The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

"Of course, dear." Jimmie answered dutifully. He had not the remotest idea of what she had said.

After an interval of alternate cutting and hurried, excited writing, during which the room might have been moved out into the rain for all Jimmie would have known or cared, so long as he was not forcibly disturbed, it was slowly forced upon his attention that something was going on in the room. He was aware while he worked that Augusta had seated herself at the machine and was clicking away fitfully at it.

That fact in itself would not have been sufficient to draw his attention. He might well have supposed that she was merely practicing, to fill in a dull and rainy afternoon. But there was something dynamic in the air about Augusta. She clicked nervously and tentatively at intervals, and then hammered on viciously and desperately, as though she feared that the thought would escape her before she had time to nail it down in words.

Jimmie's jaw dropped and he sat staring at her in stupid amazement. He could see the delicate lines of her figure drawn tense and sharp like the body of some very beautiful animal straining before a leap. He could see that her whole mind and heart were being thrown into the words that she was driving down upon the paper, and it was not merely his loyalty, his faith in everything that Augusta did, which told him that what she was doing was fine. He knew that she was creating something worthy, by the very power that he saw straining in her effort. She was putting will and soul and a wonderful, untrammelled native intelligence into it, and it could be nothing less than good.

He waited excitedly for the end of the page, to see what she would do. Augusta was orderly above all other things. Jimmie was making hasty bets with himself as to whether her little god of order would prevail and make her take the paper out carefully and look at it before starting another, as a sane person would do, or would she throw it down and race on with another without looking at what she had done. If she did the latter, then the fever had indeed taken her and she was lost.

He gave a mental whoop of sympathy as Augusta, coming with a bang to the end of the sheet, fairly tore it from the machine and threw it down without looking to see whether it fell on the table or the floor. With the same motion of her swift hands she had swept down upon another sheet of paper and without even waiting to straighten it had jammed it into the machine and was banging away for dear life upon the over-lapping sentence.

"Another good cook and honest citizen lost!" Jimmie groaned to himself. "Once that fever has bitten her she won't care which side the fish is burned on." Nevertheless, with the eagerness and adroitness of a thieving cat, he stole across the floor and picked up the paper from where it had fallen, without disturbing Augusta.

He read the page that Augusta had written, without comment of any kind. Then with a sort of stupid solemnity he gathered up the pages at which he himself had been scribbling and examined them gravely, as though his reading of Augusta's page had put them in an entirely new light. He laid down his own work on his knees and beside it he laid the page that Augusta had written, and read wonderingly from one and from the other.

In his own work he had gone back to the point where he had left the story months ago. He had not used a single one of the ideas which he had so laboriously dictated to Augusta, but had struck into an entirely new turn. Augusta could not have known what he was doing or thinking today. Yet she had taken his idea just where he had left it and she was carrying it through the very drift which he had just today thought of.

He reached into an inner pocket for a fountain pen and examined it carefully. Then he cleared his pad and began to write slowly and precisely. He was not now inventing. He was a critic, a just judge, a man having authority; in short, an editor. He took impartially, with cold and fearless discrimination, from Augusta's paper and from his own. And it was an astonishing fact that he was hardly obliged to add even connectives. A paragraph of hers fitted in after one of his so neatly that there was not a seam of divergence between. And there were even sentences which he could begin in Augusta's words, and end with his own. He was not now excited. He was working with the cool and certain precision of the trained man who has his tools right and is finding perfect materials ready to his hand.