CHAPTER XIX.
“One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-class staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other hand, one may know marriage as Kipling’s Mowgli knew the forest, because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy ground.”—Dr. Richard Cabot, in “What Men Live By.”
With “Dear Brutus” there was the usual surprised delight when the curtain rose, at the birds and sunshine in the English garden, the piquant fascination of the dwarf magician, then the unfolding of the tragedy of the failure-lives begging a second chance, and the whimsical fairy tale of the enchanted garden—the land of “Might Have Been.”
Billy was accustomed to the impulsive touch of a hand on his sleeve, at the high spots in plays, not a nervous, bothersome little hand, but a warm electric contact as quickly withdrawn while the girl kept her eyes fast on the stage. Sometimes he lost the effect of half the best acting in his amusement at watching her, like a child actually living for the moment in the drama going on before her. He was accustomed also to the tears that welled up at emotional parts, tears usually
with a smile shining through them. But he was not prepared for the deluge that swept her when the impenetrable darkness came down over the enchanted garden and the little dream daughter, who might have set things right for the misunderstood artist, cried in the hopelessness of a child’s terrified loneliness “I don’t want to be a ‘Might Have Been.’”
He had seen her weep in poetic enjoyment of pathetic parts before, but this was different and offered no explanation for itself. Sitting as close as the arm of the chair and the formality due in a public place would allow, he got the impact of each fresh shock. He was genuinely concerned. It was a most helpless situation. There were ways of meeting it, of course, which he knew—but not in a public theatre.... If only the lights would go out! Still it troubled him a little. And when it was over her sole comment was “Wasn’t it wonderful!”
“You liked it!”
“It was the most beautiful thing—”
“Even the garden? Just what was the trouble?”
“I hardly know myself. Sometime I’ll try to tell you.”
There would always be something left to tell—a new world dawning every morning, new mysteries unfolding every evening—a wonderful blessing on a long journey together.
When he left her he stood bareheaded, boyish in his humility, and spoke, as thousands of lovers had done before him, of the time when she would go all the way home with him.
It came in October. The painters had fairly crowded the carpenters out of the house, and before the last varnish was dry on the woodwork Billy had cleared away the wreckage of mortar, boxes and discarded scaffolds and left the house standing trim and solid between the sentinel pines, unmistakably new, but looking as though it had grown there. The next day Ruth’s aunt, accompanied by a capable charwoman and a truck load of boxes, known in the housewife’s vernacular as chests, decorously chaperoned her niece to her future home to arrange furniture and hang curtains and give the last touches toward making it sufficiently habitable to begin with. The aunt wasn’t just sure that it was the proper thing for a girl to visit her fiancee’s house before she was married. She didn’t know that Ruth had rope-walked the naked joists in the moonlight with Billy many times while the building was in progress; that they had measured the windows for curtains by the gleam of a flashlight a month before, else how could they have planned every last chair and hanging. The next night they came home to the house together.
The girl had protested at the idea of a wedding
trip. “We both like that hill farm better than anywhere else in the world,” she said. “Why should we go racing off to some place we don’t care about?”
“And defy an old custom like that?” he argued; but he knew that she knew how much he had wanted exactly that.
So they had gone to the church in the afternoon and had come back to a reception at the aunt’s afterwards—a very nice affair with the luxurious old rooms candle-lighted and hung with autumn leaves. And their best friends had come to wish them well, with all the noise and chatter common to such occasions, even among very well bred people; and as soon as they could, they kissed the aunt and slipped away, getting a last glimpse of Jean and the Agricultural Representative, apparently completely lost in some panorama unfolding itself before them in the open fire.
The car swung out of the city streets on to the smooth, winding country road, a familiar road, but somehow different. At the crest of the hill they stopped and looked back at the city glittering in a cup below them.
“Sure you’re not sorry you’re leaving it?” Billy asked.
“Quite sure. But it isn’t the city’s fault. It isn’t a natural place to live; but it has a lot to give in other ways.”
“Things we must try to keep in touch with.”
“Only there are times when neither city nor country, nor anything else, matters. It’s only people that count—”
But Billy was very appreciative and that sentence was never quite finished.
They were miles from the lights of the city now. A long stretch of road through woods and pastures, a white frost glittering on the fields and fences, a golden moonlight filtering through the branches of wind-swept trees and yellowing the dead leaves on the moist, black roadway, a cold white mist lying in the valley and never a sound but the steady purring of the engine. Presently a little cabin stood out alone in a clearing, its lights out, a faint white plume of smoke arising slowly from its chimney.
“Always seems a sort of lonely little house,” Billy remarked. “It must be a jolt to come out of the heart of a city to a spot like this. The compensation, of course, is that people have to love each other harder—sometimes there isn’t much else. When they don’t, the result is terrible.”
It was late when they turned in at their own gate. Earlier in the evening a neighbor had come in and lighted the fire and gone away again; the red light glowed warmly in the living-room windows. They went in together. It was the same room where they had hung curtains and adjusted furniture the day before, the same room Billy
had looked back upon happily before he left the house that afternoon, but it seemed to have come alive, somehow. The firelight played over the brown walls, the rich red and brown and gold bindings of the books, the warm autumn tints in the curtains.... A new, strange shyness held them. She slipped out of her coat and he took it from her with his best drawing-room adeptness; she waited while he found a place for it. Then they turned their attention to the fire—there was always something that might be done to a fire.
But standing there in the fresh warmth of the blazing logs, with Billy’s eyes upon her, serious and friendly, she realized suddenly how appealingly boyish he was in his anxiety to make her feel at home. And just as suddenly it dawned on Billy that she was, after all, just a wisp of a girl, such a rare, whimsical, comrady bit of a girl, who had staked everything so sportingly to come with him. And his arm went about her with the quick, reassuring pressure of a guide to be trusted.
“We’re going to be awfully happy here,” he said, just as though he hadn’t said it a thousand times before.
And the girl pressed closer to the good, rough sleeve of his coat and let it go at that.
The lights went out in the little house. The smoke still rose from the chimney like incense from an altar. Somewhere in the distance an owl
hooted, a far off lonely cry—one of the calls of the wild places which seldom fails to stir the human soul with kindred desolation, or a throb of security in the nearness of its mate. And the old pines dozed in dreamy retrospection. They had watched other lovers come and go. They were at the happy beginning of a new story.