The Moth Decides: A Novel

by Edward Alden Jewell

The locomotive was coughing and wheezing and snorting, with an air of absurd importance. All at once there was a tremendous exhaust which sent steam geysering in considerable volume to either side. They were so close that the roar brought a tightening to the girl's throat. Barry touched her arm, gently insinuating her out of the path of the steam's dominion. She felt the momentary pressure of his fingers. And through the hiss and dizzy vibration in the air it was as though he were saying to her: "You are mine, all mine! You are mine forever and ever! You can belong henceforth to no one but me!" She trembled and felt faint. Her heart was beset with goblins and ghosts....

When they had settled for the diminutive journey, Louise was more than ever glad of Mr. O'Donnell's presence. But now it was no longer so much that he might behold the brilliance of her autocracy as that she might lean upon him while striving to adjust herself to the almost alarming situation Barry's arrival had precipitated. And O'Donnell, for his own part, was not a little flattered at being so deluged with attention from a pretty woman—especially since she had a real, live lover sitting right beside her! The lover himself took everything in a perfectly philosophical manner. Naturally she didn't want to reveal her heart to the wide world, his comfortable acquiescence seemed to say. She was reserving all that for him alone. And in the meantime it was very decent and intelligent of her to be nice to his friend. As a matter of fact, Miss Needham's conduct wasn't by any means so sheer and vivid as the complex which produced it; she was not behaving nearly so strangely as she felt.

The journey back to Beulah, disproportionately lengthy if measured on the dial of one's watch, was under way. All the coaches were packed with resorters plying off in search of adventure—adventure which, in its most substantial form, could they but know it, they were to discover inside those mysterious covered baskets stowed away under seats and, sometimes rather precariously, on the metal racks overhead. For eating is, after all, the Great Adventure in Middle Western resort life. One might perhaps hesitate about putting it ahead of canoes in the moonlight, and that indispensable adjunct of every resort that ever was, the Lovers' Lane. But whereas the latter phenomena appeal to only a single age or mood of society, the adventure of filling the stomach appeals to everyone alike, old and young, mighty and humble. So far as the present excursionists were concerned, the furtive covers were soon flapping; and the air grew tropical with the persuasive aroma of bananas.

Louise sat beside her lover in the midst of these not unfamiliar scenes; and the outcome of her half agreeable, half harrowing mental complex was a slightly hysterical gaiety. So long as Mr. O'Donnell was with them, she felt secure. But why was this? Why was it she suddenly dreaded the thought of finding herself for the first time alone with Lynndal? Phantoms swarmed. In her letters she had given him every promise. Yet now he was with her again, she dared not let herself go. Phantoms of old delight; phantoms, too, projected into the scope of an imagined future.... The words she had seemed to hear while the steam brought that queer stuffiness to her throat, still echoed troublingly: "You are mine, all mine! You can belong henceforth to no one—but to me!" Her mind was all charged with a brooding unrest. Externally she sparkled and was blithe; but within lurked a vague fever of apprehension....

Things like this may conceivably be going on in almost any one's mind at almost any time; but they are never shown. We are adepts when it comes to guarding our guilty struggles.

The train was winding its way through dismal swamp country. Stark trunks of trees, stripped of verdure, with the life in them long extinct, stood knee-deep in brackish water. Though the day was quite bright, an impenetrable veil of melancholy lay over the swamplands—a gloom never lifted, which seemed the child of silence and stagnation. The sad blight of the landscape seeped into her heart. She was twisting her life this way and that, absorbed, as usual, in the mystery of her own fascinating if at present rather menaced ego.

Lynndal Barry and his companion, chatting, seemed unaware of the girl's momentary absorption; her curious, almost breathless, detachment. Although detached, she was nevertheless looking at Barry with serious, half-seeing eyes. And all at once she found herself thinking of him respectfully, even tenderly. There was something conspicuously ordered and kindly and calm about him. She seemed, abruptly, conscious of a great patience in this man who had come to her out of the West; had scarcely discovered in his letters how essentially mature he was. But the next moment this vaguely annoyed her. She seemed to miss in him the thrill of fire and passion which her nature craved. He seemed to be relaxed upon the snug hearth-rug of life—yes, in slippers! Barry was, actually, not much above thirty; but his seemed to her now a poise unwelcome. She fingered the book in her lap with nervous, groping fingers; even shuddered a little as she gazed off across the swamp.

Barry, however, seemed aware of none of the girl's emotional fluxes. Why should he be? How could he be? Barry didn't even in the least suspect that she had any such things as emotional fluxes in her make-up; nor, for that matter, was it likely he would quite know an emotional flux if he should meet it. This must not, however, be taken to signify that Barry wasn't sensitive, for he was. And he had a way, too, of biding his time, which sometimes deceived people into thinking him invulnerable to the finer antennæ of feelings. However, though his ear was not entirely deaf to the unstrummed music of life, he did not as yet suspect—or if so, not more than just glancingly—that there was to be a flaw in his eager little romance.

"Oh, yes, it will surprise her completely, of course," O'Donnell was saying.

"You haven't written at all, then?"