Wayside Courtships

by Garland, Hamlin

  He wondered where this feeling came from, and he looked into the upturned faces of the girls as if they were pansies. He wandered about the rooms with the Blakeslys, being bored by introductions, until at last Miss Powell came up the stairway with the last of the guests.

  While the girls sang and went through some pretty drills Ware again studied Miss Powell. Her appeal to his imagination was startling. He searched for the cause of it. It could not be in her beauty. Certainly she was fine and womanly and of splendid physique, but all about her were lovely girls of daintier flesh and warmer color. He reasoned that her power was in her eyes, steady, frank as sunlight, clear as water in a mountain brook. She seemed unconscious of his scrutiny.

  At last they began moving down the stairs and on to the other buildings. Ware and Blakesly waited for the ladies to come down. And when they came they were in the midst of a flood of girls, and Ware had no chance to speak to them. As they moved across the grass he fell in behind Mrs. Blakesly, who seemed to be telling secrets to Miss Powell, who flushed and shook her head.

  Mrs. Blakesly turned and saw Ware close behind her, and said, "O Mr. Ware, where is my dear, dear husband?"

  "Back in the swirl," Ware replied.

  Mrs. Blakesly artfully dropped Miss Powell's arm and fell back. "I must not desert the poor dear." As she passed Ware she said, "Take my place."

  "With pleasure," he replied, and walked on after Miss Powell, who seemed not to care to wait.

  How simply she was dressed! She moved like an athlete, without effort and without constraint. As he walked quickly to overtake her a finer light fell over the hills and a fresher green came into the grass. The daisies nodding in the wind blurred together in a dance of light and loveliness which moved him like a song.

  "How beautiful everything is to-day!" he said, as he stepped to her side. He felt as if he had said, "How beautiful you are!"

  She flashed a quick, inquiring glance at him.

  "Yes; June can be beautiful with us. Still, there is a beauty more mature, when the sickle is about to be thrust into the grain."

  He did not hear what she said. He was thinking of the power that lay in the oval of her face, in the fluffy tangle of her hair. Ah! now he knew. With that upward glance she brought back his boy love, his teacher whom he had worshiped as boys sometimes will, with a love as pure as winter starlight. Yes, now it was clear. There was the same flex of the splendid waist, the same slow lift of the head, and steady, beautiful eyes.

  As she talked, he was a youth of seventeen, he was lying at his teacher's feet by the river while she read wonderful love stories. There were others there, but they did not count. Then the tears blurred his eyes; he remembered walking behind her dead body as it was borne to the hillside burying ground, and all the world was desolate for him.

  He became aware that Miss Powell was looking at him with startled eyes. He hastened to apologize and explain. "Pardon me; you look so much like a schoolboy idol—I—I seem to see her again. I didn't hear what you said, you brought the past back so poignantly."

  There was something in his voice which touched her, but before he could go on they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Blakesly and one of the other teachers. There was a dancing light in Mrs. Blakesly's eyes as she looked at Ware. She had just been saying to her husband: "What a splendid figure Miss Powell is! How well they look together! Wouldn't it be splendid if——"

  "Oh, my dear, you're too bad. Please don't match-make any more to-day. Let Nature attend to these things," Mr. Blakesly replied with manifest impatience; "Nature attended to our case."

  "I have no faith in Nature any more. I want to have at least a finger in the pie myself. Nature don't work in all cases. I'm afraid Nature can't in his case."

  "Careful! He'll hear you, my dear."

  "Where do we go now, Miss Powell?" asked Blakesly as they came to a halt on the opposite side of the campus.

  "I think they are all going to the gymnasium building. Won't you come? That is my dominion."

  They answered by moving off, Mrs. Blakesly taking Miss Powell's arm. As they streamed away in files she said: "Isn't he good-looking? We've known him for years. He's all right," she said significantly, and squeezed Miss Powell's arm.

  "Well, Lou Blakesly, you're the same old irrepressible!"

  "Blushing already, you dear! I tell you he's splendid. I wish he'd take to you," and she gave Miss Powell another squeeze. "It would be such a match! Brains and beauty, too."

  "Oh, hush!"

  They entered the cool, wide hall of the gymnasium, with its red brick walls, its polished floor, and the yellow-red wooden beams lining the ceiling.

  There were only a few people remaining in the hall, most of them having passed on into the museum. As they came to the various appliances, Miss Powell explained them.

  "What are these things for?" inquired Mrs. Blakesly, pointing at the row of iron rings depending from long ropes.

  "They are for swinging on," and she leaped lightly upward and caught and swung by one hand.

  "Mercy! Do you do that?"

  "She seems to be doing it now," Blakesly said.

  "I am one of the teachers," Miss Powell replied, dropping to the floor.

  It was glorious to see how easily she seized a heavy dumb-bell and swung it above her head. The front line of her body was majestic as she stood thus.

  "Gracious! I couldn't do that," exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly.

  "No, not with your style of dress," replied her husband.—"I have to pin her hat on this year," he said to Ware.

  "I love it," said Miss Powell, as she drew a heavy weight from the floor and stood with the cord across her shoulder. "It adds so much to life! It gives what Browning calls the wild joy of living. Do you know, few women know what that means? It's been denied us. Only the men have known

  "'The wild joys of living! the leaping from rock

  up to rock,

  The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree,

  the cool silver shock

  Of a plunge in the pool's living water.'

  I try to teach my girls 'How good is man's life, the mere living!'"

  The men cheered as she paused for a moment flushed and breathless.

  She went on: "We women have been shut out from the sports too long—I mean sports in the sun. The men have had the best of it. All the swimming, all the boating, wheeling, all the grand, wild life; now we're going to have a part."

  The young ladies clustered about with flushed, excited faces while their teacher planted her flag and claimed new territory for women.

  Miss Powell herself grew conscious, and flushed and paused abruptly.

  Mrs. Blakesly effervesced in admiring astonishment. "Well, well! I didn't know you could make a speech."

  "I didn't mean to do so," she replied.

  "Go on! Go on!" everybody called out, but she turned away to show some other apparatus.

  "Wasn't she fine?" exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly to Ware.

  "Beyond praise," he replied. She went at once to communicate her morsel of news to her husband, and at length to Miss Powell.

  The company passed out into other rooms until no one was left but Mrs. Blakesly, the professor, and Ware. Miss Powell was talking again, and to Ware mainly. Ware was thoughtful, Miss Powell radiant.

  "I didn't know what life was till I could do that." She took up a large dumb-bell and, extending it at arm's length, whirled it back and forth. Her forearm, white and smooth, swelled into strong action, and her supple hands had the unwavering power and pressure of an athlete, and withal Ware thought: "She is feminine. Her physical power has not coarsened her; it has enlarged her life, but left her entirely womanly."

  In some adroit way Mrs. Blakesly got her husband out of the room and left Ware and Miss Powell together. She was showing him the view from the windows, and they seemed to be perfectly absorbed. She looked around once and saw that Mrs. Blakesly was showing her husband something in the farther end of the room. After that she did not think of them.
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  The sun went lower in the sky and flamed along the sward. He spoke of the mystical power of the waving daisies and the glowing greens which no painter ever seems to paint. While they looked from the windows their arms touched, and they both tried to ignore it. She shivered a little as if a cold wind had blown upon her. At last she led the way out and down the stairs to the campus. They heard the gay laughter of the company at their cakes and ices, up at the central building.

  He stopped outside the hallway, and as she looked up inquiringly at him, he said quietly: "Suppose we go down the road. It seems pleasanter there."

  She acquiesced like one in a pleasure which made duty seem absurd.

  Strong and fine as she was, she had never found a lover to whom she yielded her companionship with unalloyed delight. She was thirty years of age, and her girlhood was past. She looked at this man, and a suffocating band seemed to encircle her throat. She knew he was strong and good. He was a little saddened with life—that she read in his deep-set eyes and unsmiling lips.

  The road led toward the river, and as they left the campus they entered a lane shaded by natural oaks. He talked on slowly. He asked her what her plans were.

  "To teach and to live," she said. Her enthusiasm for the work seemed entirely gone.

  Once he said, "This is the finest hour of my life."

  On the bank of the river they paused and seated themselves on the sward under a tree whose roots fingered the stream with knuckled hands.

  "Yes, every time you look up at me you bring back my boyish idol," he went on. "She was older than I. It is as if I had grown older and she had not, and that she were you, or you were she. I can't tell you how it has affected me. Every movement you make goes deep down into my sweetest, tenderest recollections. It's always June there, always sweet and sunny. Her death and burial were mystical in their beauty. I looked in her coffin. She was the grandest statue that ever lay in marble; the Greek types are insipid beside that vision. You'll say I idealized her; possibly I did, but there she is. O God! it was terrible to see one die so young and so lovely."

  There was a silence. Tears came to her eyes. He could only exclaim; weeping was denied him. His voice trembled, but grew firmer as he went on:

  "And now you come. I don't know exactly in what way you resemble her. I only know you shake me as no other human being has done since that coffin-lid shut out her face." He lifted his head and looked around. "But Nature is beautiful and full of light and buoyancy. I am not going to make you sad. I want to make you happy. I was only a boy to her. She cared for me only as a mature woman likes an apt pupil, but she made all Nature radiant for me, as you do now."

  He smiled upon her suddenly. His somber mood passed like one of the shadows of the clouds floating over the campus. It was only a recollected mood. As he looked at her the old hunger came into his heart, but the buoyancy and emotional exaltation of youth came back also.

  "Miss Powell, are you free to marry me?" he said suddenly.

  She grew very still, but she flushed and then she turned her face away from him. She had no immediate reply.

  "That is an extraordinary thing to ask you, I know," he went on; "but it seems as if I had known you a long time, and then sitting here in the midst of Nature with the insects singing all about us—well, conventions are not so vital as in drawing rooms. Remember your Browning."

  She who had declaimed Browning so blithely now sat silent, but the color went out of her face, and she listened to the multitudinous stir and chirp of living things, and her eyes dreamed as he went on steadily, his eyes studying her face.

  "Browning believed in these impulses. I'll admit I never have. I've always reasoned upon things, at least since I became a man. It has brought me little, and I'm much disposed to try the virtue of an impulse. I feel as certain that we can be happy together as I am of life, so I come back to my question, Are you free to marry me?"

  She flushed again. "I have no other ties, if that is what you mean."

  "That is what I mean precisely. I felt that you were free, like myself. I might ask Blakesly to vouch for me, but I prefer not. I ask for no one's opinion of you. Can't you trust to that insight of which women are supposed to be happily possessed?"

  She smiled a little. "I never boasted of any divining power."

  He came nearer. "Come, you and I have gone by rule and reason long enough. Here we have a magnificent impulse; let us follow. Don't ask me to wait, that would spoil it all; considerations would come in."

  "Ought they not to come in?"

  "No," he replied, and his low voice had the intensity of a trumpet. "If this magnificent moment passes by, this chance for a pure impulsive choice, it is lost forever. You know Browning makes much of such lost opportunities. Seeing you there with bent head and blowing hair, I would throw the world away to become the blade of grass you break. There, will that do?" He smiled.

  "That speech should bring back youth to us both," she said.

  "Right action now will," he quickly answered.

  "But I must consider."

  "Do not. Take the impulse."

  "It may be wayward."

  "We've both got beyond the wayward impulse. This impulse rises from the profound deeps. Come, the sun sinks, the insect voices thicken, a star passes behind the moon, and life hastens. Come into my life. Can't you trust me?"

  She grew very white, but a look of exaltation came into her face. She lifted her clear, steady eyes to his. She reached her hand to his. "I will," she said, and they rose and stood together thus.

  He uncovered his head. A sort of awe fell upon him. A splendid human life was put into his keeping.

  "A pure choice," he said exultingly—"a choice untouched by considerations. It brings back the youth of the world."

  The sun lay along the sward in level lines, the sky was full of clouds sailing in file, like mighty purple cranes in saffron seas of flame, the wind wavered among the leaves, and the insects sang in sudden ecstasy of life.

  The two looked into each other's faces. They seemed to be transfigured, each to the other.

  "You must not go back," he said. "They would not understand you nor me. We will never be so near a great happiness, a great holiday. It is holiday time. Let us go to the mountains."

  She drew a sigh as if all her cares and duties dropped from her, then she smiled and a comprehending light sparkled in her eyes.

  "Very well, to the clouds if you will."

  * * *

  THE END OF LOVE IS LOVE OF LOVE.

  They lay on the cliff where the warm sun fell. Beneath them were rocks, lichen-spotted above, and orange and russet and pink beneath.

  Around the headland the ocean ravened with roaring breath, flinging itself ceaselessly on the land, only to fall back with clutching snarl over the pebbles.

  The smell of hot cedars was in the air. The distant ships drove by with huge sails bellying. Occasional crickets chirped faintly. Sandpipers skimmed the beach.

  The man and woman were both gray. He lay staring at the sky. She sat with somber eyes fixed on the distant sea, whose crawling lines glittered in ever-changing designs on its purple sweep.

  They were man and wife; both were older than their years. They were far past the land of youth and love.

  "O wife!" he cried, "let us forget we are old; let us forget we are disillusioned of life; let us try to be boy and girl again."

  The woman shivered with a powerful, vague emotion, but she did not look at him.

  "O Esther, I'm tired of life!" the man went on. "I'm tired of my children. I'm tired of you. Do you know what I mean?"

  The woman looked into his eyes a moment, and said in a low voice:

  "No, Charles." But the man knew she meant yes. The touch of her hand grew cold.

  "I'm tired of it all. I want to feel again the wonder and mystery of life. It's all gone. The love we have now is good and sweet and true; that of the old time was sweeter. It was so marvelous. I trembled when I kissed you, dear. I don't now. It had more of trut
h, of pure, unconscious passion, and less of habit. Oh, teach me to forget!"

  He crept nearer to her, and laid his head in her lap. His face was knotted with his passion and pain.

  The wife and mother sighed, and looked down at his hair, which was getting white.

  "Well, Charles!" she said, and caressingly buried her fingers in his hair. "I'll try to forget for your sake."

  He could not understand her. He did not try. He lay with closed eyes, tired, purposeless. The sweet sea wind touched his cheek, white with the indoor pallor of the desk worker. The sound of the sea exalted him. The beautiful clouds above him carried him back to boyhood. There were tears on his face as he looked up at her.

  "I'm forgetting!" he said, with a smile of exultation.

  But the woman looked away at the violet-shadowed sails, afar on the changeful purple of the sea, and her throat choked with pain.

  THE END

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