CHAPTER IV
AS the days were told off one by one in anticipation of the arrival of Trenholme Dare, the young architect and landscape gardener of Montreal, with his army of workmen, Louise became more conspicuously reticent, more conspicuously addicted to her books on socialism and metaphysics, her chats with the wives of luckless ranchers, her Quixotic jaunts north, south, east, and west in search of lonely school-teachers to be befriended, sick cattle to be disinfected, odd lots of provisions to be acquired from hard-up settlers. On the very day that a site was to be chosen for the foundation of her private greenhouse, she fled from Hillside and rode sixteen miles over the muddy roads of early spring for a mere ice-cream soda; yet when she had heard of the recurrence of little Annie Brown’s chronic earache, she had foregone a dance at the Valley to sit up all night and heat linseed oil, smooth pillows, and sing old French ditties.
She realized the extent of her hostility to Keble’s plans one day when a particular adverb escaped from her subconsciousness apropos of her husband’s look of boyish pleasure and surprise, a sort of diffident radiance in his face, as he glanced through a budget of documents which changed his status from that of a dependent young rancher on probation into an independent estate-holder. He seemed odiously contented, she thought, then checked herself. “Odiously” was the adverb, and in fear and wonder she rode down towards the range to reflect, to read herself a long, abundantly illustrated sermon on heartlessness, and, if possible, reduce herself to a state of remorse and penitence.
In this attempt she failed signally, and indeed went so far over into the opposite scale as to say with a passionate flick of the reins which made Sundown leap, “Then if we must, we must, that’s all, and I’ll be Nero. The sooner Rome burns the better. Vas-y donc, bonjour!”
The spring rains had set in, and water coursed down the usual channels with a volume and roar that attracted one’s attention to brooklets which in other seasons flowed by unnoticed. Water lurked in every depression, as though the earth were some vast sponge, red and brown and green. Near the river, the road was washed away. In some places rude bridges that had served the previous summer were now rendered ridiculous through a capricious change in the course of the stream. The bi-weekly mail wagon had left deep ruts now filled with water the color of cocoa. The mountains were still topped with thick white snow and reminded her of frosted cakes. There was a heavy, rich fragrance and vigor in the air. When a hare darted across the trail into the miniature forest of sage bushes, she, in spirit, darted with him, in a glee. As she cut herself a switch from a bush of willows she welcomed the drops of water that showered over her face and ran up her sleeve, as though, like some intelligent plant, she knew that the drops would make her grow. Even the mud that spattered her boots and stirrup straps she cheerfully accepted as seasonable. And she rode on at haphazard, as carelessly, yet with as much vigorous assurance as had been manifested by the hare. Like the hare she had no idea whither she was bound. Like the hare she was swiftly, gracefully making for the unknown destination. Temperamentally she was hare-like; that would make Keble a tortoise; and according to the fable he would win the race; that thought would bear investigation,—but not for the moment. For the moment she chose to intoxicate herself with the conviction that nothing in the world mattered. The ills that most people complained of,—ills like little Annie’s earaches and her own increasing estrangement from her husband,—merely lent life an additional savor, and she could conceive of acquiring a taste for chagrin, as one acquired a taste for bitters; if not a taste, then at least an insensibility. Her whole philosophy amounted to a conviction of the necessity of behaving as though the odds weren’t there.
There was only one thing that could have brought her atonement with the spring world nearer to perfection, and that would have been to have Keble riding at her side. Not the correct Keble who studied blue prints and catalogues, who read prose that sounded like poetry and poems that sounded like prose, but some idealized Keble who, with the same eyes, hair, hands, strength, honesty, and “nice back-of-his-neck,” could do what the actual Keble could not do: keep ahead of her, command her, surprise, shock, and seduce her, snatch her off her feet and whirl her through space with a momentum that prevented thought,—the Keble, in short, who failed to exist but whom she loved against hope. Love was a mystery to which she had gladly abandoned herself, but which, while appearing to receive her with open arms, had remained as inscrutable at close range as it had been from a distance. When the arms folded about her she felt imprisoned and blinded; when she drew back for perspective the arms fell, or, what was still more disheartening, methodically turned to some unallied, if useful employment, leaving her restlessly expectant and vaguely resentful. The consequence of which was that her great supply of affection, like the cascades pouring down from the hills, spread over undefined areas, capriciously turned into new channels, leaving, here and there, little bridges of a former season spanning empty river beds. That very morning at breakfast Keble had said to her, “Good morning, dear, did you sleep well?” That phrase was a useless old bridge over a flat stretch of pebbles. To Miriam he had said, “I’ve had a reply from the cement people; would you like to type some more tiresome letters to-day?” And that was a new bridge over God knew what.
She forgot that she had just been glorying in the conviction that nothing in the world mattered. Once she had said to her father that she sometimes wondered if anything were right. She blushed at a sudden humiliating guess as to what might make everything right. Humiliating because,—for all her fine theorizing,—it might be, after all, more physio- than psyhcho-logical.