3
In the third week of December Keble returned to Hillside after his first session in the Provincial Assembly. He had been loth to leave his wife at the ranch, but she had been too weak to accompany him and was still somewhat less energetic than she had formerly been. Keble found her on a divan in her own sitting room, with the monkey propped up beside her.
“It’s just as you said it would be,” he remarked. “Having to waste precious weeks in that dull hole makes the ranch so unbelievably wonderful a place to come back to!”
When the first questions had been answered, Louise held up a prettily bound little volume from which she had been reading. “Look! A Christmas present already,—from Walter Windrom. A collection of his own verse.”
Keble admired it, then Louise, in a tone which she succeeded in making casual, said, indicating one of the pages, “That’s a strange sort of poem, the one called ‘Constancy’. Whatever made Walter write a thing like that?”
Keble read the poem. “I’ve seen it before. It’s quite an old one. Girlie clipped it from some review or other and sent it to me.”
“What does it mean?” Louise insisted.
“How should I know?” he laughed. “Girlie had a theory about it. Walter was smitten with an American actress for a while,—what was her name? Myra something: Myra Pelter. She treated him rather shabbily. Took his present, then threw him down for somebody else, I believe, after they’d been rather thicker, as a matter of fact, than Girlie quite knew. Walter is romantic, you know, for all his careful cynicism; he’s always singing the praises of bad lots, and that makes Girlie wild, naturally. Girlie said the poem was Walter’s attempt to justify this Myra person’s uppish treatment of him, an attempt to make her out a lady with duties to art,—all that sort of blether. It’s Girlie’s prosaic imagination: she can never read a book or a poem without trying to fit it, word for word, into the author’s private life. I had quite forgotten its existence.”
It was difficult for Louise to conceal her relief after years of pent-up unhappiness caused by her over-subjective interpretation of the poem’s mission. “How could a man as clever as Walter ever take Myra Pelter and her art seriously. Miriam and I went to see her once. She’s only a Japanese doll!”
“Dolls are an important institution. They have turned wiser heads than Walter’s.”
Louise looked again at the historical lines. “I hate it,” she mildly remarked.
“Tell Walter so—not me!”
“Oh no,” she sighed. “The poor little lines meant well enough.”
While her remark did not make sense to him, it seemed an echo of something he had once said to himself; it brought a dim recollection of pain.
“But I would tell him at a pinch,” she continued. “I’m no doll that says only the ugly things for which you press a button in its back!”
“Ungainly sentence, that!”
He remembered now. It was the ghostly little gramaphone record, that had brought him a message about Dare.
“It’s an ungainly subject,” she retorted, absent-mindedly.
“Change it then. There’s always the monkey.”
“Yes, there’s him. Aren’t you glad?”
“Rather! . . . I don’t suppose anything could be done about his legs. They’re as curved as hoops. If he ever tries to make a goal he’ll have to stand facing the side-lines and kick sideways like a crab.”
Louise buried her nose in the monkey’s fragrant dress and shook him into laughter. She was languidly wondering where her own goal was, whether it was still ahead or whether, as Walter had so discouragingly predicted, she would find it at her starting post. She was happy; but she suspected that she was happy only for the moment. The complacence with which Keble had accepted their revival of interest in each other was already stirring a little singing restlessness of nerves within her. He so had the air of having won the race. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he always would. But she was none the less hare-like, for all that! She looked into the monkey’s eyes. “Tell your daddy,” she said, “the important thing is to make the goal,—whether you do it sideways or frontways or whatever old ways!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.