“Lila–who are we–you and I? I have been gazing at you three minutes while you were talking, and I see some one quite different from the you I knew before. Looking up at you, instead of down at you, is like transposing you. You are strangely new in this other key.”
The girl did not try to respond in kind–with her lips at least. She began teasing the youth about his crinkly hair. Breaking a twig as she spoke, she threw it carelessly at his hair, and it stuck in the closely curled locks. She laughed gayly at him. Perhaps in some way rather subtly than suddenly, as by a ghostly messenger from afar, he may have been made aware of her beautiful body, of the exquisite lines of her figure, of the pink of her radiant skin, or the red of her girlish lips. For the consciousness of these things seemed to spend his soul in joy.
The blazing eyes of Tom Van Dorn, squinting down upon the couple under the tree, could see the grace that shone from a thousand reactions of their bodies and faces. He opened his mouth to voice something from the bitterness of his heart but did not speak. Instead he yawned and cried: “And so we rot and we rot and we rot.”
Now it matters little what the lovers chattered about there under the elm tree, as they played with sticks and pebbles. It was what they would have said that counts–or perhaps what they should have said, if they had been able to voice their sense of the gift which the gods were bestowing. But they were dumb humans, who threw pebbles at each other’s toes, though in the deep places of their souls, far below the surface waves of bashful patter, heart might have spoken to heart in passing thus:
“Oh, Lila, what is beauty? What is it in the soul, running out glad to meet beauty, whether of line, of tone, of color, of form, of motion, of harmony?”
And the answer might have been trumpeted back through the deep:
“Maybe beauty is the God that is everywhere and everything, releasing himself in matter. Perhaps for our eyes and 474ears and fingers, the immanent God had an equation, whose answer is locked in our souls that are also a part of God–created in his image. And when in curve or line, in sequence of notes or harmony, or in thrilling touch sense, the equation is stated in terms of radiation, God seeking our soul’s answer, speaks to us.”
But none of this trumpet call of souls reached the two fathers who were watching the lovers. For one man was too old in selfishness to understand, and the other had grown too old in bearing others’ burdens to know what voices speak through the soul’s trumpet, when love first comes into the heart. So the hammers hammered and the saws groaned in the pavilion, and a hard heart hammered and a soul groaned and a tongue babbled folly on the veranda. But under the elm tree, eyes met, and across space went the message that binds lives forever. She picked up a twig longer than most twigs about her, reached with it and touched his forehead furtively, stroked his crinkled hair, blushing at her boldness. His head sank to the earth, he put his face upon the grass, and for a second he found joy in the rush of tears. They heard voices, bringing the planet back to them; but voices far away. On the hill across the little valley they could see two earnest golfers, working along the sky-line.
The couple on the sky-line hurried along in the heat. The man mopped his face, and his brown, hairy arms, and his big sinewy neck. The woman, rather thin, but fresh and with the maidenly look of one who isn’t entirely sure what that man will do next, kept well in the lead.
“Well, Emma–there’s love’s young dream all right.” He stopped to puff, and waved at the couple by the tree. Then he hitched up his loose, baggy trousers, gave a jerk to his big flowing blue necktie, let fly at the ball and cried “Fore.” When he came up to the ball again, he was red and winded. “Emma,” he said, “let’s go have something to eat at the house–my figure’ll do for an emeritus bridegroom–won’t it?” And thus they strolled over the fields and out of the game.