At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern Part 15

"You see that, Miss?" quavered Mrs. Smithers. "'E knows where 'e's been, and 'e knows where 'e ain't now."

"Mrs. Smithers," said Dorothy, sternly, "will you kindly fill up that hole and come into the house and go to bed? I don't want to be kept awake all night."

"You don't need to be kept awake, Miss," said Mrs. Smithers, slowly filling up the hole. "The worst is 'ere already and wot's comin' is comin'

anyway, and besides," she added, as an afterthought, "there ain't a blessed one of 'em come 'ere at night since your uncle fixed over the house."

IX

Another

For the first time in her life, Mrs. Carr fully comprehended the sensations of a wild animal caught in a trap. In her present painful predicament, she was absolutely helpless, and she realised it. It was Harlan's house, as he had said, but so powerful and penetrating was the personality of the dead man that she felt as though it was still largely the property of Uncle Ebeneezer.

The portrait in the parlour gave her no light upon the subject, though she studied it earnestly. The face was that of an old man, soured and embittered by what Life had brought him, who seemed now to have a peculiarly malignant aspect. Dorothy fancied, in certain morbid moments, that Uncle Ebeneezer, from some safe place, was keenly relis.h.i.+ng the whole situation.

Upon her soul, too, lay heavily that ancient Law of the House, which demands unfailing courtesy to the stranger within our gates. Just why the eating of our bread and salt by some undesired guest should exert any particular charm of immunity, has long been an open question, but the Law remains.

She felt, dimly, that the end was not yet--that still other strangers were coming to the Jack-o'-Lantern for indefinite periods. She saw, now, why wing after wing had been added to the house, but could not understand the odd arrangement of the front windows. Through some inner sense of loyalty to Uncle Ebeneezer, she forebore to question either Mrs. Smithers or d.i.c.k--two people who could probably have given her some light on the subject. She had gathered, however, from hints dropped here and there, as well as from the overpowering evidence of recent events, that a horde of relatives swarmed each Summer at the queer house on the hilltop and remained until late Autumn.

Harlan said nothing, and nowadays Dorothy saw very little of him. Most of the time he was at work in the library, or else taking long, solitary rambles through the surrounding country. At meals he was moody and taciturn, his book obliterating all else from his mind.

He doubtless knew, subconsciously, that his house was disturbed by alien elements, but he dwelt too securely in the upper regions to be troubled by the obvious fact. Once in the library, with every door securely bolted, he could afford to laugh at the tumult outside, if, indeed, he should ever become aware of its existence. The children might make the very air vocal with their howls, Elaine might have hysterics, Mrs. Smithers render hymns in a cracked, squeaky voice, and d.i.c.k whistle eternally, but Harlan was in a strange new country, with a beautiful lady, a company of gallant knights, and a jester.

The rest was all unreal. He seemed to see people through a veil, to hear what they said without fully comprehending it, and to walk through his daily life blindly, without any sort of emotion. Worst of all, Dorothy herself seemed detached and dream-like. He saw that her face was white and her eyes sad, but it affected him not at all. He had yet to learn that in this, as in everything else, a price must inevitably be paid, and that the sudden change of all his loved realities to hazy visions was the terrible penalty of his craft.

Yet there was compensation, which is also inevitable. To him, the book was vital, reaching down into the very heart of the world. Fancy took his work, and, to the eyes of its creator, made it pa.s.sing fair. At times he would sit for an hour or more, nibbling at the end of his pencil, only negatively conscious, like one who stares fixedly at a blank wall.

Presently, Elaine and her company would come back again, and he would go on with them, writing down only what he saw and felt.

Chapter after chapter was written and tossed feverishly aside. The words beat in his pulses like music, each one with its own particular significance. In return for his personal effacement came moments of supremest joy, when his whole world was aflame with light, and colour, and sound, and his physical body fairly shook with ecstasy.

Little did he know that the Cup was in his hands, and that he was draining it to the very dregs of bitterness. For this temporary intoxication, he must pay in every hour of his life to come. Henceforward he was set apart from his fellows, painfully isolated, eternally alone. He should have friends, but only for the hour. The stranger in the street should be the same to him as one he had known for many years, and he should be equally ready, at any moment, to cast either aside. With a quick, merciless insight, like the knife of a surgeon used without an anaesthetic, he should explore the inmost recesses of every personality with which he came in contact, involuntarily, and find himself interested only as some new trait or capacity was revealed. Calm and emotionless, urged by some hidden power, he should try each individual to see of what he was made; observing the man under all possible circ.u.mstances, and at times enmes.h.i.+ng new circ.u.mstances about him. He should sacrifice himself continually if by so doing he could find the deep roots of the other man's selfishness, and, conversely, be utterly selfish if necessary to discover the other's power of self-sacrifice.

Unknowingly, he had ceased to be a man and had become a ferret. It was no light payment exacted in return for the pleasure of writing about Elaine.

He had the ability to live in any place or century he pleased, but he had paid for it by putting his present reality upon precisely the same footing. Detachment was his continually. Henceforth he was a spectator merely, without any particular concern in what pa.s.sed before his eyes.

Some people he should know at a glance, others in a week, a month, or a year. Across the emptiness between them, some one should clasp his hand, yet share no more his inner life than one who lies beside a dreamer and thinks thus to know where the other wanders on the strange trails of sleep.

In the dregs of the Cup lay the potential power to cast off his present life as a mollusk leaves his sh.e.l.l, and as completely forget it. For Love, and Death, and Pain are only symbols to him who is enslaved by the pen.

Moreover, he suffers always the pangs of an unsatisfied hunger, the exquisite torture of an unappeased and unappeasable thirst, for something which, like a will-o'-the-wisp, hovers ever above and beyond him, past the power of words to interpret or express.

It is often reproachfully said that one "makes copy" of himself and his friends--that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon and dissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was "botanising on his mother's grave," a pardonable confusion, perhaps, of facts and realities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives his books--and not much else. From t.i.tle to colophon, he escapes no pang, misses no joy. The life of the book is his from beginning to end. At the close of it, he has lived what his dream people have lived and borne the sorrows of half a dozen entire lifetimes, mercilessly concentrated into the few short months of writing.

One by one, his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation of books is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees ever the machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repet.i.tion in its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor, of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man has not appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only the mechanism is there. Mask-like, the author stands behind his Punch-and-Judy box, twitching the strings that move his marionettes, heedless of the fact that in his audience there must be a few who know him surely for what he is.

If only the transfiguring might of the Vision could be put into print, there would be little in the world save books. Happily heedless of the mockery of it all, Harlan laboured on, destined fully to sense his entire payment much later, suffer vicariously for a few hours on account of it, then to forget.

Dorothy, meanwhile, was learning a hard lesson. Harlan's changeless preoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it a manifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It had not occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan's thought into which she was not privileged to go. She had thought of marriage as a sort of miraculous welding of two individualities into one, and was perceiving that it changed nothing very much; that souls went on their way unaltered. She saw, too, that there was no one in the wide world who could share her every mood and tense, that ultimately each one of us lives and dies alone, within the sanctuary of his own inner self, cheered only by some pa.s.sing mood of friend or stranger, which chances to chime with his.

It was d.i.c.k who, blindly enough, helped her over many a hard place, and quickened her sense of humour into something upon which she might securely lean. He was too young and too much occupied with the obvious to look further, but he felt that Dorothy was troubled, and that it was his duty, as a man and a gentleman, to cheer her up.

Privately, he considered Harlan an amiable kind of a fool, who shut himself up needlessly in a musty library when he might be outdoors, or talking with a charming woman, or both. When he discovered that Harlan had hitherto earned his living by writing and hoped to continue doing it, he looked upon his host with profound pity. Books, to d.i.c.k, were among the things which kept life from being wholly pleasant and agreeable. He had gone through college because otherwise he would have been separated from his friends, and because a small legacy from a distant relative, who had considerately died at an opportune moment, enabled him to pay for his tuition and his despised books.

"I was never a pig, though," he explained to Dorothy, in a confidential moment. "There was one chump in our cla.s.s who wanted to know all there was in the book, and made himself sick trying to cram it in. All of a sudden, he graduated. He left college feet first, three on a side, with the cla.s.s walking slow behind him. I never was like that. I was sort of an epicure when it came to knowledge, tasting delicately here and there, and never greedy. Why, as far back as when I was studying algebra, I n.o.bly refused to learn the binomial theorem. I just read it through once, hastily, like taking one sniff at a violet, and then let it alone. The other fellows fairly gorged themselves with it, but I didn't--I had too much sense."

When Mr. Chester had been there a week, he gave Dorothy two worn and crumpled two-dollar bills.

"What's this?" she asked, curiously. "Where did you find it?"

"'Find it' is good," laughed d.i.c.k. "I earned it, my dear lady, in hard and uncongenial toil. It's my week's board."

"You're not going to pay any board here. You're a guest."

"Not on your life. You don't suppose I'm going to sponge my keep off anybody, do you? I paid Uncle Ebeneezer board right straight along and there's no reason why I shouldn't pay you. You can put that away in your sock, or wherever it is that women keep money, or else I take the next train. If you don't want to lose me, you have to accept four plunks every Monday. I've got lots of four plunks," he added, with a winning smile.

"Very well," said Dorothy, quite certain that she could not spare d.i.c.k.

"If it will make you feel any better about staying, I'll take it."

He had quickly made friends with Elaine, and the three made a more harmonious group than might have been expected under the circ.u.mstances.

With returning strength and health, Miss St. Clair began to take more of an interest in her surroundings. She gathered the white clover blossoms in which Dorothy tied up her pats of sweet b.u.t.ter, picked berries in the garden, skimmed the milk, helped churn, and fed the chickens.

d.i.c.k took entire charge of the cow, thus relieving Mrs. Smithers of an uncongenial task and winning her heartfelt grat.i.tude. She repaid him with unnumbered biscuits of his favourite kind and with many a savoury "snack"

between meals. He also helped Dorothy in many other ways. It was d.i.c.k who collected the eggs every morning and took them to the sanitarium, along with such other produce as might be ready for the market. He secured astonis.h.i.+ng prices for the things he sold, and set it down to man's superior business ability when questioned by his hostess. Dorothy never guessed that most of the money came out of his own pocket, and was charged up, in the ragged memorandum book which he carried, to "Elaine's board."

Miss St. Clair had never thought of offering compensation, and no one suggested it to her, but d.i.c.k privately determined to make good the deficiency, sure that a woman married to "a writing chump" would soon be in need of ready money if not actually starving at the time. That people should pay for what Harlan wrote seemed well-nigh incredible. Besides, though d.i.c.k had never read that "love is an insane desire on the part of a man to pay a woman's board bill for life," he took a definite satisfaction out of this secret expenditure, which he did not stop to a.n.a.lyse.

He brought back full price for everything he took to the "repair-shop," as he had irreverently christened the sanitarium, though he seldom sold much.

On the other side of the hill he had a small but select graveyard where he buried such unsalable articles as he could not eat. His appet.i.te was capricious, and Dorothy had frequently observed that when he came back from the long walk to the sanitarium, he ate nothing at all.

He established a furniture factory under a spreading apple tree at a respectable distance from the house, and began to remodel the black-walnut relics which were evidence of his kinsman's poor taste. He took many a bed apart, sc.r.a.ped off the disfiguring varnish, sandpapered and oiled the wood, and put it together in new and beautiful forms. He made several tables, a cabinet, a bench, half a dozen chairs, a set of hanging shelves, and even aspired to a desk, which, owing to the limitations of the material, was not wholly successful.

Dorothy and Elaine sat in rocking-chairs under the tree and encouraged him while he worked. One of them embroidered a simple design upon a burlap curtain while the other read aloud, and together they planned a shapely remodelling of the Jack-o'-Lantern. Fortunately, the woodwork was plain, and the ceilings not too high.

"I think," said Elaine, "that the big living room with the cas.e.m.e.nt windows will be perfectly beautiful. You couldn't have anything lovelier than this dull walnut with the yellow walls."

Whatever Mrs. Carr's thoughts might be, this simple sentence was usually sufficient to turn the current into more pleasant channels. She had planned to have needless part.i.tions taken out, and make the whole lower floor into one room, with only a dining-room, kitchen, and pantry back of it. She would take up the unsightly carpets, over which impossible plants wandered persistently, and have them woven into rag rugs, with green and brown and yellow borders. The floor was to be stained brown and the pine woodwork a soft, old green. Yellow walls and white net curtains, with the beautiful furniture d.i.c.k was making, completed a very charming picture in the eyes of a woman who loved her home.

Outspeeding it in her fancy was the finer, truer living which she believed lay beyond. Some day she and Harlan, alone once more, with the cobwebs of estrangement swept away, should begin a new and happier honeymoon in the transformed house. When the book was done--ah, when the book was done! But he was not reading any part of it to her now and would not let her begin copying it on the typewriter.

"I'll do it myself, when I'm ready," he said, coldly. "I can use a typewriter just as well as you can."

Dorothy sighed, unconsciously, for the woman's part is always to wait patiently while men achieve, and she who has learned to wait patiently, and be happy meanwhile, has learned the finest art of all--the art of life.

"Now," said d.i.c.k, "that's a peach of a table, if I do say it as shouldn't."

They readily agreed with him, for it was low and ma.s.sive, built on simple, dignified lines, and beautifully finished. The headboards of three ponderous walnut beds and the supporting columns of a hideous sideboard had gone into its composition, thus ill.u.s.trating, as Dorothy said, that ugliness may be changed to beauty by one who knows how and is willing to work for it.

The noon train whistled shrilly in the distance, and Dorothy started out of her chair. "She's afraid," laughed d.i.c.k, instantly comprehending.