“Take a hold,” a husky voice had urged Anthony; “help the circus men put up the big tent, and get a free pass.” In the contagion of work he had pulled upon the hard canvas, the stiff ropes that cut like scored iron, and held stakes to be driven into the slushy sod. Thin shoulders strained against his own, gasping and maculate breaths assailed him. The flesh was tom from a man's palm; another, hit a glancing blow on the head with a mall, wandered about dazed, falling over ropes, blundering in paths of hasty brutality.
Anthony rested with aching muscles in the orient flood of the sun. The tent was erected, flags fluttered gaily aloft, the posters of the sideshow flung their startling colors abroad. A musical call floated upward from an invisible bugle: an air of gala, of triumphant and irresponsible pleasure, permeated the scene. “She's all right, isn't she?” Alfred Craik demanded at his side. He nodded silently, and turned toward home, his pulses leaping with joy at the dewy freshness of the morning, the knowledge of Eliza—a sparkling, singing optimism drawn from the unstained fountain of his youth.
XIV
LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf—at a super-union scale—for his mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade. From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the swirling stream—“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”
After the midday meal a minute review of the places where Eliza might be found discovered the Ellerton Country Club to hold the greatest possibility. Anthony was a virtual stranger to that focus of the newer Ellerton; except for the older enthusiasts who played golf every afternoon that it was humanly possible to remain outside it was the stronghold of the species Anthony had encountered in the dressing room at the Dreens' dance. The space at the back of the drugstore where he had lounged held unbroken the elder tradition of Ellerton. There he had cultivated a mild contempt for the studied urbanity, the formally organized converse and games, of the Club. But as a setting for Eliza it gained a compelling attraction. And, in his freshly-ironed flannels, he ordered his steps toward that goal. The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking—teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic.
Then he saw Eliza... she was on the tennis court, playing with a vigorous girl with a bare and stalwart forearm. He divined that the latter was winning, and conceived a sweeping distaste for her flushed, perspiring countenance and thickset ankles. “How beautiful you look!” Eliza called, as he propped himself against the wire netting that, overrun with honeysuckle, enclosed the courts. He watched her fleeting form, heard her breathless exclamations, with warm stirs of delight. When her opponent played the ball beyond her reach his dislike for that efficiency became an obsession. The flying shadows lengthened on the rolled, yellow surface of the court; the group on the porch emptied their teacups and moved away; and the final set of games won by the “beefsteak.”
Eliza slipped into a formless chocolate-colored coat: racket in hand she smiled at him. “I'm rather done,” she admitted. She hesitated, then: “I wonder—are you doing anything?—if you would drive me home?” He assured her upon that point with a celerity that wrought a momentary confusion upon them. “The Meadowbrook and roan at the sheds,” she directed. In the basketlike cart they swung easily over the road toward Hydrangea House. Checked relentlessly into a walk the roan stepped in a dainty fume.
Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes; her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal—her relaxed, drooping body filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time itself.