Son of the Wind/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
ET DEAM VIDIMUS
TO spring full-grown into the water to learn to swim, to mount full-grown into saddle to learn to ride, to leap for the first time into love, with the set convictions of experience and the brain of a skeptic—that is an experience which gives a man some moments of terror, lest he drown himself or be trampled before his heart begins to beat with the joy of the unimagined. Carron, in the days of his mother's authority, had known none of the adolescent fancies. Without sentiment, late in developing, he had had small experience of women until his youth flung him into the plains. There he had known them—a few—owners of small properties, of hotels, of larger properties, of mines; or girls he had danced with only in the heated balls. Their eyes had been keen and a little hard from continual defensive looking on the world. Their shrewd brains continually were pitted against man's in his arena; or did he venture toward theirs, it was a battle, and the thing was to get the better of him. Materialist, romanticist that he was, expecting of woman all things he was not, Carron found these as unsympathetic as certain New England exotics he remembered returning from Paris to Connecticut with their lovely eyes filled with the wonder of Parisian shops, the language of the city soft on their tongues, their hearts lodging houses for the latest foreign fancy.
It was the woman of the cultivated soul who had taken him; she, who knew how to make herself his ally, pet him out of his shynesses, laugh him out of his vanities, sit at his feet and look up at his strength, draw out of the recesses of his mood shrewd music that he himself had not suspected. Five days they had had; and Love, who is fond of putting five days into five minutes, had shown them, if not herself from head to foot, at least the full splendor of her face. That instantaneous knowledge was of the heart. It had come first, which commonly is the final revelation. There remained to discover the hundred lesser knowledges of the mind, and the charm of the days which followed was partly this becoming acquainted with each other backward.
The season of arranging the hotel was done, furniture shrouded and doors closed. The greater house assumed an intense repose; and Blanche, released from its tyrannies, became a creature of the out-of-doors. The later summer stood at the full above their heads. By night came the wider spreading gauzy fan of cloud, reaching from horizon to horizon; but the morning dispersed it, and at noon the sky showed a broad sheet of blue. The white grass was beginning to turn to gray, the trees black and laden with dust, the faint pools in the creek bed were shrunken dry, and every twig snapped under the foot like a spark. They saw, from the shelter of wooded hilltops, the hawk drop slowly, cutting the air, and come to his perch on the dying pine, and stand, his wings held out from his body for heat, his sharp tongue like a splinter in his mouth. They walked in the thick scent of endless pines and smelled, mixed with the resin, the sharper pungence of far-off forest fires. She led him by little unexpected paths to look on new corners of the world. They sat on heights and saw the ragged horizon of trees beyond, and beneath the shelf of rock where perhaps a snake stirred, glistening.
She told him all things, from the shyest places of her thoughts. Even the long-kept fancies of the child—divine foolishnesses—unbelievable unworldlinesses. She pointed out to him again at sunset the little, playing, wild animals, rabbits and whisking chipmunks. She seemed to think, perhaps, they had souls. She brought back to his memory a certain morning beneath cedars; but this place they had not revisited. He recalled it, as he recalled the Sphinx's window, something belonging in past time; and he had no wish to lead her back to the discussion that had been theirs. No doubt she was in his hand now, an instrument easy to use; but she had ceased altogether to appear to him as an instrument. If he drew her on to talk now, his ulterior purpose was to watch the play of expression around her mouth, and the change in her eyes from alertness into dreams. His nature continued to fulfil itself. He continued to bend every faculty of mind and will to the pursuit of one thing, making everything else tributary to it. The only difference was that imperceptibly, in ways so gradual he was unaware of them, his object had changed. She had become the object.
Sometimes they raced the early moon—early, before the red had disappeared from the west—and stood beneath the Witch's Spindle silent, saw the bent form, like a human being, and felt themselves beneath the arms of fate. But never the later moon. She would not be out in the dark hours. Reminded of the floodtide of night, she offered excuse of the increasing veil of cloud; when that was gone then they might, perhaps, but each night it gathered a little deeper, and a chill came with it that whispered of winter, something to be thought of with a shiver in the small hours, and forgotten in the bright eye of day.
Sometimes they sat within the fringe of trees near where the carpet had laid, near enough to see the house—and it was a wonder if eyes from there did not see them—and laughed and talked nonsense; shamefully flattered each other, made fun of each other. He had been treated as a child and as a ruler at different times in his life, and he was treated as both at once now, but with a difference—a privileged child, humored, and when refused, refused with coaxing and a smile; an adored despot—not feared but deferred to, looked upon with eyes like a dove's for gentleness. Her gentleness was his continual amusement, and her incuriousness. She asked him at all seasons what he thought of her, sometimes what he thought of himself, sometimes of this or that person. But never of what he had done, of what life had been to him before he met her, or of any person who might have been in it, never troubled him with those questions of the past and the future with which human beings are wont to disturb the present. She had love, she held it and increased it. Sometimes, whether alone or with the other people around them, their eyes met, and he felt the knife of extreme happiness that is close to suffering. He thought it was because she was beautiful; not beautiful because of beauty, but because she was herself. Beauty now all depended on being Blanche. If it were she, then it was safe.
He learned a deal of her while they were among the other people—and this was often enough. He saw she was more ignorant of books than he; for sometimes, when they came in in the late afternoon, they took the way of the scholar's study, and entering flushed from the air, no doubt to him a living bucolic, they took at least half of his mind off of his volumes by pulling them about and skimming over them. She had never heard of Atalanta, but she thought it was like Carron. She listened to the story of the Golden Fleece and found Carron in it. She pointed him out to himself in the pictures of the beautiful bas-reliefs of the Parthenon—one of the mounted figures—and embarrassed him by calling attention to its perfections. The two men spent some quiet twilights with her, her head closer to her father's than to Carron's, but close to both.
Once, across her ruffled hair, as she bent above Carlyle's thunders, the scholar sent a glance, inquiring and anxious. Carron had almost nodded to reassure him, "Yes, I love her," when he remembered it was not of this Rader wanted to ask. The repeated appearance of the man and the woman together, their harmonies and elations, the scholar might have perceived, as the ear takes in the rhythm of words, pleased, without reflection or deduction. It was of the other thing he questioned, which had brought the two men together, and which, strangely enough, still seemed a living issue in Rader's mind. The younger man looked it down. He would not acknowledge that such a thing existed, or ever had existed. He thought the scholar looked both relieved and disappointed. No doubt his imagination had been strongly touched; he had thought to see some incident, like an old, heroic tale, played out before his eyes.
But there, also, was his loyalty to the girl. She seemed to stand for a great deal to him, perhaps for an embodiment of that theoretic beauty he had named once as being the most real thing in all the world; perhaps for the embodiment of a simpler, more human thing, his own youth. There was a likeness between them. Even Carron, an observer, could trace the outward resemblance, the same quick, inquiring turn of the head, and the same dreamy eye, though it dreamed upon a different ideal, the scholar's was upon the abstract; the girl's upon the concrete—a terrible thing to desire and to expect to find. She watched her father's face more than she did the beautiful pages of his Spectators. She spoke of him to Carron, one afternoon, as they walked on into the house, through the long passage.
"He gets lost in them," she said, meaning the books, "just as we do in the hills. He forgets everything, even to go to bed. He has had beautiful books from the time when he could buy such things, and mother would never let him part with one of them."
"Why, did he want to?"
"O, of course not. I meant when we were so terribly—poor, and he could have sold even a few for a good deal of money, mother would never even ask him. She did everything, rather than that. She used to patch our shoes herself. She loves him terribly. She would do anything for him."
"And he?" Carron prompted.
Blanche shrugged, and shook her head. "He is fond of us, of course, but, well—we are not books, that is our shortcoming. They're more to him than any person is. It is hard to understand." She gathered her forehead. "Mother doesn't, but she accepts it."
Such facts fell rather quaintly from her mouth, bare facts, observed of people. She showed the same direct comprehension in regard to certain other persons whom he became indirectly acquainted with, her many correspondents. These evidently were people who had stayed at the hotel for a space, and been caught in the woven net of sweetness and careless disdain. The letters, which were brought up now by the boy George, included usually one or two for her—letters, most of which bore the postmarks of cities in the state; but sometimes one showed an Italian stamp or a Cuban, or that its journey was from the far north. She would smile faintly over the open page; then look up with a laugh to read him a line, or give him a sketch of the writer. This lady was living at Nice. She was trying to decide whether it would be safe to divorce her husband, because there was a chance that, then, her friend might not marry her.
This man was a retired seaman, who had made his money in smuggling opium. His letter began: "Miss Rader: Miss," which delighted her, and was a prospectus of the writer's perfections and virtues with a guarded query as to the possibility of marriage. At the idea of becoming a smuggleress—as she put it—Blanche fell into such laughter that she found it difficult to make Carron understand that the writer of a certain third letter was a quite eminent geologist, who wanted very much another specimen of a stone. He felt sure she must remember it. It was in the middle of a rocky ledge, down a declivity, just over the hill from the hotel. She could, he said, procure it easily by being lowered a little distance—ten feet—preferably at night, as then there was little chance of rattlesnakes; and even should she happen to step on one there would not be so much danger.
"Father wouldn't see anything wrong with that point of view," she declared. For herself, she seemed to find it, like the others, exceedingly amusing. She seemed to like these people, even the lady at Nice of whom Carron had serious doubts, but she did not look on them as friends. There was a fine line drawn there. It was the rare thing about her that she could live in the mixed crowd of humanity, like it, have so few illusions about it, yet in the midst of it keep herself so untouched, and cherish so intensely ideals and illusions that were all her own.
He had seen the sentiment she had and the fancies,—the sensitiveness, almost morbid, with which she assumed her own nature to everything that grew and lived, without sound, or, at least, without a human voice. But this she kept separate from her outward living. Deeply and ineradicably secretive she was, afraid lest any unsympathetic touch or thought come near something she loved! She had turned cold eyes on Ferrier. Her tolerant friendship had disappeared, and she drove him away from her presence with icy words and looks. Carron, to whom this man had never been more than a vague figure on the horizon, worth nothing but a little pity, ventured to inquire.
She shrugged, shook her head, and waived the question.
He sounded her. "You don't dislike George," he said.
"George is different."
She was very clear on this point. "He hasn't a brain, you see. He feels you don't like him, and as an animal would be, he's afraid of you. But Bert doesn't like you, because he wants something." She flushed a little with anger, and Carron dropped this delicate question for another. But upon the question that involved her mother, Blanche was not cold. Hostility mixed with affection is hot. "She doesn't trust you," the girl declared with darkening eyes. "I don't expect anything of Bert, but she ought to feel as I do about you—yet she doesn't. She says things about you. It makes me feel hot, as if she had struck me, and for the moment I hate her."
But her temper could run further than that, he was to find out, when he tried to urge her one evening into the little balcony where their first tryst had been kept. She resisted, refused, pressed for a reason, shivered. "It is rotten, condemned. It may tear away from the house at any minute, even with nothing on it."
He was struck with admiration and horror of this frantic child.
"I thought you didn't care about me—and I knew I did—and, just then, I didn't care what became of us!" she explained. "You don't know how I have lain awake over the thought of what might have happened to you! I am dreadful once I am started."
"You may risk my neck," he told her plainly, "but not your own. And you are to be decent to your mother. She's not having a bit of a good time of it, and she may be right about me for all you know."
"She isn't," Blanche flared positively, as if she found him an enemy to himself. "But I will be nice if you want me to," she added with sudden docility; then, tipping her head a little, until it almost touched his, "I'd rather," she said, "do anything than that I should make you angry."
He thought this was merely a pretty speech, but he discovered on the same day the full truth of it. They had been walking over the turn of the hill, toward the barn, going for the horses, when the figure of the boy, George, came into sight below them, among the trees. It was some days since Carron had seen him. He had kept away from the house, was not even to be found when the diligent Mrs. Rader wanted him, and Blanche searched. There had been anxiety in the girl's look then and now there was a brightening as she waved her hand. The creature threw high both of his, streaked with earth; then began to come with bounds upward, through the trees. Like a large dog, foolish with the joy of seeing his master, he came straight toward her as though he would have flung her over, but, instead, flung himself upon her and falling on his knees, clasped his arms around her waist, and hung there, dropping back his head to look up worshipfully.
Laughing she put her hands on his arms. Thus she might have laid them on the dog's head. But Carron was quick. He seized the boy's wrists. The creature clung fast with a cry. He gave Carron an upward look, the dull, glazed eye of fury; but the man unlocked his fingers with a hard twist and plucking him off as if he had been a slug, tossed him backward, until he rolled a little down the hill.
"What are you doing?" she cried. "What is the matter?"
"Don't let him touch you again!" Carron could hardly speak. The sight of the half-witted thing hanging upon her thickened his tongue and sent the red sparks before his eyes.
The boy was picking himself up, dazed and terrified, from the ground. "You have hurt him!" she lamented as if he had been an injured kitten, and made a dart forward. "He didn't mean any harm! He does that like a child!"
Carron had her by the shoulder, and thrust her back. "Don't go near him, do you hear! Let him go!"
She looked confounded while the figure of the boy, half running, half creeping, was growing smaller among the trees.
"How could you do that! I am the only thing in the world he isn't afraid of."
"He is like a beast! I can't endure to see him near you!"
"He's not." She had an anger of her own. "He is a great deal less of one than some men with brains."
Carron shut his teeth.
"Do you mean me?"
She stared at him with face growing pale, lifted her hands a little as if to thrust away the thought. "Oh, no!" she wailed. "To you—how could I?" She turned with the air of leaving him for the end of the world, took a few precipitate steps, clasped and leaned against a tree trunk, hiding her face, shaking with nervous sobs, without a tear.
Sullenly he approached her. The storm had poured on him suddenly out of clear heavens. "If I had known that creature mattered so much to you, I wouldn't have interfered," he said. The sound of those sobs was terrible to him.
At his touch she released the tree and clasped him instead, clinging with hands which were a revelation of nervous strength. "It isn't because of him, I care so much I" she murmured, "it's you! You didn't mean it. He has not a brain. You can't understand that, I know; and you, so kind always, always so gentle, so good—O better than I am, much better—how could you think I would say such a thing to you? The sound of your voice, it hurts, it hurts me like fire! You didn't mean it?"
Terribly moved, he swore that he had not, that she might have what she wanted; that he loved her, that he would be anything she pleased to think him; only stop sobbing like that and everything would be all right. He was scarcely aware of what he was saying. He was trying to express and utterly failing, the sensation of misery and happiness which filled him at thus being clung to, trusted, believed in as an unshakable, invulnerable god. Outwardly he reassured her. Inwardly he was crying, "Lord knows where we are going! Lord knows how this will end!"
She seemed to have furnished him with her own virtues, with all virtues which have been known since man was born. When he was with her they seemed almost possible to him. But when he thought on these things in the times they were apart, he felt afraid. What if she should discover that he was only a common man, not "different", as she had told him under the cedars? Were they to have disagreements over the things in the world which for eight days they had forgotten, cast out, and scorned? A strange girl—so his thought ran; notions a man had never heard of in other women. Never could tell in what direction he might hurt her next, or delight her. She was unexpected, certainly, having none of the exactions common to woman, making no bargains with him, ready to run to meet him from any distance; yet, suddenly, with nothing to warn him, he would find himself floundering in her inexhaustible reserves. He had supposed the distance between them was but a hand's breadth, and behold, a dark continent.
Still, through barrens of egoism, around pitfalls of their natures, of whose dangers they were unaware, they drifted nearer together. To become as one person, to be done for ever with the possibility of differing! Thus love was leading them on, with her mirage of the perfect solvent.
Restless, wanting more than he had in the present, not wanting to look into the future, Carron lived in chaos, without a thought of to-morrow. Half their joy had been in their freedom, their wildness, their detachment from the world. That institution by which the world is populated—he had never even considered it enough to scorn it. Of the tremors of the man who comes in all the circumstances of clothes-for-an-occasion, with a prearranged form of question, he knew nothing. He—the last of human creatures to think of himself as mated—felt the approach of an end to summer, an end to an idyl, a sharpening of its sweetness; and, like a wounding edge, the threat of separation.