CHAPTER III
THREE days later Louise stood on the terrace watching the departure of her guests. As the last car disappeared into the pines she thought of the day when Walter and his mother drove away from the cottage which she had named “Sans Souci.” On that day she had tensely waited for some sympathetic sign from Keble, and he had withheld it. Now she knew that the balance was changed, that Keble was waiting for a sign from her. Yet all she could say was, “Thank God, that’s over!”
Recently she had had no time to project her thoughts into the future. Until this family reunion was safely thrust into the past she had schooled herself to be patient, as she had done under the constraint of approaching motherhood. Both events she had regarded as primary clauses in her matrimonial pact, and the reward she had promised herself for executing them was complete moral freedom. She would admit nothing more binding in the pact, for she had made a point of benefiting as little as possible from it. If Keble had provided her with a home, she had managed it skilfully for him. If he had placed his bank account at her disposal, she had gone disproportionately deep into her own. An element unforeseen in the pact was that either party to it might, in the process of carrying out its clauses, develop personal resources for which the other could have little use but which, on sheer grounds of human economy, ought not to be allowed to remain unmined.
Keble had warned her that grappling with ideas might end in one of the ideas knocking her on the head. Which was nonsense. The danger lay not in grappling with ideas but in trying to dodge them, in letting them lurk in your neighborhood ready to take you unawares. If you went at them with all your might they were soon overpowered.
Yet going at them brought you face to face with other ideas lurking farther along the path, and before you knew it you were in a field where no one,—at times not even Dare—was able or cared to follow. And at the prospect of forging on alone your imagination staggered a little; an unwelcome emotion,—unwelcome because more fundamental than you had been willing to admit,—surged up and insisted that nothing in life was worth striving for that carried you out of the warmth of the old community of affection. For, whatever might be achieved through adventuring in wider fields, a catering to new minds would be entailed, an occasional leaning upon new arms, homage from new eyes and hearts. That was inevitable, since human beings were of necessity social. And the overwhelming pity of it was that you would always be conscious that the neatest mind in the world, though not the broadest, the most comfortable arms, though not the most expert, the most candid blue eyes, though not the most compelling, were those of the man from whom your adventurousness had drawn you away. The thought of entirely outgrowing them gave you a chill. When you had penetrated further into the forest of life’s possibilities you couldn’t go on indefinitely playing hide and seek among the trees with that old companion. He would stop at the edge of the forest, and you must make your way through it, alone.
As Louise sat on the terrace, a little weary after the continuous tension, recalling the appealing droop of Keble’s lips as he had turned away from her a few minutes before, she was obliged to face the fact that some chord within her had responded to the appeal, despite her stern censorship. She was obliged to admit that even when her path became definitely distinct from Keble’s, when she should finally throw all the weight of her personality into a passion worthy of her emotional possibilities, or that failing, into some project so vital that she would become oblivious to the trifles that filled so much of Keble’s and Miriam’s attention, she would not be able to extinguish the fragrance of the flower of sentiment that Keble had been the first to coax into blossom. Her feeling toward any new friend who might tread her path would exhale the odor of the phial of affection labelled “Keble”, though that phial lay on a neglected shelf.
Even in the recklessness that had overtaken her beside Billy’s grave, there had been some purring obligato, a running commentary to the effect that her wanton experiment was in Keble’s name, that all the thrills in the universe were reducible to the quieter terms of mere charm, that all the charming things in life were reducible to “Keble”, and it was inherent in the nature of charm that it could not be captured and possessed, except in symbols, or by proxy. One could be so profoundly loyal to one’s personal conception of life,—a conception which exacted unflinching courage at the approach of new ideas and high venturesomeness in tracking down concealed ideas,—that one could accept clues from a stranger even though the accepting might involve a breach of what the world called constancy. Incidentally, the fact that her first breach, whatever it may have meant to Dare, was an erotic fiasco as far as she was concerned, had by no means discountenanced further experimentation. Life should pay her what it owed her, even if she had to pay heavy costs in collecting her due.
On making the shocking discovery that marriage was no solution of her destiny, she had vigorously bestirred herself, only to make the even more shocking discovery that she was shedding her husband as a caterpillar sheds its cocoon. Now, poised for flight, she could cherish a tender sentiment for the cocoon but could scarcely fold her wings and crawl back into it.
She recalled the cruel little poem, still unaccounted for, which had thrown open a door in her mind.
For, being true to you,
Who are but one part of an infinite me,
Should I not slight the rest?
Those lines had come at her with a reproachful directness. In them, or rather in the blue pencil which marked off the poem on its printed page, she had read Keble’s impatience with her limitations. Her reason had seen in the lines a justification against which her heart rebelled. From that moment she had been disciplining her heart. So effectively indeed, that now,—were it not for that appealing little droop and for the sentimental fragrance which still clung to her,—she might have flung the poem at him and cried, “Voilà la monnaie de ta pièce. I’ve learned my lesson in bitter thoroughness. Now it is I who point to ‘rude necessary heights’ intent upon a goal you are unable to see.”
The nature of the goal was not clear even to herself, nor could she exactly define the help that Dare had given her in mounting towards it. Certainly the upward journey had been easier since he had first appeared, and certainly her climbing prowess had seemed more notable in moments when she and Dare on some high ledge of thought had laughingly looked down at Keble and Miriam exchanging mystified glances, in which admiration for the agility of the two on the ledge was blended with misgivings as to the risks they ran.
Although she was lured upward by the hope of wider views, there were times when she scrambled and leaped for the mere joy of climbing. There were other times when she was intoxicated by a sense of the vastness of causes to be advocated and the usefulness of deeds to be done. She had visions of jumping up on platforms and haranguing masses of people till they, too, were drunk with the wine of their own potentialities. She had only the sketchiest notion of what she or they were to accomplish. The nearest she came to a definite program was the vision of a new self-conscious world blossoming forth into unheard-of activity, giving birth to new institutions and burying the old. Any cause would be hers provided it were intelligent, energetic, and comprehensive. In the joy of being awake she needed to rouse the world from its lethargy, make it cast away its crutches. In her consciousness of rich personal resources she needed to make everybody else dig up the treasures latent within themselves. Most of all, she desired that the world should “get on”, that its denizens should abandon their moral motorcars and leap into moral aeroplanes until something still more progressive could be devised.
Despite the vagueness of her goal there was no lack of impetus in her pursuit of it, and every day, on a blind instinct which she had learned to revere, she did deeds in point, deeds which, when done, proved to be landmarks, in a perfect row, on her route towards the unknown destination. This encouraged her to believe that the future would help her by showing a tendency to create itself.
The visit of Keble’s family had proved a negative hint as to the nature of her goal, for clearly her direction was not to be one that led into a bog of kind, complacent social superiorishness. Whatever errors she might make she would not end by being gently futile, like her mother-in-law; she would not turn into a wet blanket like Girlie, nor a noisy, nosy Christmas-cracker like Mrs. Windrom. Alice Eveley had been the most satisfactory woman of the four, yet Louise particularly hoped she would not land in Alice’s bog; for Alice, while intelligent, had turned none of her intelligence to account; while bright, she shed only a reflected light; while frank, she could politely dissemble when downrightness would have been more humane; and while sympathetic, she held to conventions which had it in them to insist upon mercilessness. Alice was, one could sincerely admit, a jolly good sort, but only because she had not opposed favoring circumstances of birth, wealth, and privilege. Girlie was a less jolly good sort because she had avoided even the gentle propelling force of favoring circumstances and loitered in back eddies,—she had been “dragged” to Italy, for instance, and had brought back no definite impression save that of a campanile which had made recollection easy for her by leaning! Alice at least floated down the middle of the stream. But neither had struck out for herself, and Louise’s complete approval was reserved for people who swam. In that respect the men of the party had had more to commend them.
But even the men moved in a hopelessly restricted current. One could point out so many useful directions in which they wouldn’t dream of venturing. That was where Dare had shown to advantage. Even though Dare had kept his tongue in his cheek, his real superiority had been manifest to Louise. Compared to Mr. Windrom, a renowned old Tory, Dare was a comet shooting past a fixed star. Mr. Windrom had undoubtedly swum, but only in the direction of the political current in which his fathers had immersed him. Dare, like herself, had swum against the current. Like herself and her father and Aunt Denise and misguided Uncle Mornay-Mareuil, Dare had emerged from obscurity and poverty. She and Dare had swum to such good purpose that they had attained the smoothly running stream that bore on its bosom the most highly privileged members of civilization. And while momentarily resting, they had caught each other’s eyes long enough to exchange, with a sort of astonished grunt, “Is this all!” Was it to be expected that they should stop swimming just because every one else was contented with civilization’s meandering flow? To have done so would have been to degrade the valor that had gone into their efforts thus far.
Yet the mere fact that they had reciprocated a glance of intelligence had been pounced upon by one of the privileged members as evidence of treasonous dissatisfaction with the meandering current, and Mrs. Windrom’s last words to her, pronounced in a voice which every one was meant to hear, were, “Do say good-bye to Mr. Dare for me. I’m sorry he’s not well; but I know what a devoted nurse you will be.”
Of course Alice and Lady Eveley and Miriam and all the others might have good enough memories to associate Mrs. Windrom’s remark with Walter’s accident, but the chances were that they would not, and that left in their minds an equivocal association between her devotion as nurse and the particular case of Dare’s indisposition. Louise was aware that Mrs. Windrom meant her remark to convey this hint, and while she didn’t care a tinker’s dam for Mrs. Windrom’s approval, she did object to underhandedness.
Walter had swum, and although he might not have the prowess of herself and Dare, still he had shown enough independence of the complacent stream to qualify in the class which included Dare, herself, and,—by a narrow margin,—Keble and Miriam. For Miriam had not merely floated. If she had not made as good progress as Walter or Keble, she was none the less to be commended for the distances she had covered, for Miriam was handicapped in having no family or money to lean back on in moments of fatigue and discouragement.
Alice had lost some of her standing with Louise by saying to Miriam before departing, “I hope we shall see something of each other in the future, Miss Cread. I take it that you will be returning east this autumn.”
It was natural enough for Alice to “take it” that Miriam would be returning. But, in the light of that trifling episode during the dance, Louise felt that Alice’s express assumption of Miriam’s departure was almost a hint; and having learned to read Miriam’s countenance, she was almost sure that Miriam had felt the remark to be, if not a hint, at least a warning. And that Louise resented; for the fact that Alice had not been born athletic enough to strike out for herself gave her no right to curb the athleticism of others. And if it was a warning, and if Alice justified it to herself on the score of sisterly protection, then how did Alice justify her many sisterly neglects? Louise felt that if she had been in Alice’s place when Keble, sick of the war, had first struck out into the wilds, no power on earth could have prevented her from following at his heels to fry bacon over his camp fires. If she had had a brother she would have guarded and bullied and slaved for him with the single object of making him what Minnie Hopper as a little girl would have called “the champeen king of the circus.”
Whether Miriam’s continued sojourn was in the best interests of all concerned was another matter. Obviously Miriam, despite her protests, desired to stay. But that was none of Alice Eveley’s business. It was a matter for Miriam alone to decide, and she should not be hampered in her decision. In a sense it was Keble’s business too. Certainly not his wife’s, though long before Keble’s sister had appeared on the scene, Louise had sometimes arrested herself, as Alice had done, and chosen a different course in order not to break in on some apparent community of interest between her husband and Miriam Cread.
A perambulator appeared at the corner of the terrace, propelled by a stolid nursemaid. The monkey, rosy and fat, was making lunges at a white hillock in his coverings which he would have been surprised to know was his own foot. On seeing his mother he abandoned the hillock to give her a perky inspection. His bonnet had slid down over one eye, and the tip of his tongue protruded at the opposite corner of his mouth.
Louise broke into a laugh. “Katie! Make that child put in his tongue or else straighten his hat. He looks such an awful rake with both askew.”
Katie missed the fine point of the monkey’s resemblance to a garden implement, but, as Dare had recognized, Katie was as immortal in her ignorance as philosophers are in their erudition. She straightened the monkey’s headgear, this adjustment being less fraught with complications than an attempt to reinstate his tongue.
“His granpa and gramma come into the nursery before breakfast,” Katie proudly announced. “They said it was to give me a present, which they done,—but it was really to see the monkey again.”
Louise had risen and gone over to shake the white hillock, an operation which revived the monkey’s interest in that phenomenon.
“Any one would think he was their baby!” she said sharply.