Black Oxen Part 41

One by one the other men had joined them, until even Mr. Dinwiddie was in the procession, marching with loud stamping feet round and round the big room. The cries became shorter, menacing, abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoa.r.s.e, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso disk into the victrola; and as those immortal notes flung themselves imperiously across that wild scene, the primitive in the men dropped like a leaden plummet, and they threw themselves on the floor by the fire. But they smoked their pipes in silence. They had had something that no woman could give them nor share, and there was an ungallant wish in every manly heart that they had left the women at home.

Caruso was succeeded by Emma Eames, and the great lost diva by Farrar and Scotti. Then, the concert over, a yawning party stumbled upstairs to bed and not a sound was heard from them until the first bell rang at seven o'clock next morning.

XLVII

"You forgot me last night."

"Yes, I did." Clavering smiled unrepentantly.

"You looked horribly primitive."

"No more so than I felt."

They were in a boat on the lake. The air was crisp and cold although the sun blazed overhead. Clavering was happy in a disreputable old sweater that he kept at the camp, and baggy corduroy trousers tucked into leggins, but Mary wore an angora sweater and skirt of a vivid gra.s.s green and a soft sport hat of the same shade, the rim turned down over eyes that might never have looked upon life beyond these woods and mountains. Clavering was hatless and smoked his pipe lazily as he pulled with long slow strokes.

Other boats were on the lake, the women in bright sweaters and hats that looked like floating autumn leaves, and the lake was liquid amber.

A breeze blew warm scents out of the woods. The water lilies had opened to the sun and looked oddly artificial in their waxen beauty, at the feet of those ancient trees. Stealthy footsteps behind that wall of trees, or a sudden loud rustling, told of startled deer. The distant peak looked to be enamelled blue and white, and the long slopes of the nearer mountains were dark green under a blue mist, the higher spruce rising like Gothic spires.

Clavering smiled into her dancing eyes. "You look about fourteen," he said tenderly.

"I don't feel much more. I spent a month or two every year in these woods--let us play a game. Make believe that I am Mary Ogden and you have met me here for the first time and are deliberately setting out to woo me. Begin all over again. It--you, perhaps!--was what I always dreamed of up here. I used to row on the lake for hours by myself, or sit alone in the very depths of the woods. Do you think that famous imagination of yours could accomplish a purely personal feat? I haven't nearly as much but I'm quite sure I could. And then--after--we could just go on from here."

He looked at her in smiling sympathy. "Done. We met last night, Miss Ogden, and I went down at the first shot. I'm now out to win you or perish in the attempt. But before we get down to business I'll just inform you of a resolution I took a day or two ago. I shall get a license the day we return and marry you the morning you sail."

"Oh!" And then she realized in a blinding flash what she had fought out of her consciousness: that she had shrunk from the consummation of marriage, visualized a long period of intermittent but superficial love-making and delightful companions.h.i.+p, an exciting but incomplete idyl of mind and soul and senses... . Underneath always an undertone of repulsion and incurable ennui ... the dark residuum of immedicable disillusion ... that what she had really wanted was love with its final expression eliminated.

But she realized it only as a fact, ... a psychological study of another ... buried down there in an artificial civilization she had forgotten ... in that past that belonged to Marie Zattiany ... with which Mary Ogden had nothing to do ... her mind at last was as young as her body, and this man had accomplished the miracle. The present and the future were his.

She looked up into his eyes, anxious but imperious, and answered softly: "Why not?"

"Exactly. I've no desire to take that long journey with you, but I'm not going to take any chances, either... . Ah! Here's an idea that beats the other hollow. When the party breaks up we'll go down to Huntersville with them, marry there, and return to the camp. I don't see how your Dolomites could beat this for a honeymoon. Why in thunder should we trail all the way over to Europe to find seclusion when we must return in two or three months, anyhow? It's a scandalous waste.

We can go to the Dolomites for our second honeymoon--we'll have one every year. And this is much more in the picture if you want to be Mary Ogden again. She never would have proposed anything so elaborate and unnecessary. Say yes, and don't be more than a minute about it."

Mary drew in her breath sharply. The plan made a violent and irresistible appeal. There would be no long interval for possible reversal, for contacts in which it might be difficult to hold fast to her new faith. But what excuse could she make to leave him later? ... Later? Did Austria really exist? Did she care? Let the future take care of itself. Her horizon, a luminous band, encircled these mountains... . She smiled into his ardent eyes. "Very well.

I'll write to Hortense today and tell her to send me up a trousseau of sorts. And now--you are to understand that you have not dared to propose to me yet and are suffering all the qualms of uncertainty, for I am a desperate flirt, and took a long walk in the woods this morning with Mr. Scores."

"Very well, Miss Ogden, I will now do my best to make a fool of myself, and as soon as we return to camp will telegraph to New York for a five-pound box of chocolates."

"Hark! Hark! The Lark!" shouted Todd as he rowed past with Babette Gold. "Only there isn't a lark or any other bird in these woods that I've been able to discover."

"Birds sing one at a time," shouted back Clavering. "Choir of jealous soloists."

He rowed into a little cove and they gazed into the dim green woods, but the maple leaves grew almost to the ground, and it was like peering through the tiny changing s.p.a.ces of a moving curtain through which one glimpsed green columns flecked with gold.

He beached the boat, and they walked, single file, up a narrow run-way made by the deer. Everywhere was that leafy whispering curtain.

Between the rigid spruce and soft maples were fragrant balsams, and ferns, and an occasional pine with its pale green spikes. They pa.s.sed enormous boulders detached from the glaciers that had ground mountains in their embrace, but today things of mere beauty in their coats of pink and green and golden moss.

Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheeled on his hind legs, gave a leap and went cras.h.i.+ng through the forest snorting his protesting fury. The doe scampered after, her white-lined tail standing up perfectly straight.

They sat down on a log, dried and warmed by the sun in this open s.p.a.ce, and talked for two hours. There was no need for careful avoidance of dangerous subjects. Clavering had come to these woods nearly every year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. Once, as the trail widened, he touched her fingers tentatively. She let her own curl for a moment, then gave him a provocative glance over her shoulder and hurried on.

XLVIII

Clavering, when making up his list with Mr. Dinwiddie (by courtesy), had, with the exception of Todd, who was always the life of any party, Gora, whom he always liked to have at hand, and Eva Darling, who was a favorite of "The Amba.s.sador to the Court of the Sophisticates," as Todd had long since dubbed him, chosen his guests at random, taking whom he could get, careful merely to ask those who, so far as he knew, were on speaking terms.

But he hardly could have gathered together a more congenial and lively party, nor one more delighted to leave New York for the woods. Henry Minor, editor of one of the intellectual and faintly radical magazines, whose style was so involved in his efforts to be both "different" and achieve an unremitting glitter, that he had recently received a pet.i.tion to issue a glossary, was as amiable as a puppy in the society of his friends and when in the woods talked in words of one syllable and discovered a mighty appet.i.te. His wife, who had demonstrated her originality by calling herself Mrs. Minor, was what is known as a spiffing cook and a top-notch dresser. She had, in fact, the most charming a.s.sortment of sports clothes in the camp. Eva Darling, who danced for pastime and ill.u.s.trated for what little bread she was permitted to eat at home, was as lively as a gra.s.shopper and scarcely less devastating. Babette Gold wore her black hair in smooth bands on either side of the perfect oval of her face, and had the sad and yearning gaze of the unforgiven Magdalen, and she had written two novels dealing with the domesticities of the lower middle cla.s.s, treating with a clinical wealth of detail the irritable monotonies of the nuptial couch and the artless intimacies of the nursery. She smoked incessantly, could walk ten miles at a stretch, and was as pa.s.sionless as a clam. Gerald Scores, who wore a short pointed beard and looked the complete artist, was one of the chief hopes of the intellectual drama cunningly commercialized; and as capable as Clavering of shutting up his genius in a water-tight compartment, and enjoying himself in the woods. He was mildly flirtatious, but looked upon emotional intensity in the personal life of the artist as a criminal waste of force. Halifax Bolton, who claimed to be the discoverer of the Younger Generation (in fiction) and was just twenty-eight himself, was a critic of formidable severity and the author of at least five claques. The intense concentration of writing routed his sense of humor, but he had as many droll stories in his repertoire as Todd. His wife, the famous "Alberta Jones," fierce Lucy Stoner, was the editor, at a phenomenal salary, of one of the "Woman's Magazines," and wrote short stories of impeccable style and indifferent content for the _Century_ and the _Dial_.

They were all intimate friends and argued incessantly and amiably. And they were all devoted to Mr. Dinwiddie, whom they addressed as Excellence, without accent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: At Dinwiddie's mountain lodge Clavering (Conway Tearle) pleaded with Madame Zattiany (Corrine Griffith) to marry him. (_Screen version of "The Black Oxen."_)]

When Mary and Clavering arrived at the camp in response to the dinner bell, Eva Darling, who wore very pretty pink silk bloomers under her sport skirt, was turning hand-springs down the living-room, while the rest of the party applauded vociferously, and Mrs. Larsing, who was entering with the fried chicken, nearly dropped the platter.

"Just in time, Madame Zattiany," cried Minor. "This is the sixth round and she is panting----"

But she interrupted him. "'Mary'--from this time on. I insist. You make me feel an outsider. I won't be addressed in that formal manner nor answer to that foreign name again."

"Mary! Mary! Mary!" shouted the party with one accord, and Clavering drew a long breath. He had wondered how she would manage to feel Mary Ogden under the constant bombardment of a name that was a t.i.tle in more ways than one. But he might have trusted her to manage it!'

In the afternoon Mrs. Minor suggested having tea in the woods, and they all walked--single file--five miles to drink their tea and eat their cakes (Larsing carrying the paraphernalia) in a pine grove on the summit of a hill, and then walked back again, clamoring for supper.

Mary had been monopolized by Scores and Bolton, occasionally vouchsafing Clavering a glance. During the evening they were all too pleasantly tired and replete to dance or to play the charades they had planned, but lay about comfortably, listening to a concert of alternate arias and jazz. Clavering did not have a word alone with Mary. She sat on one of the divans between Gora and Todd, while Scores lay on the floor at her feet, his head on a cus.h.i.+on, one foot waving over a lifted knee, the perfect picture of the contented playwright. They kept up a continuous murmur, punctuated with gales of laughter. Clavering had sulkily taken a chair beside Babette Gold, whose metallic humor sometimes amused him, but she went sound asleep before his eyes, and he could only gaze into the fire and console himself with visions of a week hence, when these cursed people had gone and he was the most fortunate man on earth.

His room was downstairs next to Mr. Dinwiddie's, and he made up his mind to let himself out softly at midnight, throw pebbles at her window and whisper to her as she leaned from her cas.e.m.e.nt. It was a scene that if introduced into a modern play would have driven him from the theatre and tipped his pen with vitriol next morning, but it appealed to him, somehow, as a fitting episode in his own high romance. But he was asleep before his head touched the pillow, and did not lift an eyelash until the first bell roused him at seven o'clock. Then, however, he lay for some time thinking, soberly.

XLIX

The hour between seven and eight was a lively one in the upper corridor. There was only one bathroom on the second floor. Scores and Miss Gold took their morning plunge in the lake, but the rest preferred the less drastic shower, and there was a continual darting to and fro of forms clad in bath-robe or kimono; the vanquished peeping through door-cracks waiting for the bathroom door to open--signal for another wild rush down the hall, a scuffle at the door, a triumphant slam and hoot, and loud vituperations from the defeated. Mary cannily waited until the last, and came down, clad in a white sweater and heavy white tweed skirt, after the others had cleared the generous platter of ham and eggs, and the mountain of corn bread was a hillock of crumbs.

"Oh, Mary!" said Mr. Dinwiddie, reprovingly, "and you as prompt as royalty. In camp----"

"I've no thought of going without my breakfast," said Mary unrepentantly. "Ring the bell, Din."

The men had risen, but Clavering alone had determination in his eye.

He pulled out a chair beside his own, and Mary accepted it gracefully, waving a morning greeting to the others.

"How good of you to keep this chair for me, Mr. Clavering," she murmured. "It is shocking of me to be so lazy."

"I'm sick of this game," growled Clavering. "If you act today----"

"Shh! I am sure you are going to take me out on the lake immediately after breakfast."