3
Riding, fishing, and hunting for the winter’s supply of game enlivened the autumn months, and when the snow arrived, drifting through the canyons, obliterating all traces of roads and fences, there were snow-shoe and ski-journeys, skating on a swept portion of the lake, and dances before the great fireplace. Self-consciously at first, but soon without being aware of it, Louise reflected the sheen of her companion, and acquired objective glimpses of herself. There had been long discussions in which tastes and opinions had been sifted, and Louise’s speech and cast of thought subtly supervised. Throughout the program Keble made quiet entrances and exits, dimly realizing what was taking place, grateful for, yet a little distrustful of the gradual transformation. It was as though, in an atmosphere of peace, unknown forces were being secretly mobilized. There was a charm for him in the nightly fireside readings and conversations. When he was present they were likely to develop into a monologue of daring theories invented and sustained by Louise,—a Louise who had begun to take some of her girlish extravagances in earnest. In the end Keble found himself, along with Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise’s radicalism the stock counter arguments of his class.
This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional society. For the sum total of his mental bouts with Louise was that she serenely but quite decisively relegated him to the ranks of the safe and sane. And “safe and sane” as she voiced the phrase meant something less commendable than “safe and sane” as he voiced it. For Keble “safe and sane” was of all vehicles the one which would carry him and his goods most adequately to his mortal destination. He had always assumed that Louise had faith in the vehicle. Now he seemed to see her sitting on the tail-board, swinging her legs like a naughty child, ready to leap off at the approach of any conveyance that gave promise of more speed and excitement.
During his later school-days, Keble, by virtue of an ability to discriminate, had arrived at a point of self-realization that rendered his conformity to custom a bore to him but failed to provide him with the logical alternative. For this he had consulted, and responded to, the more refined manifestations of individualism in contemporary literature and art, to the extent of falling under the illusion that he himself was a thoroughgoing individualist. A victim of a period of social transition, he, like so many other young men of his generation, made the mistake of assuming that his doubts and objections were the effect of a creative urge within himself, whereas he had merely acquired a decent wardrobe of modern notions which distinguished him from his elders and, to his own eyes, disguised the inalterably conservative nature of his principles. Hence the almost irreconcilable combination: an instinctive abstemiousness and an Epicurean relish.
Whenever Louise, after some brilliant skirmish with the outriders of orthodoxy, came galloping into camp with the news that a direct route lay open to the citadel of personal freedom and personal morality, Keble found himself throwing up his cap in a sympathetic glee, but then he fell to wondering whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the discomfort to neutral bystanders.
At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of questionable value. Certainly, to Keble’s mind, the potential results, should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the incidental damage,—not where one’s wife was concerned. For him “safe and sane” meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that “safe and sane” smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the consideration of “truth,” and he saw that for him truth was something more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her direction.
Miriam caught something of the true proportions in the situation, and it was her policy to remain negative in so far as possible, pressing gently on either side of the scales, as the balance seemed to require. She had a conscientious desire to help the other two attain a comfortable modus vivendi, but as the winter progressed it became increasingly evident to her that her efforts might end by having a contrary effect. Reluctantly she saw herself saddled with the rôle of referee. Furthermore, it seemed as though the mere presence of a referee implied, even incited, combat. Their evenings often ended on a tone of dissension, Louise soaring on the wings of some new radical conclusion; Keble anxiously counseling moderation; and Miriam, by right and left sallies, endeavoring, not always with success, to bring the disputants to a level of good-humored give and take.
On two or three occasions she had been tempted to withdraw entirely, feeling that as long as a third person were present to hear, the diverging views of husband and wife would inevitably continue to be expressed. But on reflection she realized that her withdrawal could in no sense reconcile their divergences. From Louise she had derived the doctrine that views must, and will, out, and that to conceal or counterfeit them is foolish and dishonest. As Miriam saw it, these two had come to the end of the first flush of excited interest in each other. Their ship had put to sea, the flags had been furled, the sails bent. They had reached the moment when it was necessary to set a course. And they might be considered fortunate in having a fair-minded third person at hand to see them safely beyond the first reefs. It hadn’t occurred to Miriam that she might be a reef.
With Louise nothing remained on the surface; the massage that polished her manners polished her thoughts, and with increasing facility in the technique of carrying herself came an increasing desire to carry herself somewhere. As a girl she had too easily outdistanced her companions. Until Miriam Cread’s advent there had been no woman with whom to compete, and her intelligence had in consequence slumbered. Keble had transformed her from a girl into a woman; but Miriam made her realize the wide range of possibilities comprised under Womanhood, and had put her on her mettle to define her own particular character as a woman. Now her personality was fully awake, and her daily routine was characterized by an insatiable mental activity, during which she proceeded to a footing on many subjects about which she had never given herself the trouble to think. She had read more books than most girls, and had dined on weighty volumes in her father’s library for the sake of their sweets; but under the pressure of her new intellectual intensity she found that, without knowing it, she had been nourished on their soups and roasts. The unrelated impressions that she had long been capturing from books and thrusting carelessly upon mental shelves now formed a fairly respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.
But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself, became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father, twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the English boy from Hillside.
If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was to be coaxed and driven gently, to a point not far off. It was too personal to be explained; and if he couldn’t see it, then she must do what she could on her own initiative, at her expense and his.
The dreamy girl faded out of her eyes, and a self-contained, positive young woman rose from her seat with an easy directness, crossed the room to switch on the lights, and said, “Keble, I’ve just decided how I shall dispose of my Christmas present.” For the benefit of the Browns she explained, “I had a colossal cheque in my stocking from a father-in-law who doesn’t know what a spendthrift I am.”
“What will you do with it?” asked her husband.
“Something very nice. You’re sure to object.”
“Is that what makes it nice: my objecting?”
“That makes it more exciting.”
“Then let me object hard, dear.”
Louise withstood the laughter that greeted Keble’s score. “Do it immediately,” she advised, “and have it over with; then I’ll say what it is.”
“Why not spare us a scene?” suggested Miriam. “We know what a brute he is.”
“You’re concerned in it,” Louise replied. “I hope you won’t object, for that would be fatal.”
This gave Keble his opportunity for revenge against Miriam’s “brute.” “Mayn’t we take Miriam’s compliance for granted? We know what a diplomat she is.”
Louise was now seated on the opposite side of the table, facing them. “Do you object, Papa?”
“On principle, yes, because it’s sure to be something rash. As a matter of fact, no, because you’re the only sensible rash person there is.”
Louise was delighted. “It’s Papa’s stubborn belief in my common sense, more than anything else, that gives me the courage of my enlightened rashness,” she proclaimed.
At this Keble turned with a smile to Miriam. “Now I see what you meant by brute. It’s because I won’t always acknowledge the enlightenment of rashness.”
Miriam colored a little, to her great annoyance. “Really, you mustn’t seek meanings in my random words.”
“Oh, then it wasn’t meant literally?”
“There aren’t any literal brutes left; only figurative ones. Must I do penance for a levity I admit to have been uncalled for?”
“I’ll let you off,—with the warning that I shall watch your remarks more closely in future.”
“Then I can only defend myself by becoming the objectionable thing you called me!”
“Diplomat! Is that objectionable?”
“Rather. It implies the existence of things to be connived at. Once you’ve admitted diplomat you’ve admitted stakes, and rivalry.”
Mrs. Brown was on what she called tender hooks. Her husband was waggishly of the opinion that the cheque would end by being spent on wagon loads of sugar for Sundown, that pampered circus beast.
“Has everybody finished objecting?”
Everybody had.
“Well, then, Miriam and I are going on a jaunt,—to New York and then South where it’s warm.”
“It’s a sort of holiday from me, I gather?” said Keble when the others had done exclaiming.
Miriam’s eyes turned in warning towards the speaker, whose lips broke into a smile, in relish of the “brute” which, diplomatically, was merely flashed across the room. This little passage arrested Louise, who had been for the twentieth time reminded, by Keble’s detachment, of the inexplicable poem.
“Or yours from me,” she replied. “What’s sauce for the gander—”
Keble judged the moment opportune for bringing forth his best Port, and while the three men took a new lease of life, the women chatted excitedly about resorts and itineraries.
Louise’s announcement had been especially welcome to Miriam. It promised an escape from umpiring,—from neutral-mindedness. Her cheeks burned a little.
The doctor was drifting back, along with Keble’s superintendent, into the rigorous pioneer days of the Valley, the days before the branch line had been built into Witney, contrasting the primitive arrangements of that era with the recent encroachments of civilization. The logical development in the talk would be some reference to Keble’s ambitious designs, which the spring would see well under way. Miriam glanced up to see how he would receive the cue, which usually roused him to enthusiasm. He allowed it to pass, and she was intrigued to see on his face a look of boyish, wistful abstraction, and loneliness.
He felt her eyes on him, and turned as she looked away. She knew he disliked to be surprised in a self-revelatory mood, and she had time to notice his features assume their usual impersonal cast. That she regretted; the wistfulness had been ingenuous and touching. At times she felt that he deliberately submerged his most likable traits. That was a great pity, because it gave Louise new incentives to go off on her independent courses. Miriam felt that his self-consciousness had begun by hurting Louise, driving her to protect herself against a coldness she couldn’t understand. The unfortunate result was that Louise had rather more than protected herself: had gradually attained a self-sufficiency that took Keble’s coldness for granted, even inducing it. That was a moral advantage which Miriam’s femininity resented, though nothing could have drawn the admission from her.
She was glad when Louise, by a new manoeuvre in the talk, gave her an excuse to go into the next room. For there were times when nothing sheathed the sharp edges of life so satisfactorily as a half hour at the piano.