One Man in His Time Part 39

The May night was as warm as summer, and swinging garlands of ferns and peonies concealed electric fans which were suspended from the ceiling.

In the midst of the strong wind of the whirring fans, the dancers in the two long drawing-rooms appeared to be blown violently in circles and eddies, like coloured leaves in a high wind. For a few minutes after Stephen had entered, the rooms seemed to him merely a brilliant haze, where the revolving figures appeared and vanished like the colours of a kaleidoscope. Near the door he became aware of the resplendent form of his hostess, stationed appropriately against a background of peonies; and after she had greeted him with absent-minded cordiality, he pa.s.sed with Margaret in the direction of the thundering sounds which came from the bank of ferns behind which the musicians were hidden.

"Shall we try this?" he shouted into Margaret's ear.

She shook her head. "It's one of those horrid new things." Her high, clear tones pierced the din like the music of a flute. "Let's wait until they play something nice. I hate jazz."

She was looking very pretty in a dress like a white cloud, with garlands of tiny rosebuds on the skirt; and he thought, as he looked at her, that if she had only been a trifle less fastidious and refined, she might easily have won the reputation of a beauty. Nothing but a delicate superiority to the age in which she had been born, stood in the way of her success. Sixty years ago, in modest crinolines, she might have made history; and duels would probably have been fought for her favour. But other times, other tastes, he reflected.

For the rest of the dance, they sat sedately between two bay-trees in green tubs that occupied a corner of the room. Then "something nicer"

started,--a concession to Mrs. Harrison's mother, who shared Margaret's disapproval of jazz,--and Stephen and Margaret drifted slowly out among the revolving couples. After the third dance, relief appeared in the person of the young clergyman, who had come to look on; and leaving Margaret with him between the bay-trees, Stephen started eagerly to search for Patty where the dancers were thickest.

Across the room, he had already caught a glimpse of Corinna, in a queenly gown of white and silver brocade. She had stopped dancing now; and standing between Alice Rokeby and John Benham, she was glancing brightly about her, while she waved slowly a fan of white ostrich plumes. Among all these fresh young girls, she could easily hold her own, not because of her beauty, but because of that deeper fascination which she shed like a light or a perfume. She had the something more than beauty which these girls lacked and could never acquire--a legendary enchantment, the air of romance. Was this the result, he wondered now, of what she had missed in life rather than of what she had attained? Was it because she had never lived completely, because she had preferred the dream to the event, because she had desired and refrained, because she had missed both enchantment and disenchantment--was it because of the profound inadequacy of experience, that she had been able to keep undimmed the glow of her loveliness? It was not that she looked young, he realized while he watched her, but that she looked ageless and immortal, a creature of the spirit. While he gazed at her across the violent whirl of colours in the ballroom, he remembered the evening star s.h.i.+ning silver white in the afterglow. Perhaps, who could tell, she may have had the best that life had to give?

Making his way, with difficulty, through the throng, he followed Corinna's protecting gaze, until he saw that it rested on Alice Rokeby, who was wearing a dress that reminded him of wild hyacinths. For a moment, the sight of this other woman's face, with its soft, hungry eyes, and its expression of pa.s.sive and unresisting sweetness, gave him a start of surprise; and he found himself knocking awkwardly against one of the dancers. Something had happened to her! Something had restored, if only for an evening, the peculiar grace, the appealing prettiness, too trivial and indefinite for beauty, which he recalled vividly now, though for the last year or two he had almost forgotten that she ever possessed it. Yes, something had changed her. She looked to-night as she used to look before he went away, with a faint flush over her whole face and those soft flower-like eyes, lifted admiringly to some man, to any man except Herbert Rokeby. Then, as he disentangled himself from the whirl, and went toward Corinna, she came a step or two forward, and left John Benham and Alice Rokeby together.

"Everything is going well," she said; and he noticed, for the first time, that her charming smile was tinged with irony, as if the humour of the show, not the drama, were holding her attention. "I am having a beautiful time."

He glanced over her shoulder. "What have you done to Mrs. Rokeby?"

She shook her head, with a laugh which, he surmised sympathetically, was less merry than it sounded. "That is my secret. I have a magic you know--but she looks well, doesn't she? I did her hair myself. If you could have seen the way she had it arranged! That dress is very becoming, I think, it makes her eyes look like frosted violets. Her appearance is a success--but 'More brain, O Lord, more brain'!"

"Do you suppose that type will ever pa.s.s?" he asked.

She met his inquiring look with eyes that were golden in the coloured light. "Do you suppose that women will ever mean more to men than pegs on which to hang their sentiments? Alice and her kind will always be convenient subst.i.tutes for a man's admiration of himself."

"Which he calls love, you think?"

"Which he probably calls by the most romantic name that occurs to him.

Have you seen Patty?"

Before he could reply, she turned away to speak to some one who was approaching on her other side; and a minute later, with a joyous smile at Stephen, she floated off in the dance. Was she really as happy as she looked, or was it only a gallant pretence, nothing more?

He had not found Patty yet; and while he stood there, with his eyes eagerly searching the revolving throng for her face, he had a singular visitation, a poignant sense that some rare and beautiful event was eluding him in its flight, a feeling that the wings of the moment had brushed him like feathers as it sped by into experience. Once or twice in his life before he had received this impression; first in his boyhood when he rose one morning at sunrise to go hunting, and again in France after he had come out of the trenches. Now it was so vivid that it brought with it a sensation of fear, as if happiness itself were escaping his pursuit. He felt that his heart was burning with impatience, and there was a persistent hammering in his ears as if he had been running. What finding her would mean, what the future would bring, he did not know, he did not even seek to discover. All he understood was that the old indifference, the old apathy, the old subjective, tormenting egoism, had given place to a consuming interest, an impa.s.sioned delight. He felt only that he was thirsty for life, and that he must drink deep to be satisfied.

Then, suddenly, it seemed to him that the music grew softer and slower, and the wind-blown throng faded from him into a rosy haze. From the centre of the room, borne round and round like a flower on a stream, he saw her face and her romantic eyes looking at him with a deep expectancy that brought a pang to his heart. Her head was thrown back; the short black hair blew about her like mist; and her cheeks and lips were glowing with geranium red. At that instant she was not only the girl he loved--she was youth and spring and adventure.

The impatience had died now; the burning of his heart was cooled; and life had grown miraculously simple and easy. He knew at last what he wanted. His strength of purpose, his will to live had returned to him; and he felt that he was cured; that he was completely himself for the first time since his return. The dark depression, the shadows of the prison, were behind him now. Straight ahead were the roads of that hidden country, and for the first time he saw them flushed with an April bloom.

Then the music stopped; the throng scattered; and she came toward him with a tall young man, very slim and nimble, whose name was w.i.l.l.y Tarleton. In her dress of green and silver, with a wreath of leaves in her hair, she reminded him again of a flower, but of a flower of foam.

As he held out his hand the dance began again; w.i.l.l.y Tarleton vanished into air; and Patty stood looking at him in silence. After the tumult of his impatience, it seemed to him that when they met, they must speak words of profound significance; but all he said was,

"It is so warm in here. Will you come out on the porch?"

She shook her head. "I thought you were with Miss Blair?"

"I am--I was--but I must speak to you before I go back. Come on the porch where it is so much quieter."

The deep expectancy was still in her eyes. "I have promised every dance.

Mrs. Page saw that my card was filled in the beginning. Why don't you ask some of the girls who haven't any partners? It is so dreadful for them. If men only knew!"

"I don't know, and I don't care. I want you. If you will come on the porch for just three minutes--"

"Yes, it is quieter," she a.s.sented, and pa.s.sed, with a dancing step, through the French window out on the long porch which was hung with Chinese lanterns. Beyond was the wide lawn, suffused with a light that was the colour of amethyst, and beyond the lawn there was a narrow view of Franklin Street, where the flas.h.i.+ng lamps of motor cars went by, or shadowy figures moved for a little s.p.a.ce in obscurity. From this other world, now and then, the sharp sound of a motor horn punctuated the monotonous rhythm of the music within the house; while under the Chinese lanterns, where the shadows of the poplar leaves trembled like flowers, the struggle in Stephen's heart came to an end--the struggle between tradition and life, between the knowledge of things as they are and the vision of things as they ought to be, between the conservative and the progressive principle in nature. After the long insensibility, spring was having her way with him, as she was having it with the gra.s.s and the flowers and the bloom on the trees. It was one of those moments of awakening, of ecstatic vision, which come only to introspective and imaginative minds--to minds that have known darkness as well as light.

In that instant of realization, he knew, beyond all doubt, that he stood not for the past, but for the future, that he stood not for philosophy, but for adventure--for the will to be and to dare. He would choose, once for all, to take the risk of happiness; to conquer inch by inch a little more of the romantic wilderness of wonder and delight. While he stood there, looking down into her eyes, these impressions came to him less in words than in a glorious sense of youth, of power, of security of spirit.

"I looked for you so long," he said, and then breathlessly, as if he feared lest she might escape him, "Oh, Patty, I love you!"

Before she could reply, before he could repeat the words that drummed in his brain, the door into the present swung open, and the dream world, with its flower-like shadows and its violet dusk, vanished.

"Patty!" called Corinna's voice. "Patty, dear, I am looking for you."

Corinna, in her rustling white and silver brocade, stepped from the French window out on the porch. "Some one has sent for you--your aunt, I think they said, who is dying--"

The girl started and drew back. Her face changed, while the light faded from her eyes until they became wells of darkness. "I know," she answered. "I must go. I promised that I would go."

"My car is waiting. I will take you," said Corinna.

She turned to enter the house, and Patty, without so much as a look at Stephen's face, went slowly after her.

CHAPTER XXII

THE NIGHT

As the car pa.s.sed through the deserted streets, Corinna placed her hand on Patty's with a rea.s.suring pressure. Without appearing to do so, she was studying the girl's soft profile, now flas.h.i.+ng out in a sudden sharp light, now melting back again into the vagueness of the shadows. What was there about this girl, Corinna asked herself, which appealed so strongly to the protective impulse in her heart? Was it because this undisciplined child, with that curious sporting instinct which supplied the place of Victorian morality, represented for her, as well as for Stephen, some inarticulate longing for the unknown, for the adventurous?

Did Patty's charm for them both lie in her unlikeness to everything they had known in the past? In Corinna, as in Stephen, two opposing spirits had battled unceasingly, the realistic spirit which accepted life as it was, and the romantic spirit which struggled toward some unattainable perfection, which endeavoured to change and decorate the actuality. More than Stephen, perhaps, she had faced life; but she had not accepted it without rebellion. She had learned from disappointment to see things as they are; but deep in her heart some unspent fire of romance, some imprisoned esthetic impulse, sought continually to gild and enrich the experience of the moment. And this girl, so young, so ingenuous, so gallant and so appealing, stood in Corinna's mind for the poetic wildness of her spirit, for all that she had seen in a vision and had missed in reality.

When the car reached the Square, it turned sharply north. Sometimes it pa.s.sed through lighted s.p.a.ces and sometimes through pools of darkness; and as it went on rapidly, it seemed to Corinna that it was the one solid fact in a night that she imagined. Patty was very still; but Corinna felt the warm clasp of her hand, and heard her soft breathing, which became a part of the m.u.f.fled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow. Of something which had never been, but still might be! Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again! Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and make everything different! It was after midnight; and to Corinna it seemed that the darkness had released the collective spirit of the city, which would retreat again into itself with the breaking of dawn. Once a cry sounded far off and was hushed almost immediately; once a light flashed and went out in the window beneath a roof; but as the car sped on by rows of darkened tenements, the mysterious penumbra of the night appeared to draw closer and closer, as if that also were a phantom of the encompa.s.sing obscurity.

"Is this the aunt you told me of, Patty?" asked Corinna abruptly.

"Yes, I went to see her once--not long ago. I promised her that I'd come back when she sent for me. She wanted to tell me something, but she was so ill that she couldn't remember what it was. It was about Father, she said."

"Stephen will come for us after he has taken Margaret home. I gave him the number."

Patty turned and gave her a long look. They were pa.s.sing under an electric light at the time, and Corinna thought, as she looked into the girl's face, that all the wistful yearning of the night was reflected in her eyes. What had happened, she wondered, to change their sparkling brightness into this brooding expectancy.

The car stopped before the house to which Patty had come with Gershom; and as they got out, they saw that it was entirely dark except for the dim flicker of a jet of gas in the hall. By the pavement a car was standing, and from somewhere at the back there came the sound of a baby crying inconsolably in the darkness. While they entered the hall, and went up the broad old-fas.h.i.+oned flight of stairs, that plaintive wail followed them, growing gradually fainter as they ascended, but never fading utterly into silence. When they reached the second storey, and turned toward the back of the house, a door at the end of the pa.s.sage opened, and an old woman, with a hunch back, and a piece of knitting in her gnarled hands, came slowly to meet them. Standing there under the jet of gas, which flickered with a hissing noise, she looked at them with gla.s.sy impersonal eyes and a face that was as austere as Destiny.

Afterward, when Corinna thought over the impressions of that tragic night, she felt that they were condensed into the symbol of the old woman with the crooked back, and the thin crying of the baby which floated up from the darkness below.

"We came to see Mrs. Green," explained Corinna.

The old woman nodded, and as she turned to limp down the pa.s.sage, her ball of gray yarn slipped from her grasp and rolled after her until Corinna recovered it. In silence the cripple led the way, and in silence they followed her, until she opened the closed door at the end of the hall, and they entered the room, with the sickening sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree. From behind a screen, which was covered with faded wall paper, the figure of the doctor emerged while they waited, an ample middle-aged man, with the air of having got into his clothes in a hurry and the face of a pragmatic philosopher. He motioned commandingly for them to approach; and going to the other side of the screen, they found the dying woman gazing at them with eager eyes.

"She is doing nicely," remarked the doctor, with the cheerful alacrity of one in whom familiarity has bred contempt of death. "Keep her quiet.

One can never tell about these cases."