Black Oxen Part 42

His amiability was immediately restored, but his gaiety was somewhat forced. "You are looking charming this morning, Miss Ogden. I wished last night that there was a guitar or even a banjo in the camp, that I might serenade beneath your window."

And Mary actually blushed. She had slept dreamlessly, and between the light mountain air and her new role, she felt as light-hearted as Eva Darling, who was holding Mr. Dinwiddie's hand openly.

"Oh, Excellence!" cried Mrs. Minor from the other end of the table.

"What do you say to having a picnic lunch? Didn't you tell me that you knew of a lovely gorge about six miles from here? Steak broiled between forked sticks! Potatoes roasted in the ashes! Flapjacks!

Heavenly."

"Anything you say," replied Mr. Dinwiddie rather tonelessly. "Want to put it to the vote?"

"Let me answer for the crowd," commanded Todd. "It is our duty when in the woods to eat our meals after as much unnecessary toil, and to enjoy as much discomfort, as is humanly possible. Otherwise we might as well stay in town. We'll hilariously tramp six miles with packs, sit on the damp ground, extract earwigs, eat burnt steak and half-cooked potatoes, and then tramp back again, our spirits gradually rising at the prospect of a decent meal eaten in comfort----"

"Kill-joy!" cried Minor. "Don't we come to the woods to tramp? I want to lose twenty pounds this trip, and if you don't you ought to. I vote we make Rolly carry a sack of potatoes."

"It's agreed then?" asked Mr. Dinwiddie, veiling his hope that it was not. But the a.s.sent was general. They were all as excited over the prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran down to the lake.

L

Clavering had tied the boat to a tree in a little inlet far down the lake, and they were walking through a wood of spruce trees and balsam.

There was no leafy curtain here, although they could see one swaying on either side through open vistas between the rigid columns of the spruce.

A trail was hardly necessary for there was no undergrowth, and although the trees were set close together they were easily circ.u.mnavigated.

It was some time since they had spoken. His face was graver than she had ever seen it, and she waited for him to speak. She almost could feel those unuttered words beating on the silence of the woods. There was nothing else to break that silence but the faint constant murmur in the tree-tops, and once, beyond that leafy curtain, the sudden trilling of a solitary bird. Again, the tremendousness of this high isolation swept over her. The camp and its gay party might have been on some far distant lake.

He put his arm around her firmly. "I am not going to pretend any further," he said. "It is too big for that. And you have never been anything but Mary Ogden to me, except, perhaps, on that night I have practically dismissed from my mind. I called you Mary Ogden to myself until I learned your new name, and I don't think that name has ever come into my thoughts of you. And although you slipped on another skin with it you were always Mary Ogden underneath. You needed a new name for your new role, but, like any actress on the stage, it had nothing to do with your indestructible personality. I say this because I want you to understand that although I cannot play up to your little comedy any longer and go through the forms of wooing you as if you were a girl--I shouldn't like you half as well if you were--I do not think of you or wish you to think of yourself as anything but Mary Ogden."

He paused a moment, and she slipped her arm about him and they walked on through the wood.

"I cannot go on with it because these days up here that we can spend almost altogether alone, if we will, are too sacred to waste on an amusing but futile game. Do you realize that we do not know each other very well? I sometimes wonder if you know me at all. From the time I fell in love with you until you promised to marry me, I was at one sort of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires--that hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you--sporadic is the word, for between my work and your friends, we have had little time together--and I don't think I have ever taken you in my arms with the feeling that you were the woman I loved, not merely the woman I desired. And I believe that I love you even more than I desire you. You are all that, but so much--so much--more."

She had fixed her startled eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.

"There has always been a lot of talk about the soul. Sentimentalists wallow in the word, and realists deride it. What it really is I do not pretend to know. Probably as good a word as any--and certainly a very mellifluous word--for some obscure chemical combination of finer essence than the obvious material part of us, that craves a foretaste of immortality while we are still mortal. Perhaps we are descended from the G.o.ds after all, and unless we listen when they whisper in this unexplorable part of our being, we find only a miserable subst.i.tute for happiness, and love turns to hate. Whatever it is that golden essence demands, I have found it in you, and if circ.u.mstances had been different I should have known it long ago. I know now what you meant that night when you told me you had spent many distracted years looking for what no man could give you, and although I doubted at that time I could even guess what your own mysterious essence demanded, I know now--still vaguely, for it is something as far beyond the defining power of words as the faith of the Christian. It can never be seen, nor heard, nor expressed, but it is there. And only once in a lifetime does any one mortal have it to give to another. A man may love many times, but he is a G.o.d-man only once."

He held her more closely, for she was trembling, but he continued to walk on, guiding her automatically through the trees, for his eyes were almost vacant, as if their vision had been reversed.

"I have had some hours of utter despair, in spite of the double excitement of these past weeks, for it has seemed to me that I was no nearer to you than I had been in the beginning. There was a sense of unreality about the whole affair. At first it seemed to me the most romantic thing that could happen to any man, and it was incredible that I had been chosen the hero of such an extraordinary romance--intensified, if anything, by the fact that it was set in roaring New York, where you have to talk at the top of your voice to hear yourself think... . But that pa.s.sed--in a measure. I was beset by the fear--at times, I mean: I was not always in a state to look inward--that you were slipping away.

Not that I doubted for a moment you would marry me, but that your innermost inscrutable self had withdrawn, and that you accepted what must have appeared to be my own att.i.tude--that we were merely two vital beings, who saw in each other a prospect of a superior sort of sensual delight----"

"That is not true," she interrupted him fiercely. "But you seemed to me to be in that phase when a man can think of nothing else. If I hadn't hoped--and believed--in you against all I knew of men, I'd never have gone on with it."

"I'm sure that is true. I must have disappointed you horribly. You had felt the bond from the beginning, and I can imagine what you must have dreamed I alone could give you. The trouble was that I didn't realize that I alone was in fault, at the time. That boiling pot in my brain was making too much noise. But I can a.s.sure you that I have returned to normal, and if I thought I couldn't satisfy you I'd let you go without a word. But you know that I can, don't you?"

She nodded.

"What is it, I wonder?" He sighed. "I wish I knew. But it is enough to feel... . You must understand that in spite of the erratic creature you have known since you refused to marry me at once and left me with no resource but to let that play boil out, I am man first and a writer incidentally. I also have a stronger ambition to be your husband than to write plays. If I don't strangle what talent I have it is because I must have the money to be independent of newspaper work. Otherwise I should have neither peace of mind nor be able to live abroad with you. I know that you cannot be happy here, and I am not a victim of that ancient myth that two people who love each other can be happy anywhere. Environment is half the battle--for the super-civilized, at all events. But you shall never have another dose of the writer. I'll write my plays in New York and rush production. The greater part of the year I shall spend with you in Europe, and I cannot think of anything I'd like more--why, the very night I first saw you I was longing with all my soul to get out of New York and over to the other side of the world---- Why, Mary! You are not crying? You! I never believed you could----"

"I--I--did not believe it either... . But, are you sure? Could you reconcile yourself? You seem so much a part of New York, of this strange high-pitched civilization. If you are not sure--if you are only tired of New York for the moment... . I--yes, I will! I'll give it all up and live here. Of course I love New York itself--was it not my Mary Ogden home? And there are delightful people everywhere... . No doubt my dream of doing great things in Europe was mere vanity----"

"Do you believe that?"

"Perhaps not. But, after all, what I tried to do might be so easily frustrated in that cauldron--why should I risk personal happiness--the most precious and the rarest thing in life, for what may be a chimera--wasted years and a wasted life. Why are we made as we are, if to coax that hidden spark into a steady flame is not our highest destiny?

It certainly is our manifest right... . Dreams of doing great things in this world are nine-tenths personal vanity. I believe that when we leave this planet we go to a higher star, where our incompleteness here will be made complete; and perhaps we are spared a term of probation if we make ourselves as complete here as mortal conditions will permit.

And, possibly, once in a great while, two human beings are permitted to effect that completeness together."

They were both in an exalted mood. The wood was very still, its beauty incomparable. And they might already have been on another star.

Across that divine balsam-scented stillness came the deep imperative notes of a bell.

Clavering twitched his shoulders impatiently.

"Let them go on their screaming picnic," he said. "We stay here. Did you mean that, Mary?"

"Yes, I meant it. We will not go to Europe at all--except to visit my Dolomites some day. When you are writing I'll come up here."

"I don't know that I shall ask that sacrifice of you. A part of your brain is asleep now, but it is a very active and insistent part when awake. In time you might revert--and resentment is a fatal canker; but let's leave it open. It is generally a mistake to settle things off-hand. Let them alone and they settle themselves."

"Very well. At all events, while we are here, I shall not give it another thought. The present at least is perfect."

"Yes, it is perfect!" He put both arms about her. The past was a blank to both. Their pulsing lips met in the wonder and the ecstasy of the first kiss of youth, of profound and perfect and imperishable love. They clung together exalted and exulting and for the moment at least they were one.

LI

They ate their dinner under the amused eyes of Mrs. Larsing, who had served dinners a deux before to couples that had "lost their way."

Afterward they sat by the fire and talked desultorily: a great deal about themselves; sometimes wandering to the subjects that had interested them most before they had met each other. Clavering told her of the many plays he had written, and burned; because in his inordinate respect for the drama he had found them, when not wholly bad, too good to be good enough. But the long practice had given him a certain mastery of technique, and when she had set his brain on fire he had had less trouble than most young playwrights in compelling his imagination to adapt itself to the inexorable framework. He had always felt that the imagination, what is called, for want of a better term, the "creative faculty," was there, but it was lethargic; it sometimes roused itself to spurts and flashes during wakeful nights, but slept like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a pig when he tried to invoke it. No doubt, as Gora had told him, his life had been too easy and agreeable; he made a good deal of money with no particular effort, he was a favorite with the cleverest men and women in New York, and he had no one to think of but himself. His mother was dead and his sisters married. And there was no doubt that if you were on top, a personality, New York was the most enchanting place in the world to live in, just as it must be the most unsatisfactory for the poor and insignificant. To have conquered New York meant more--several thousand times more--than conquering all the rest of the United States put together, with New York left out. Moreover, it was the only place where you could have any real fun, if you wanted your fun with the sort of men who drifted to New York from all parts of the nation as naturally as pilgrims went to Mecca. If it was your fate to be a politician, Was.h.i.+ngton, of course, was the goal, but that, in his opinion, was merely moving from a little small-town to a big one, and he thanked his stars he did not have to live in a place where there was nothing but politics and society. In New York you had only to help yourself to any phase of life you wanted.

Mary smiled as she remembered the contemptuous remark of another New York convert: "Oh, Was.h.i.+ngton is merely an island outside of New York,"

and she fell to wondering what New York would have been like if it had not been fed so persistently by those streams of eager and ambitious brains debouching into it from every part of a by no means unambitious and negligible commonwealth. Another island, probably. Certainly it was the most exhilarating place in the world today, with its atmosphere of invincible security and prosperity, its surging tides of life. No wonder it was impossible for the intensive New Yorker to realize that four thousand miles away a greater world was falling to ruin.

She told him something of the old political life of Vienna, continually agitated by some "Balkan Question"; of the general dislike of the "Heir," whose violent death at Sarajevo had been the death knell of European peace; apprehensions of the day when he should ascend the throne, for he was intensely clerical and reactionary. If he had survived until the old Emperor's death, and there had been no war, it was doubtful if there would not have been a "palace revolution" within six months of his succession. It was also possible that the people would have had their revolution, for they were becoming enlightened and discontented, and powerful men in the highest offices of the Government were in sympathy with them.

"I suppose you mean this Prince Hohenhauer for one," said Clavering.

"Hohenhauer believed that every throne in Europe would be overturned before the middle of the twentieth century, and that it was the part of wise leaders to prepare not only themselves but the people for a republican form of government. He had the greatest admiration for the principles on which this Republic was founded, and said that Europe was to be congratulated that we had made the mistakes for her to avoid.

Much as the rest of the world congratulates itself that Bolshevism was tried out in Russia and made a ghastly mess of improving the condition of the underdog before the ma.s.ses in other countries had time to lose their heads. I've no doubt that he will be the next Chancellor of Austria, and that when he gets the reins of power in his hands, he'll keep a firm hold on them, which is more than any one else has done----"

"What do you suppose has brought him to this country?"

"I fancy he has come to obtain the moral support of the American Government in whatever plan he may have made for putting Austria on her feet again."

"Have you any idea of what that plan may be?" Clavering was watching her intently, his ear attuned to every inflection of her voice. But her tones were as impersonal as if reciting a page out of ancient history, and her gaze was frank and direct.

"I can only guess. Personally I should think his present plan would be an alliance with Bavaria and other South German States--a South German Confederacy. That would make a powerful combination, and as Bavaria has always hated Prussia, she would be the last to lend herself to any schemes of vengeance the north may cherish--particularly if she remains a republic. And, of course, she would a.s.sume her share of the Allied debt... . It would be a wonderful thing if it could be brought off.