2
Keble’s corner of creation had become a chaos of felled trees, excavations, foundations, ditches, scaffoldings, cement-mixers, tripods, lead pipe, packing-cases, tents, and Irish masons. Four years before, on returning to London from a journey around the world, he had heard his father say that a young man who had “anything in him” couldn’t help desiring to exert himself even to the point of great sacrifice in the attainment of whatever most interested him. That remark had discouraged Keble, for he could imagine nothing for which he could have an overwhelming desire to sacrifice himself: least of all British politics, which was the breath in his father’s nostrils.
The remark had sent him roaming again, not to see more of the world but to think. And, thanks to a hunting accident which confined him several weeks to a log cabin in the wilds of Alberta, he had not only thought, but found the thing for which he desired to exert himself to the point of sacrifice. At the moment when the lure of a new country was driving from his memory the vapid gaieties of West End night clubs, he met a girl who seemed to be the human counterpart of all the mystery and spaciousness in nature which had cast a spell upon him. The acres which his father had acquired many years before for the mere fun of owning something in Canada were a jumble of forest primeval, clear waters, prairies, untamed animals. Louise was a jumble equally enticing. And the passion to reclaim the one became inextricably allied with a passion to reclaim the other. It mattered no more to him that his rivals in the latter case were cowboys than that, in the former, his opponents were inexperience and a sceptical family. In both cases he saw possibilities that others hadn’t seen.
His forests and fields, being without a purpose of their own, yielded docilely to his axes and ploughshares and grouped themselves into the picture he had conceived of them. But his wife, after the first months of submission, had begun to sprout and spread with a capricious and bewildering luxuriance.
For some time he felt the change, but not until the arrival of Trenholme Dare did his feeling become statable. Not that there was any technical lack of affection or good will or loyalty; there was simply a great lack of common effort. The original trust and enthusiasm had vanished, and since no one was to blame, he was beginning to be anxious about its return. At times he suspected that he ought, in some fashion, to assert himself. But, fundamentally humble, as well as proud, he could do nothing more than watch Louise’s progress in a sort of despairing approbation, and go on cultivating his own garden.
What changes had taken place in himself, with increasing seriousness of purpose, he could not have said. The changes in Louise were multitudinous, in the sense that a tree in spring is more multitudinous than the same tree in winter. She had acquired foliage and blossoms. He trembled to see what the fruit would be. Once he had been priggish enough to wonder whether he could be contented with a wife brought up in such primitive simplicity; his priggishness received a final snub in Palm Beach, where instead of the impetuous creature whose cultivation he had once bumptiously promised himself to take in hand, he was met by a woman who had herself so completely in hand that she set the tone for everybody within range. Vaguely he suspected that the transformation was the result of a process undertaken with the intention of pleasing him. But to have claimed this would have seemed to him presumptuous. He now found in her a cautiousness, politeness, and undemonstrativeness that, to his dismay, he recognized as an echo of his own; and, their positions reversed, he had some conception of the hurt he must have inflicted on her. Whereupon he longed for her old headlong assaults and gamineries,—longed for them for their warmth and for their value as examples to learn by.
The only encouraging factor in the situation was Louise’s honesty. In that respect at least there was no change. He was convinced that she had told him only one lie in her life, and that was a pathetic fib for which he was more than ready to answer to Saint Peter, since it was a by-product of the process of self-improvement Louise had undertaken, as he suspected, to do him honor. Being the first lie, it was overdone: for Miriam Cread was, of all the women he could think of, perhaps the least like a Harristown schoolmistress. He had never challenged the story, and it had never been officially contradicted. Neither Louise nor Miriam knew that one day, in looking through a bundle of old illustrated weeklies, his eye had been arrested by the photograph of a group of people in the paddock at Ascot, prominent among whom was “Rear Admiral Cread of Washington, D. C. and his daughter,” chatting with a dowdy old princess of the blood royal at the very moment,—as Keble took the trouble to calculate,—when Weedgie Bruneau was alleged to have been improving her acquaintance with Miriam in a remote normal school in the Canadian northwest.
How Miriam had got to Hillside, what she had come for, and why she stopped on, were questions whose answers were of no importance. Important was the fact that Miriam’s presence had had the effect of an electrolized rod plunged into the chemical solution of his marriage. As a result of which Louise and he had separated into copper and NO3. In short he had relapsed into a rather flat solution, and she had come out a very bright metal.
Miriam was not a source of anxiety to him. Whatever machine she had dropped from, she had played fair. At times she was a positive boon: sweet, serene, solid. “I wish you could see her, my son,” he had once written to Walter Windrom. “Even your flawless Myra Pelter’s nose, if not put out of joint, would have to be furtively looked at in the mirror, just once, to see that it was still straight.”
But the man from the machine.
He was entirely self-made, and, as Keble was the first to admit, a tremendously good job. Miriam’s comment was that, though his thumbs were too thin-waisted for a Hercules and his shoulders too broad for an Apollo, he was undoubtedly of divine descent. Louise, on first seeing him, had shrugged her shoulders and said, under her breath, the one word: “Cocksure.”
Keble’s impression of Dare was recorded in his latest letter to Windrom, with whom, as a relief from his recent solitary self-catechism, he had resumed a more intensive correspondence. “He takes possession of you,” wrote Keble, “Chiefly, I think, with his voice, which is more palpable than most men’s handshakes: one of those voices that contain chords as well as single tones, that sink and spread, then draw together into the sound of hammer on steel, and scatter into a laugh which is like a shower of sparks. If I were a sculptor I would model him in bronze fifteen feet high and label him the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. If I owned a monopoly of the world’s industry I would make him general manager. If I were the sovereign people I would cheerfully and in a sort of helpless awe make him dictator, all the while deploring and failing to understand his views. He would simply thunder forth policies in a voice full of chromatic thirds, and with frantic, nervous huzzahs I would bear him shoulder-high to the throne.”
Dare struck Keble as a philosopher who through excess of physical energy had turned to mechanical science. Or perhaps a born engineer whose talent for organizing matter had a sort of spiritual echo. At one moment he would make his facts support his philosophical speculations; at the next his philosophy, like a gigantic aeroplane, would mount into the sky with tons of fact stowed away in neat compartments. The result was that Keble didn’t know whether to marvel at the load Dare could mount with, or be alarmed at the whirling away into space of so much solid matter.
“Contact with this chap,” wrote Keble, “has taught me this, that to me who,—it must alas be admitted,—am merely on the brink of understanding my epoch, individuality has seemed almost an end in itself, as though the object of life were achieved when the flower blossomed. (I remember romantic nights during my furloughs in Paris when I paid mute tribute to long-haired, be-sandalled creatures who were, to my excessively English eyes, ‘being individual’). But egos are passé; mass ego, it seems (or egi) have come in. For Dare the blossoming, even the fructifying, are incidental. His interest (at least in the reflective lulls after dinner, for during the daytime he’s the most practical of men) extends to the cosmic activity which is (in some manner I have yet to comprehend) rendered possible by the virtually automatic living and procreating and dying of millions upon millions of violets and pine trees and rabbits and ladies and gentlemen and glaciers and republics and solar systems. He assaults the subject with these stimulating volleys of odds and ends.
“Now imagine, Walter, for only you can, the effect of all this on my wife. It’s turning into ‘a case unprecedented’, and before long I may, like Bunthorne, have to be ‘contented with a tulip or li-lie’. Louise long ago talked me into a cocked hat. Miriam, through the mysterious licence she had been endowed with, kept up a semblance of intellectual alto to Louise’s dizzy soprano. But now, oh dear me now, Miriam and I aren’t even in tempo with her, much less in key. My household,—I still claim it as mine through force of habit, which is always imperative with me,—has become a china shop for the taurean and matadorean antics of two of the most ruthlessly agile products of the age.
“Louise is for the moment (and you can only define her momentarily) an interpreting link between Dare (twenty-first century) and me (nineteenth). Her original association with me awakened her consciousness to a delicate scale of weights and measures in matters of taste and opinion. When she had acquired my acuteness of perception she discovered that she was naturally endowed with Alpine talents that made my hilltop look like a mound. From her easy victories over Miriam and me she concluded that there were endless enterprises awaiting her. When she was alone she began to feel herself operating on a higher gear, making for herself new speed records. Now that I look back, I know that my cautiousness, in more than one crisis, gave her ample excuse for going her own gait. I have it from her lips that she has kept her love (whatever we mean by that enormously capacious word) for me brightly burning, as I, in all the welter, have done. Her religious nature, for want of a cult, has always centered round an exquisite instinct which I suspect to be a sort of sublimated eroticism: something that I suppose no man ever understands,—or would some other man? That’s the devilish puzzle of it. Yet almost without being aware of it she seems to have kindled new fires before an altar so much more important and all-embodying than her feeling for me or mere anybody else that the light of her little lamp of constancy is like the light of a star in the blaze of noon.
“What one does in a case like that is more than I know. All I am sure of at this moment is you, my son, a lighthouse that flashes at dependable intervals through my fogs. Do you, for one, stay a little in the rear of the procession if every one else gets out of sight. I don’t deserve it of you; I merely exact it,—again through force of habit: the same habit that, in our school holidays suffered me to play with your yacht on the Kensington round pond after I had wrecked my own.”