Neighbours Part 29

"Only your friend?"

"Oh, see, there's a place where perhaps we can slide right over the pitch! Let's!"

She was on the sled in an instant, and I behind her. I kicked it loose.

With a gentle crunching sound the runners started sc.r.a.ping through the snow; then, as the speed increased, the sound rose to a whine which mingled with the rush of air in our ears and the spray of snow in our faces. Jean's heels were just above the snow surface, and when, as happened once or twice, they dropped too low, they showered us with flying icy crystals. Then, just at the dip, one heel drove in much too deep--too deep to be accidental--the sled trembled, turned sideways, and went over.

We disentangled ourselves, laughing, but we did not immediately reclimb the hill. I found a sheltered spot in the pitch where we might sit on the sled with our backs to the great drift while our faces caught the slanting warmth of the sun and our eyes could range the field of tiny rainbow signals thrown up from the ripple at our feet.

Jean broke up the crusted snow with the heel of her overshoe; then buried her feet in the powdery mound. Presently a toe came wiggling up through it. . . . . . . .

"Jean, don't!" I cried. "You take me back to those old days! We understood everything then; then everything was supposed to be settled."

The toe settled to stillness in its burrowing; Jean's sensitive lips, too, settled to a stillness firm and sad.

"Tell me, Jean," I pressed at length; "why can't we go back; why can't we start over again--like that?"

"We have always been good friends," she murmured.

"Good friends--yes. Must it stop at that?"

"And neighbours," she continued. "We have always been good neighbours.

Perhaps that is the trouble."

"How--the trouble?"

"Well, it's like this," she said, and again the toe began to gyrate in the snow. "We've known each other so well, and so long, there isn't anything--much--left to know, is there? Could you stand the boredom of a person who has no new thoughts, no strange ideas, no whims--nothing that you haven't already seen and known a hundred times?"

"There never could be boredom with you, dear. Just to have you with me, to feast on you, to know you were mine, would be enough for me."

"For about a week. You'd soon tire of a feast with no flavor to it. _I_ would, at any rate. . . . Oh, I see it working out already. I don't want to gossip, and Jack and Marjorie have been everything they could to me, but already I can see them settling down to the routine--_the deadly routine_. Bad enough anywhere, but on these prairies, with their isolation, their immensity--unbearable. I couldn't stand it."

I studied her for a moment in silence. Jean might know all about me; I might have no new thoughts, new ideas, new whims, but it was quite plain I didn't know all about her.

"Still, there are many couples on these prairies living happily, I suppose," I ventured.

"You suppose," she repeated. "That's right. It is just supposition.

n.o.body knows; that is, the public doesn't know. But what is their happiness? An ox-like acceptance of the routine. Breakfast, work; dinner, work; supper, work; sleep; breakfast--the whole circle over again. I couldn't stand it, Frank; there's no use pretending I could.

I'd--I'd run away with some one!"

"Jean!"

"Yes, I know what you're thinking. But it would break the routine, anyway; it wouldn't be that way I would lose my soul; perhaps that way I might save it."

"You're a strange girl, Jean."

"Yes? After all these years? I am so glad. As long as I am strange you will be interested in me. That's the trouble with you; you're not strange. I know all about you. And I wouldn't be your housekeeper for life for the sake of being your lover for a week."

"Jean!"

"Shocking, isn't it? But true. Don't you know that's what happens, nearly always? It must happen, unless there are new points of interest always arising. I have the misfortune to think, and so I see these things in advance, and try to s.h.i.+eld you from them."

"The misfortune to think?"

"Of course. Otherwise I could accept the ox-routine and grind out my soul in the treadmill of three meals a day. I suppose that's what people call morality--ideal wife and mother, etc. I'd run away from it all."

I, too, punched the snow with my heel. "I never heard you talk like that, Jean," I said at length. "I didn't think you thought--along those lines. You wouldn't excuse people who run--who disregard their marriage vows?"

"The first of which is to love," she shot back. "When that fails, all fails. Why make a mockery of it?"

"But I would love you, always--always. You would be to me the only--the only _possible_ girl in the world!"

Slowly she turned her face toward me; she had been giving me an opportunity for profile study during this dialogue. Her eyes found mine; her lips--in them again I saw the rose-leaf beauty of her childhood.

When she spoke her voice was low and tremulous and musical.

"You dear boy! You think so. I only wish it were true!"

The last words came with a catch in her breath, I thrust forward and clasped her hands in mine.

"You mean that? Oh, Jean, if you do. . . . ."

"Yes, I mean it. That is the great difficulty. It isn't true. You wouldn't love me always. I wouldn't always be the only girl."

"Jean, you would. I swear it!"

"Then I must reverse it. I wouldn't love you always. You wouldn't always be the only man in the world."

My spirit, which had gone pounding upward, fell like a burst balloon.

"Why?" I demanded.

"Because your vision is too small. Because it is bounded by the corner posts of Fourteen. Because I couldn't live penned up in such a--a pasture."

"You'd be breaking out--toward section Two."

"Frank!" It was her turn to exclaim.

"Yes, toward section Two. You've done some plain talking, Jean; now it's my turn. It is Spoof that has upset your mind--put all these wild notions in your head. It is Spoof that you are thinking about, not me. I suppose you think you could marry him and not drop into the routine; you would be less an ox, as you put it, on Two than on Fourteen. Perhaps that would be best, after all. Perhaps if you were fenced in on Two, you might break out toward Fourteen!"

"Frank! Please don't be unkind--and unfair. . . . . . . . I _am_ thinking about Spoof, and it is just because he is _not_ bounded by section Two. You and Jack and Jake think he's a greenhorn, and you play your silly little tricks on him, but his world is the world, and yours is Fourteen, and Jack's is Twenty-two, and Jake's is--whatever his section is. He's so big, so big!"

"I see. Spoof has travelled more than we have. He has seen more of the world. He has met more people. And so he is big! I bet I grow more oats to the acre than he does--you should see his plowing; looks like--'be guess and be d.a.m.ned,' as Jake says."

"Quite an elegant remark; suitable to Jake, hardly to be expected from you. And your argument would be irresistible--if I were an ox."

"You're sharp, aren't you? Well, something to eat is not to be despised, even by BIG people, like you and Spoof. Even the soul, which you are afraid of losing on Fourteen, will pick up and leave you on Two, unless you feed that body in which it lives. That's what the soul itself thinks about people who don't hustle for a living; it gets up and leaves them."

"Good for you!" cried Jean, "You are actually thinking. I have goaded you into it. Now--where are we?"

"We're at Spoof. You say you could love me for a week, and him forever."