CHAPTER I
IT was the second anniversary of the death of Billy Salter. A summer breeze played over the hillock which was surmounted by two small tombstones. The branches of the trees which had sheltered the grave-diggers from hail on the day of the funeral were now tossing in a frantic effort to extend their shade to the rows of asters with which Katie and Louise had bounded the two graves.
“Seems less lonesome for Billy, don’t it, Mrs. Eveley, when Rosie has a flower bed too,” Katie had commented. Rosie Dixon had died before Billy was born, but her span of life had been as limited as his own, which had the effect of making them seem contemporaries.
As Katie had expressed it, “If both were living to-day Rosie would be twenty-nine and Billy fourteen, just going into long pants; but really they’re only the same age—both twelve, poor babies!”
Louise recalled the remark this August afternoon as she and Trenholme Dare tied their horses to neighboring trees and ascended towards the deserted graves. “I couldn’t help feeling that Katie had stumbled on an interesting idea,” she said.
“She had,” Dare agreed. “If Katie was a savant she might have developed it into an epoch-making theory of time.”
“How far ahead would that have got her?”
“Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely, concrete observations like Katie’s. Conversely the beauty of Katie’s homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton’s apple and adventures of other scientific saints. It’s like art: the glory of music is that it is made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that they can all get to a musical heaven.”
Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and unglazed,—an ocean’s ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.
The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown’s mane came to sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding boots.
“By all that,” she said, “you imply that philosophizing doesn’t get one anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting ahead like a comet.”
“Philosophy isn’t the propeller, it’s the log that records the progress and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent applied mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it doesn’t make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn’t make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God’s evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of still further combinations of remnants . . . The folly of regarding Socrates as sublime and me as ridiculous is that we are one and the same entity, just as those asters are merely a continuation of the first aster seed, which was merely the continuation of a continuation.”
Louise recalled the discussion she had had with her father on the day of Billy’s funeral, when they had agreed to grant cats equal rights with Billy in the matter of immortality. “Would you go so far as to say that Socrates and Sundown were parts of the same entity?” she inquired.
“Even further. I should include the fly that his tail can’t quite reach, the worms under his feet, and the leaves over his head. It’s all in the ocean . . . Stones and mud aren’t as self-assertive as radium, but who is to say that they have no phosphorescent potentialities? If you eat a speck of mud on your celery, doesn’t it, or something chemical in it, become a part of you and take a more distinguished place in the realm of things vital?”
“Then how to account for the fact that we can talk, Sundown can only neigh, and stones can’t even sigh,—even if they are full of sermons.”
“By the fact that stones are figuratively phosphorescent in an extremely negligible degree, that Sundown is phosphorescent in an infinitely greater degree, and that you and I are so surcharged with phosphorescence that we simply burst into hissing flames of intelligence. Or, if you prefer, we’re not so tightly packed as stones; our atoms are more free to roam and collide and become interesting. Human intelligence, with all its concomitants of reasoning and speech, is a sort of transformation which is analogous to the remarkable things that happen in a laboratory when certain combinations are subjected to intense pressures and temperatures. Degrees of vitality are like the gradations of electrical force: sluggish magnetic fields, live wires, dynamos, power stations. Everything has some vital status, just as everything has some electrical status.”
“But you make everything seem so impersonal and arbitrary. Don’t you believe that human beings can voluntarily increase or decrease their voltage and usefulness? If I determine to live up to my best instincts, can’t I do so on my own initiative, without having been anticipated by Fate?”
“I think of it the other way round. Your strongest instincts, good or bad, will live up to you. They will determine your acts. The decision to live up to them begs the question, for it is they that prompted the decision, making up your so-called mind for you. You only said the words of your excellent decision after the excellent decision had surged and pulsated and battled and muscled its way through your system to the tip of your tongue. Taking a decision is like taking a train: in reality the train takes you.”
“According to that theory there’s nothing to stop the whole world from going to pot, morally speaking. What if bad instincts obtain a majority in the house?”
“Ah, but thanks be to God they won’t! Nature hasn’t gone to pot physically, for all the efforts of plague and dyspepsia. She won’t go to pot morally, either, though we may always need prisons, or their future equivalents. Nature is, in the long run, economical; she balances her books; and morality, like health, is merely a question of thrift.”
“And religion? What is it?”
“Oh,—for a slouchy metaphor, call it the sparks struck off by moral friction.”
“That’s deep water.”
“Moral: accept the concrete and don’t try to formulate the abstract. Katie would never have expected an apple to fall into the sky just because she had never heard of Isaac Newton. And when she feels that Rosie Dixon and Billy, despite arguments to the contrary, are the same age, she has got just as far as the hypothetical metaphysician who would turn her experience into a revolutionary theory of objective and subjective time,—except that Katie won’t get a Nobel prize. If she lives to be three score and ten, snug in her three dimensions, and never hears time defined as qualitative multiplicity, she will fulfil a sublime destiny; she will with unerring instinct and awe-inspiring virtuosity obey complex laws which are none the less urgent for being unformulated in her narrow skull. And when she dies, her soul, like John Brown’s, will, though in fearfully divisible, microscopic, and unrecognizable particles, go ‘marching on’.”
“Thank goodness Katie is miles down the road by this time where she can’t hear what a hash she is going to be!”
“Yes, that after all marks the difference between people like Katie who are close to the earth, and those who do get up in a metaphysical balloon. Katie comforts herself with promises of a red plush heaven full of harps, where she at the age of seventy-three will repair in a white robe to rejoin her Billy, still twelve; whereas the savants who see the world as an ant-heap are not appalled at the thought of personal obliteration, I for one think it’s rather a lark to be a sort of caricature on a school blackboard for three score and ten years then turn into a thin cloud of chalk dust when higher forces rub you off; it’s fun to speculate on the future of the particles of chalk in the cloud.”
Louise confessed that she could not gloat over the prospect, but let it be understood that, for the sake of feeling herself floating in the air amongst a distinguished metaphysical crew, including Dare, she cheerfully accepted the principle. Then something made her lean forward and gaze towards a distant bend in the road.
“Look! That’s them!”
“What’s who?” Dare asked, and added, “grammar be blowed!”
Three touring cars, an unprecedented sight, were winding their way up from the direction of the Valley.
“Keble’s telegram said this evening,” Louise explained, with a blank look at her companion, followed by a glance at her wrist watch. “And it’s not three o’clock yet. Thank heaven Miriam is at home to give them tea.”
“Them” referred to the English travelers, whose visit had been postponed in order that it might be embraced in a western tour which Lord Eveley and his assistants in the Colonial Office were scheduled to make on Imperial business. Keble had left the ranch a few days before to meet them in Calgary and guide them hither. All through the spring and summer he had been bringing his building work to completion, and Dare had been on hand several weeks now, partly in the rôle of contractor, partly in the rôle of friend. He had remained for the celebrations before proceeding to Japan, where he was to make notes and sketches for a commission in California.
“What a pity you won’t be on hand to receive them,” Dare sympathized.
Louise flicked her switch rebelliously. “If they say evening, they can’t expect me to know they mean afternoon. There’s no reconciling that discrepancy whether you call time qualitative multiplicity or plain duration. And they’ll just have to wait.” She smiled maliciously. “I hope they’ll look blank at each other and say, ‘Just as I thought’.”
“Why? So you can fool them all by being excessively correct?”
She was delighted. “How did you guess?”
“The clue to you is always the same. You’re a born actress.”
To herself she was thinking. “Even the most enlightened men fail to understand that some women are capable of being the quintessence of themselves when they’re most outrageously play-acting.” And she was not at all sorry that Dare should fall into one of the traps laid for his sex,—there were so many he didn’t fall into!
“I adore acting. And love being caught at it. And always go on till I am.” This suggested a new thought to her. “That’s why Keble and I are so often a hundred miles apart. I’m acting, and he doesn’t know whether I’m acting myself or some other character, and that irritates me and I act all the harder, and it turns into farce or tragedy, and he still fails to catch me, and I’m too far gone in my rôle to stop, but yearn to be caught——”
“And spanked?”
“You and Miriam spank me sometimes. Then Keble sees, and laughs. But so distressingly late.”
“Hadn’t we better be starting?”
The procession had passed the Dixon ranch and was vanishing towards Hillside.
“In a minute,” she replied, without stirring. “We don’t have to have seen them, you know.” Then with an abrupt change of mood she surprised him by saying, “I dread it, Dare. It’s worse than going up for examinations.”
“You’ll probably find them delightful.”
“You’re not their wild and woolly daughter-in-law.”
He shifted his position on the grass and sat facing her, with curious, intent eyes. There was something subduing in his regard, as in his strength and grace. “I wonder what I am, really. I wish I knew,—my degree of being accepted as your friend, I mean.”
She was pleasantly conscious of the urgent need to evade the intentness of his eyes, but temporized by mocking. “Don’t try to formulate the abstract. Those are your words, and if you don’t follow your own advice you’ll be in the predicament Katie would be in if she tried to go up in a balloon.”
The forthcoming meeting had unnerved her more than she cared to admit. An attack of stage-fright had made her say “in a minute” when he had suggested returning. To that was added a twinge of vertigo, as though she felt herself standing on a precipice from which force of circumstances would make her presently retreat, but which for that very reason had an indefinable lure. The eyes and hands and arms and thighs of her companion were challenging her. Meanwhile, in her subconsciousness, the talk of “in-laws” had set in motion a tune from The Mikado, and as she flicked her boots she sang a paraphrase:
“They married their son,—
They had only got one,—
To their daughter-in-law elect.”
The ruse by no means succeeded in suppressing the rebellious desire to look over the precipice. “I wonder if they did right,” she said.
Dare looked away, and she breathed more freely, hoping yet fearing that he would immediately resume his disturbing, overpowering intentness. “Sometimes,” he said, “I resent it; at other times I’m thankful.”
As he was still looking away she ventured an emotional step nearer. “Do you mind explaining that cryptic remark?”
“It’s very simple. If their son hadn’t married you, I undoubtedly would have. And it would have been a gigantic blunder.”
“How do you know you would have?”
“I’m damned if we could have avoided it.”
“In other words, those strong instincts you were talking about,—good or bad,—would have taken that funeste direction,—the direction of bringing us smack up against each other for better or worse.”
“For a while it would have been heaven on earth. Then hell.”
“Why?”
He still avoided her eyes. “Because strong things must clash. Because you and I don’t permanently need each other; we’re too self-reliant.”
His unwillingness to look at her roused a demon. “I wonder if you believe that.”
“Must one always say all one believes?”
She ignored the question and he continued. “Marriage, to be successful, must be entered into by one leading person and one following person. We were each born to lead. We could never play on the same team, but as captains of opposing teams we can be profoundly chummy . . . If the other element had been allowed in, the chumminess in the crucible would have flared up into a white flame, but the contents of the crucible would have been reduced to ashes.”
“Like the Kilkenny cats,” she assented, absent-mindedly.
She was now stubbornly determined to regain possession of that dangerous glance. “Isn’t it grotesque,” she went on, “that contemptible, weak-souled people repeatedly disregard scruples that give pause to the strong?”
Dare held his breath, and his profile showed that he was pressing his teeth against his lip. They had never steered so near the reefs in all their skilfully navigated acquaintanceship. Louise pulled weakly at the grass.
Frankness had been their support up to the present, and each was privately acknowledging that they could no longer depend on it.
Silence. Louise felt that she ought to do something to divert his emotions into more familiar channels. “I wish I were a man,” she said, and the effort of uttering words made her conscious of the dryness of her throat. She also had a freakishness of breath to contend with.
Dare collected himself, sat up, with his back partly turned to her, so that his eyes looked over the plain. The breeze had gone down and the afternoon light seemed to be an intrinsic property of the objects it gilded rather than an emanation from the sun.
“What would you do if you were?” he asked.
“The incomparably splendid things you do,” she promptly replied.
“I’ve come pretty near doing some incomparably asinine things.”
“But you’ve stopped short. I would have, too, of course. Besides,” she hesitated, then decided on one final plunge of frankness, “in a world full of people who don’t do splendid things, you could almost have pleaded justification in not stopping short, I imagine,—if not actual provocation.”
She saw his fingers open, then close. For once in her life, just once, she longed to see those strangely intent eyes fixed on her, wanted them to come closer and closer until her own eyes must close, yet she sat weak, watching the back of his head, then his fingers. For the second time in her life,—the first was during Walter Windrom’s visit,—she saw deep into the psychology of infidelity: this time more specifically. Indeed with a crudeness that made her blush.
Suddenly he wheeled about. The look was there. She gave a strange little cry, raised her hands slightly from the ground, and in a flash found herself imprisoned by his arms, and mouth.
A few moments later he was on his feet, facing the valley again, his arms folded.
He walked to the trees and saddled the ponies. But as Louise made no move he returned and stood looking down at her. “There’s still time to escape,” he warned her.
She was again pulling at the grass. “There’s only one way to escape from oneself . . . And that is not to acknowledge the danger.”
“Even when mad things happen?”
“Mad things are no more disgraceful than the mad desires that precipitate them. If you admit the desires——”
“Yes, but—good God!” It ended in an explosive sigh at the futility of any reasoning faculty one might bring to bear on a problem that had its source somewhere so far beneath reason’s reach.
He sat down again, at her feet, and their eyes met in a long, steady regard.
“Do you suppose it has been—just that, really, all this time?” he finally asked.
“Not only that . . . Partly.”
He held out his hand and she placed hers in it, without hesitation. It was irrevocable. During the remainder of the afternoon time and scruples were burnt up in the white flame.