The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

It was true that even in that time she had loved him with a love which he would not have believed her capable of even guessing at. But that made no difference. Jimmie had not been free. Nothing that had since passed had altered that fact. And Augusta had cruelly whipped herself into believing, that even if Jimmie had not cared for her in any way, his quick heart and his kindness for her mother and herself would have made him do just what he had done in the circumstances. (She was able to believe this because she knew that she herself, at that time, would have married the most repulsive man in the world if it had been a necessary condition for getting her mother out of the madhouse.)

All this had lain away covered in her mind through the months of happiness and well being and hopeful, heart-filling work. But it was inevitable, as she had always known, that it would one day come forth and stalk upon her.

The outward signs that the peace of her mind and the safety of her love were being threatened were indeed very slight. Jimmie was restless. Something was troubling him, that much she knew. Once or twice she had felt that he was on the point of speaking out, but the moment had passed and had left her with the dizzy, sinking feeling of a threat suspended.

Sometimes she was able to lull the feeling of foreboding evil by the thought that it was merely the Spring. Everything about them was restless and stirring and shooting forth buds and blades, and all the little rivers of life were running full. It was only to be expected that they themselves, coming out of the close, storm bound life of the Winter, should feel a stirring of unrest, an urge of discontent and energy, towards something new.

Also, she knew that their reading of the war in Europe had been having an unsettling effect upon both of them. In the days of last Summer and Fall, when Jimmie's health was her single thought and when he himself was still subject to recurrent days of feverishness during which the doings of the world lost their interest for him, the first news of the world's tragedy had come dribbling to them through occasional old newspapers borrowed from Mr. Gamblin's store, and it had hardly aroused in them anything more than a puzzled and only half believing wonder. Belgium was mutilated—But Jimmie's temperature must be watched.

Later, however, when the shadow was definitely lifted from Wardwell's life, they began to follow the war with an avidity that was proportional to their detachment from the diversions and worries which took up the thoughts of other people more normally situated. They subscribed for a New York daily paper, and when Jimmie came home from the station with a week's papers in a bundle they sat down and devoured them eagerly.

Augusta, all pity and eager partisanship for the innocent and for the right, was disappointed in Jimmie. He, being half boy and whole writing man, thought only of the noise and the whole whaling wonder of the thing, and she wondered that he could take it all so impartially. But now there came a May day when Jimmie came home with his bundle of mail and tramped heavily into the room, without speaking.

He walked over to where she sat at the typewriter. Before her, over the machine, he spread a paper and laid his hand on the broad headlines. They told of the Lusitania horror.

After a little he leaned over her shoulder, as she read in silence, and pointed down a column of the known dead to the name of a man—a writing man—whom he had loved.

He walked slowly over to the table in the corner and dropped the mail quietly. Augusta stole a look at him as he stood there, leaning over slightly, brooding, his big hands, rough and red from work and wind, knuckled down hard on the bare table.