happned to her,—in that same one meaning. The rest of her, most of her in fact, was out there in the void. It was everything that had not happened. It might be anything. Whatever it was she embraced it, accepted it unreservedly, consented to it beforehand for the thrill of consenting.
For the first time in her existence she felt knowingly the passion of youth to pierce itself with life.
XVIII
THERE came a sound of footsteps on the path,—that plunging sound of muffled resonance men make in iron-studded raw hide footgear, with also in this case a swishing minor note from the play of the ankle aprons worn by the mill workers. Agnes had never heard any sound like it. Not until two men met and passed in the path, so close that she could smell them, did she quite make out what it was; and by that time her heart was making more noise than the men’s feet. They did not see her. They passed without speaking to each other, which was strange for mill workers; but when they had walked maybe twenty paces in opposite directions one cast a taunt backward over his shoulder. What it was Agnes could not tell. The other answered it. Both stopped. Then she heard them slowly returning.
They met again at the same spot where they had passed and stood there looking at each other warily, suspiciously, their eyes rolling in the moonlight. She could see them distinctly, for they were very close, yet as it happened she herself was so concealed that the men, though they might have touched her, did not see her.
One had a very pleasing aspect. He was tall and vibrant with a fine profile and no bristles. That was Alex Thane, the magnificent puddler.
The other was of lower stature, much heavier, massive, in the form of a wedge, with a width at the top across the shoulders that was almost a deformity. He was neckless. His head started from between his shoulders like a gargoyle. Coarse black ha
ir grew all over him. His moustache was like a worn brush. His eyes were wide apart, set very high, denoting enormous animal vitality.
It was he who had cast back the taunt; and it was he with his chin thrust out who spoke first when they met again and stood facing each other in that singular way. He was a Cornishman. What he said Agnes could not understand. Thane answered him in words which, though she knew them as words, most of them, imported to her mind no sense whatever. Still she got the drift of what they were saying, for they said a good deal of it in a universal language more gleaming and subtle than the language of words. She got it from their tones and gestures and what radiated from their eyes. And it was the drift of what men have been saying to each other from the beginning.
First it was, “Which of us can kill the other?”
After a very long time, millions of years maybe, it became, “Which of us could kill the other?”
That was the leap that placed an abyss between man and animal. No creature but man exists on this side. The animals still say can. He says could. It was the beginning of civilization. And all that we have done since has been to elaborate the ways of could, ways to conquer without killing, and to evolve the sporting code in which the potentials of could are standardized. According to that code one may acknowledge that another could have killed him without losing one’s life, one’s self-esteem or one’s social caste.
These two, Thane and the Cornishman, had been egged by their fellows into a state of intense rivalry. They were the most powerful men in the mill. Each in his daily work easily performed feats of strength beyond the power of others, but with this difference, that while Thane exerted himself only now and then for the mere feeling of it and the sooner when no one was watching, the Cornishman exhibited his superiority continuously because his vanity required it, and set a killing pace for the men of his crew. He was brutal and laughed exultingly if one of them dropped.
There was much debate as to which was the better man. A majority inclined to the Cornishman for that he was always and instantly ready to try it out, whereas Thane put every challenge aside, not as if he were afraid but with an air of distaste.
The Cinder Buggy Page 11
