Hare and Tortoise

by Pierre Coalfleet

3

When they dismounted and walked towards the house the sun was already far enough below the mountains to give Hardscrapple the appearance of a dark cardboard silhouette against the rose and green of the sky. Around their feet grew patches of scarlet flowers with flannel petals and brittle stocks. The lake below, seen through a clump of black pines, was grey and glazed. The Hillside crane, on his evening grub-call, flew over their heads towards his favorite island. As they watched his landing Louise noticed two white crescent-shaped objects on the dark floor of the lake near the stream which came down in steps from the canyon. It was as though some giant seated on an overhanging ledge had been paring his nails.

“They’re on the water already!” she cried.

“Fishing. Quite true to type,” Dare commented. “The minute rich old men get away from home they have an uncontrollable desire to kill.”

Louise sighed at the prospect of unforeseen vagaries in her guests. “Will they be grumpy if they don’t catch anything?”

“Probably,—and reminiscent.”

“I’m glad the flowers came out so well,” Louise remarked irrelevantly, with an affectionate backward glance at the garden as they reached the terrace. “With all due respect to your genius, I like my own roses better than all this.”

“This” was indicated by a sweeping gesture which took in the Castle, the commodious outbuildings, and a pattern of roadways and clearings.

She was arrested by the sound of voices from the other terrace. A tall woman whom she immediately recognized appeared at the corner, leading a younger woman towards the parapet. With the air of a licensed guide she was pointing across the lake towards the “Sans Souci” cottages now tenanted by the Browns, and volubly describing points of interest.

“Over there, to the right of those three tall trees. Keble calls them Castor and Pollux.”

Half turning towards her companion, as though Girlie’s eyes could not be trusted to find any spot pointed out to her, Mrs. Windrom caught sight of the advancing pair.

“Ha!” she cried, and turned her daughter round by the shoulders. “There you precious two are at last!”

Louise hurried forward, with kisses. Girlie seemed as slow to bring her faculties to a correct focus on Louise as she had been in respect of the trees. She was a lithe, willowy girl with soft, colorless hair, a smile faintly reminiscent of Walter, and limp white fingers that spread across the bosom of a straight, dark-blue garment of incredible spotlessness, considering the dusty motor journey from Witney. “Being less clever than her brother,” Louise was reflecting, “she has tried to get even by taking up outdoor things, which really don’t go with her type.”

“I was so sorry that Walter couldn’t join you in the east,” she said, addressing Mrs. Windrom. “But he has promised us a long visit next year.”

Girlie was getting a clearer focus. “He did nothing but rave about the ranch after he and Mother were here,” she contributed. “Now I see why. It’s like a private Lugano.”

Louise doubted it, but linked her arm in Girlie’s. “The only way we could keep him here, however, was to give him a horse that broke his ribs. I hope you’ll have better luck.”

“Walter never could ride anything but a hobby,—poetry, or first editions. Nor play anything more energetic than croquet. As a partner at golf he’s as helpful as a lame wrist.”

“But a darling for all that,” Louise defended.

“Oh, rather!” exclaimed Girlie, with an emphasis that seemed to add, “That goes without saying,—certainly without your saying it.”

They proceeded towards wide window-doors and entered the drawing-room, where Miriam and the other two women had risen on hearing the hubbub. Louise went straight to the elder woman. “I’m Louise,” she announced. “Full of apologies.”

Her mother-in-law kissed her and presented Alice. “We arrived before we expected. Keble got a special locomotive to bring us through the pass, and couldn’t let you know because the telegraph office was closed.”

“It always is, in an emergency. And when it’s open, the wires are down. We just guess back and forth. Please don’t mind my get-up. You all look so fresh and frilly. Out here we dress like soldiers, in order to be in keeping with our slouchy telegraph service and other modern inconveniences.”

“I’m sure you look very comfortable,” said Lady Eveley with a maternal smile. She was bird-like, with an abundance of white hair and a coquettish little moiré band around her neck to conceal its ruins. When she smiled, her good will seemed to be reiterated by a series of wrinkles that extended as far as her forehead.

“Oh, I’m anything but! First of all I’m dusty, and second of all I’m parched.”

“There’ll be a fresh pot in a minute, dear,” said Miriam. “Do sit here.”

Mrs. Windrom was asking Dare to confirm her statement that the pillars were Corinthian, which he could not honestly do, and by a monstrous geographical leap their discussion wandered to a region beyond Girlie’s focus. “Mother talks architecture as glibly as Baedeker, but she’s really as ignorant about it as I am,” she assured Dare. “I’ve been dragged to Italy goodness knows how many times, but the only thing I’m sure of is the leaning tower of Pisa.”

Louise presented Dare to Lady Eveley and felt that she was being studied by Keble’s sister. She went to sit beside Alice near tea, which Miriam had resuscitated. She gave Miriam’s hand a grateful pat, then turning to her sister-in-law, expressed the hope that she had found her right room. “After living so long in a log cabin I assume that everybody will get lost in this warehouse. Keble is so methodical he refers to right wing and left wing, like a drill-sergeant. The only way I can remember which room is which is by the color of the carpet or what you can see from the windows.”

Alice was laughing, her amusement being divided between Louise’s mock-seriousness and the reckless velocity of speech which left no gaps for replies. She was a dry, alert, lean woman of nearly forty, who should never have been named Alice. She had none of Keble’s grace, but something of his openness and discernment. Alice would make as good a judge as Keble, Louise reflected, but a less merciful jury. As to dress, she gave Louise the impression of having ordered too much material, and the white dots in her foulard frock merely emphasized her angles. Her hair had once been blond like Keble’s, but was now frosted, and arranged in a fashion that reminded Louise of the magazine covers of her girlhood.

When there was a hiatus Alice assured her that they had all been safely distributed and had spent an hour running back and forth comparing quarters. “My room has a pale blue and primrose carpet, and I should think about forty miles of entirely satisfactory view! And gladioli on the table. How did you know, or did you, that gladioli are my favorite flowers,—and how did they ever get here?”

Louise accepted a cup of tea and motioned Dare to a seat nearby. Lady Eveley joined them and Miriam went out to stroll with the Windroms.

“I knew you liked them,” Louise replied, “because you once mentioned it in a letter to Keble; and they grew in the greenhouse, for whose perfections Mr. Dare is to be thanked. Don’t you think he has done us rather well?”

The two women agreed in chorus. Then Alice added, “Father couldn’t believe his eyes. He remembered the lake from a hunting trip years and years ago. But when he saw what you and Mr. Dare and Keble have made of it,—my dear, he almost wants it back!”

“My husband said you had made the house look like a natural part of the landscape, Mr. Dare,” Lady Eveley leaned towards him with her timidly maternal, confidential, richly reiterated little smile. Louise concluded that her individuality, at its most positive, was never more than an echo of some other person’s individuality, usually her husband’s.

“Most houses are so irrelevant to their surroundings,” Alice interposed. “Our place in Sussex for instance. Of course it has been there since the beginning of time, and that excuses it, but it’s fearsome to look at, and would be in any landscape. I wish Mr. Dare would wave his wand over it.”

“Alice thinks Keblestone too antiquated,” explained Lady Eveley. “But her father and I are deeply attached to it, and she and Keble were both born there. I do hope you will come and stay with us there next summer, with the baby.”

“That priceless baby!” Alice exclaimed. “He pulled the most excruciating faces for us. Then I gave him a beautiful rubber elephant and he flung it square at his nurse’s eyes,—nearly blinded the poor soul. Where did you find that nurse, Louise? She’s devotion personified.”

“He took to his grandfather at once. Sat on his knee and watched him as though he had never seen anything so curious!”

“Baby is very rude,” Louise apologized.

“Brutally candid,” Alice agreed. “If an elephant offends him he throws it at his nurse, and if a new grandfather is substituted, he solemnly stares him out of countenance.”

“We shall spoil him, my dear,” said the monkey’s little grandmother. “We’re so proud of him.”

Louise replaced her cup on the table, got up from her chair, and implanted a playful but wholehearted kiss on the old lady’s forehead. “I’m dying to see the grandfather who was too big to be flung in Katie’s eyes,” she announced. “Shall we walk down to the lakeside and meet the boats? There’s an easy path.”

She led the way, with Lady Eveley. Two or three times as they descended the winding path the older woman patted Louise’s arm and smiled, apropos of nothing, reassuringly. In the end Louise laughed and said, trying to keep her frankness within gentle bounds, “You know, I’m quite floored by your friendliness. I’ve been racking my brains to think how I could put you at your ease, and now I find that everybody’s aim is to put me at mine. I wish you were going to stay longer. Four days is nothing.”

“We should love to, my dear, but you see the men have so many speeches to make, and they must be back on a certain date. It has been very exciting. All along the way there were deputations to meet the train. The mayors came and their wives—too amusing! And brought such pretty flowers. Alice doesn’t object to the cameras at all, though she says her nose is the only thing that comes out. Alice resents her nose. She says she wouldn’t mind its size if she didn’t keep seeing it, poor dear . . . And banquets without end. I don’t see how they find so many different things to say. My husband just stands up there——”

“And the words come to him,” interposed Louise “I know.”

“Isn’t it remarkable? When I can scarcely find enough words to fill up a letter! I’m terrified when they ask me to speak at the women’s clubs. Canadian women are so intelligent. And so tireless. Mrs. Windrom is much better at that kind of thing.”

“Mrs. Windrom is very clever.”

“Oh, very! She always remembers names. I don’t, and Alice nudges my elbow. She is such a good daughter. Never forgets.”

“Alice seems very alert.”

“Oh, very!” Lady Eveley had a soft little voice and a careful way of setting down her words, as though they might break. “Very! She takes after her father. Keble does too, though Keble likes quite a lot of things I like. Perhaps the baby will take after me. Though I really don’t see why any one should!”

Louise had an affectionate smile for this gentle grievance against creation, and slipped her arm about the black satin waist. “Of course Baby will take after you, dear,” she promised. “I’ll make him if he doesn’t naturally. He takes after me when he throws elephants around, but he takes after his father when he opens his big blue eyes and grins a trustful, gummy grin. He’s going to be quite like Keble when he acquires teeth and manners. Katie says so, and she’s the authority on Baby . . . Perhaps you’ll let me take after you a little, too. But I’m an awful hoyden.”

“You’re so clever, aren’t you!” exclaimed Lady Eveley. “We knew it, of course, from Keble.”

Louise was serious. “The worst of that,” she mused, “is that clever people always have a naughty side. And I’m naughty.”

“But if we were perfect our husbands would find us dull in the long run, don’t you think?”

“There’s that, of course,” Louise agreed. How completely every one took it for granted that there would be a long run!

They had reached the new boat-slip, and were joined by Mrs. Windrom, Girlie, and Miriam. Dare and Alice followed, and the talk became topographical, Mrs. Windrom finding still more objects for Girlie to look at. Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom was even explaining the landmarks to her.

Girlie’s attention, however, kept straying to the boats, which were hugging the shaded shores and advancing at a leisurely rate. In the first boat was an object on which Girlie’s eyes could always focus themselves with an effortless nicety. This object was her fiancé, Ernest Tulk-Leamington, an oldish young man, who was Lord Eveley’s secretary and a rising member of the Conservative Party. The first to step out of the boat, he was followed by Mr. Windrom and a freckled, orange-haired youth who proved to be Mr. Cutty.

“Any fish?” cried Mrs. Windrom. Her husband showed signs of becoming prolix, while Mr. Cutty, behind his back, stole his thunder by surreptitiously holding up a forked stick on which two apologetic trout were suspended.

When the necessary ceremonies were effected, Mr. Windrom declared that you could never be sure, in untried waters, what flies the fish would rise to. He went on the principle of using a Royal Coach when in doubt, but he had tried Royal Coach for an hour without getting a strike, and had ended by putting out a spinner, by means of which he had caught——

He turned. “Those two.” But he saw that the irreverent Mr. Cutty had already displayed the catch, and he was a little vexed at the anticlimax, as well as at the showing, which was undoubtedly poor, viewed against a dark mass of water and mountain, with a half dozen animated ladies as spectators. Dare had sought Louise’s eyes, and they smiled at the fulfilment of her fears.

The second boat was nearing the slip and Louise had a moment in which to study her father-in-law. It was a reassuring, yet a trying moment, for she became unnerved and felt suddenly isolated. For two pins she would have cried. There was no definable reason for the emotion, unless it was due to her double reaction from the graveyard episode and the friendliness of her mother-in-law. They were all strangers, even Keble. In some ways Keble was more of a stranger than Dare,—less an acquaintance of her most hidden self. Her loneliness was associated, too, in some vague way with the easy, manly intimacy of the two figures in the boat, who were links in the chain of her own existence yet so detached from it. Keble was undeniably an integral part of her identity, yet as he sat at the oars he seemed to be some attractive young traveling companion she was destined never to know.

Lord Eveley, a lean, hale figure in tweeds, a fine old edition of his son, was reeling in his line, and speaking in a voice which carried perfectly across the still water. Keble made replies between the slow strokes of his oars. The yellow had faded from the light, and with its disappearance the dark shades of the trees took on a richer tone, and the water turned from glass to velvet. The grey of the pine needles changed to deep, blackish green, the narrow strip of shallow water was emerald merging into milky blue, and the pebbles at the bottom were like ripe and green olives.

There was a lull in the chatter, and only the faint lapping noise of the oars broke the stillness. A wave of loneliness had engulfed Louise, despite the warm little arm that was still resting on hers. By some considerateness which only Keble seemed to possess, his eyes turned first of all to her. True, they immediately traveled away towards the others and his remarks were general, but the first glance had been hers and it had been accompanied by a quick smile,—a smile which seemed to condone some lapse of hers; she was too immersed in her present rôle to recall what the lapse had been. At any rate it was a most timely proof of Keble’s reliability, and it rescued her. She smiled shyly as Keble directed his father towards her.

By one of those mass instincts that sense drama, every one had turned to watch. Being in the centre of the stage, she forgot her diffidence.

“Weedgie, here is a father-in-law for you. He’s an indifferent angler, but a passable sort of pater . . . Father, this is Louise.”

“Is it really! Upon my soul!” He bestowed a paternal kiss.

“You seem so surprised!” Louise laughed. “Did you think I was a boy?”

“By Jove, you know, you might have fooled me if it had been a shade darker. But if you had, I should have been uncommonly disappointed. Keble, I take it, makes you disguise yourself in boys’ clothes to protect you from irresponsible lassos?”

“Oh dear no, he hates my breeches. Besides, I can protect myself quite extraordinarily well. The fact is, I’m at a disadvantage in these.” She was pulling sidewise at “them”. “For when you’re got up as a man you’re always giving yourself away: your hairpins fall out or you blush. Whereas in feminine attire you can beat a man at his own game without his even suspecting you’re using man-to-man tactics. That’s fun.”

“Yes. I suppose it would be,” agreed Lord Eveley. “Eve did it without much of either, they say.”

“They say such shocking things, don’t they! . . . Didn’t you catch any fish?”

“Only three. Your better half caught seven,—cheeky young blighter! One beauty.”

Mr. Windrom needed to know what they had been caught with.

“Royal Coach,” said Keble. “It’s the best all round fly.”

Mr. Windrom was incredulous and pettish. “You must have ’em trained to follow your boat.”

“Better luck next time, Mr. Windrom,” Louise ventured. “Keble shall go in your boat, then they’ll have to bite. Meanwhile please show him how to make drinkable cocktails. He needs a lesson.”

She looked at her watch, then smiled at the circle of faces. “It’s just exactly ‘evening’, so we can consider that the party has arrived. Dinner is in an hour. Nobody need change unless he wishes. I’m going to turn back into a woman for dinner, just to prove to my father-in-law what an awful failure I am as a boy. Meanwhile I’ll race anybody up the hill.”

“I’m on,” said Mr. Cutty.

“Me too,” said Dare.

“Any handicap for skirts?” inquired Alice.

“Ten yards,” Louise promptly replied. “Measure off ten yards, Keble. Anybody else?”

“Come, Girlie,” said Mrs. Windrom. “Any handicap for old age, Louise?”

“Fifteen yards for any one over thirty-five. Come on Mr. Leamington. Beat Mr. Dare. He wins everything I go in for . . . Grandfather, you be starter,—you’re to say one, two, three, go. Miriam dear, you can’t be in it, for you have to show Grandmother the easy path up. I showed her down, but one of the many delicious things she told me on the way was that she forgets things and has to have her elbow nudged.” Louise shot a bright glance at Lady Eveley.

“Keble, when you’ve marked off the fifteen, sprint on up the hill and mark a line on the gravel so we won’t go plunging on the bricks and kill ourselves . . . Oh!”

She stopped, and every one, toeing the line, looked around. Her nervous high spirits were infectious. Even Girlie was excited. Lord Eveley was holding up his hand in sporting earnest. His wife, under Miriam’s wing, beamed.

“I’m trying to think what the prizes will be. Wouldn’t be a race without prizes. Any suggestions, Mr. Cutty?”

“Might have forfeits for the first prize, and first go at the billiard table for another.”

“Bright head-work, Mr. Cutty. Prizes as follows: the winner must choose between making a speech at dinner or telling a ghost story before bedtime. The loser gets his choice between first go at the billiard table, first choice of horses to-morrow, or ordering his favorite dish for breakfast,—can’t say fairer than that. But if anybody tries to lose, God help him! . . . All set, Grandfather!”

The servants who were arranging the dinner-table thought the party had gone mad when it came reeling up the slippery grass hill in a hilarious, panting pell-mell led at first by Mrs. Windrom, who fell back in favor of Alice Eveley, who in turn was superseded by others. Towards the end Dare and Mr. Cutty, closely followed by Louise, were leading, then Dare stumbled and Mr. Cutty toppled into Keble’s arms, the winner. Louise was weak with laughter at the sight of Mr. Windrom brandishing his fishing rod and shouting instructions over his shoulder to his faltering helpmeet. Girlie, her skirts held high, was abreast of Mr. Tulk-Leamington, whose gallantry interfered with his progress. Alice was far down the line but doing as well as possible under the disadvantages of high heels and foulard folds. In the end they all reached the line but Mrs. Windrom, who had collapsed on the turf, facing a noisily breathing throng.

“I’ll have that big trout for breakfast, Louise,” she gasped. “The one Keble caught. And no one can say I didn’t try to win!”