The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Augusta, from long watching, from unending longing and perpetual defeat, had worn thin the coarser material covering that held the living, burning spirit within her. As her mother seemed to remove day by day into deeper and deeper places of the soul's isolation, Augusta seemed ever to follow her.

Wardwell, standing by his wife with the feeling of a strange man watching over a girl baby left suddenly and unaccountably to his care and at the same time with the hunger of a young lover for his sweetheart's first kisses, thought, and thought often, that she was going away from him.

She was unfailingly dear and thoughtful. The moments which she could snatch for him from the ever increasing care of her mother she filled with anxious and touching tenderness. Every day brought him a new and revealing sense of the depth of her spirit and affection. But the feeling of being separated from her came pressing upon him with a twofold weight.

In the day time she played her part as the girl who had come from "that place" with Rose Wilding, while Wardwell looked on heart sick with sympathy for the pain that he knew she carried and with a withering sense of his own uselessness. She played a part. But she played the part so well in her self-effacing patience that he was finding it necessary to remind himself that she was playing a part. It came to the point where he at times caught himself walking rapidly up and down his room and arguing with himself whether this was really his Augusta, or whether he, too, was losing his grip on reality.

At night, when she was away from his sight and he knew that she had gone back into the little Augusta of Rose Wilding's memory, it was, if anything, worse. Here he knew she played a willing part, trying to make the part a reality. For Wardwell knew the daring of her mind and the greatness of her desire; knew that she would stop at nothing, would grasp at every thread of memory that could possibly draw her mother's mind across the vacant wilderness between the present and the past.

But even this double barrier of outward isolation from the Augusta who was his was not the great thing that he feared. The look which he had seen in Augusta's face in the days when they were hunting the city for her mother, that strained, listening look that took her away from him and from everything about them, was often in her eyes now. Somehow he knew that in it she spoke to the spirit of Rose Wilding that wandered in the unknown places.

He did not resent the state of things. But he found himself unaccountably peevish and unwontedly tempted to self pity.

He did not know what was coming upon him. Would not have believed it if he had been told. He knew that they were bad days for him. They were days in which he sat pounding out useless hours at the typewriter, only to destroy the work as soon as he had done it. They were nights when he worked feverishly, bitterly at the jokes and skits that were at once his bread and butter and the bane of his soul.

He came to hate the mere thought of writing at all. He was a failure. Even the things that he could do, the hated jokes that until now had brought him enough for a living, were now failing him. He was not making enough to afford to take Augusta and her mother away from this big house. And the thought that Augusta in the face of all her burdens was obliged to keep it to support her mother and herself, while he barely paid his board drove him frantic.

One day in the middle of the winter he climbed to the coop in the fourth story of the old building in Bleecker street where the presses were complaining over the last edition of the afternoon. He had been walking nearly all day, climbing stairs in increasing discouragement and going down them again with a certain sickly relief. He was, in short, looking for work.