CHAPTER XVII
CONCERNING MARRIAGE
And it was spring-time; these prisoners of frost were beautifully sensitive. They, too, with the lake and the aspens and the earth, the seeds and the beasts, had suffered the season of interment. In such fashion Nature makes possible the fresh undertakings of last summer’s reckless prodigals; she drives them into her mock tomb and freezes their hearts—it is a little rest of death—so that they wake like turbulent bacchantes drunk with sleep and with forgetfulness. Love, spring says, is an eternal fact, welcome its new manifestations. Remating bluebirds built their nests near Joan’s window; they were not troubled by sad recollections of last year’s nests nor the young birds that flew away. It was another life, a resurrection. If they remembered at all, they remembered only the impulses of pleasure; they had somewhere before learned how to love, how to build; the past summers had given practice to their singing little throats and to their rapid wings. No ghosts forbade happiness and no God—man-voiced—saying, because he knew the ugly human aftermaths, hard sayings of “Be ye perfect.”
What counsel was theirs for Joan and what had her human mentor taught her? He had taught her in one form or another the beauty of passion and its eternal sinlessness, for that was his sincere belief. By music he had taught her, by musical speech, by the preaching of heathen sage and the wit of modern arguers. He had given her all the moral schooling she had ever had and its golden rule was, “Be ye beautiful and generous.” Joan was both beautiful and made for giving, “free-hearted” as she might herself have said, Friday’s child as the old rhyme has it,—and to cry out to her with love, saying, “I want you, Joan,” was just, sooner or later, to see her turn and bend her head and hold out her arms. Prosper had the reward of patience; his wild leopardess was tamed to his hand and her sweetness made him tender and very merciful.
Their gay, little house stood open all day while they explored the mountains and plunged into the lake, choosing the hot hour of noon. Joan made herself mistress of the house and did her woman’s work at last of tidying and beautifying and decking corners with gorgeous branches of blossoms while Prosper worked at his desk. He was happy; the reality of Joan’s presence had laid his ghost just as the reality of his had laid hers. His work went on magically and added the glow of successful creation to the glow of satisfied desire. And his sin of deceit troubled him very little, for he had worked out that problem and had decided that Pierre, dead or alive, was unworthy of this mate.
But sometimes in her sleep Joan would start and moan feeling the touch of the white-hot iron on her shoulder. Her hatred of Pierre’s cruelty, her resolution to be done with him forever, must have vividly renewed itself in those dreams, for she would cling to Prosper like a frightened child, and wake, trembling, happy to find herself safe in his arms.
So they lived their spring. Wen Ho, the silent and inscrutable, went out of the valley for provisions, and during his absence Joan queened it in the kitchen. She was learning to laugh, to see the absurd, delightful twists of daily living, to mock Prosper’s oddities as he mocked hers. She was learning to be a comrade and she was learning better speech and more exquisite ways. It was inevitable that she should learn. Prosper, in these days, spent his whole soul upon her, fed her with music and delight, and he trained her to sing her sagas so that every day her voice gained in power and flexible sweetness. She would sing, since he told her to, her voice beating its wings against the walls of the house or ringing down the cañon in untrammeled flight. Prosper was lost in wonder of her, in a passionate admiration for his own handiwork. He was making, here in this God-forsaken solitude, a thing of marvel; what he was making surely justified the means. Joan’s laughable simplicity and directness were the same; they were part of her essence; no civilizing could confuse or disturb them; but she changed, her brain grew, it absorbed material, it attempted adventures. Nowadays Joan sometimes argued, and this filled Prosper with delight, so quaint and logical she was and so skillful.
They were reading out under the firs by the green lip of the lake, when Wen Ho led his pack-horse up the trail. He had been gone a month, for Prosper had sent him out of the valley to a distant town for his supplies. He didn’t want the little frontier place to prick up its ears. Wen Ho had ridden by a secret trail back over the range; he had not passed even the ranger station on his way. He called out, and, in the midst of a sentence Joan was reading, Prosper started up.
Joan looked at him smiling. “You’re as easily turned away from learning as a boy,” she began, and faltered when she saw his face. It was turned eagerly toward the climbing horses, toward the pack, and it was sharp and keen with detached interest, an excitement that had nothing, nothing in the world to do with her.
It was the great bundle of Prosper’s mail that first brought home to Joan the awareness of an outside world. She knew that Prosper was a traveled and widely experienced man, but she had not fancied him held to this world by human attachments. Concerning the “tall child” she had not put a question and she still believed her to have been Prosper’s wife. But when, leaving her place under the tree, she came into the house and found Prosper feverishly slitting open envelope after envelope, with a pile of papers and magazines, ankle-high, beside him on the floor, she stood aghast.