Of Time and the River (86 page)

“When do we come to your place, Joel?” the other youth asked, when they had driven on in silence for a time. “How far is it?”

“What?” Joel whispered quickly, again turning his radiant and inquiring face. “OUR place? Oh!” he said. “We’re on our place now.”

“ON it?” the other stammered, after a moment’s bewildered pause. “But—but—where—I didn’t see a gate or anything—when?—”

“Oh,” Joel whispered, with an enlightened air. “THAT! We passed it.”

“PASSED it? Where?”

“When we turned in from the main road,” Joel whispered. “Do you remember?”

“The—the MAIN road?” the other stammered. “You—you mean—that concrete highway way back there?”

“Yes,” Joel whispered. “That was the entrance to our place—one of them. It’s not much of an entrance,” he whispered apologetically. “I don’t wonder that you couldn’t see it.”

“Then—then—everything since then—all we passed—all this—?” the other stammered.

“Yes,” Joel whispered, with his radiant, eager look, “that’s it. That’s our place. It’s really grand country,” he went on matter- of-factly. “I want to show you around tomorrow.”

They swept suddenly around a curve of the gravelled road, bordered with fragrant shrubs. Before them stretched out an immense sward of velvet lawn, darkened by the grand and silent stature of great trees. The car swept forward; through the tree-barred vista of the lawn, the outline of a house appeared. It was a dream-house, a house such as one sees only in a dream—the moonlight slept upon its soaring wings, its white purity, and gave the whole enormous structure an aerial delicacy, a fragile loveliness like some enchanted structure that one sees in dreams. And yet, for all this quality of dream-enchantment, there was something hauntingly familiar about it too. The car swept around the drive and halted before the moonlit façade of the house. A back porch level with the ground was flanked by tall, square columns of graceful, slender wood. To one side, far below, beyond the house, and the great moon-sweep of velvet, he could see the wink and glimmer of the Hudson River.

And suddenly that haunting sense of familiarity fused to a blind flash of recognition. The house was the house he had passed a dozen times in darkness, had seen a dozen times at morning from the windows of a speeding train along the river, as he hurtled citywards again from those blind night passages of desire and fury in a town called Troy.

They got out of the car. Joel took his valise, and like a person walking in a dream, he followed him across the porch, into a large and dimly lit entrance-hall. Joel put his valise down in the hall, and turning, whispered:

“Look. I’ll show you your room later. Mums and some other people are waiting for us on the terrace. Let’s go and say hello to them first.”

He nodded, unable to speak, and in silence followed his guide down the hall and through the house. Joel opened a door: the blazing moonlight fell upon the vast, swarded lawn and sleeping woods of that magic domain known as Far Field Farm. And that haunting and unearthly radiance fell as well upon the white wings of that magic house and on a group of its fortunate inhabitants who were sitting on the terrace.

The two young men went out: forms rose to greet them.

LX

A group of eight or ten people were gathered on the terrace. Joel introduced Eugene swiftly, quietly, in an eager, whispering voice, as always, with his fine, kind intuition, mindful of another person’s embarrassment and confusion: the moonlit figures rose, looked toward him, passed and swam and mixed around him in a blur of names and moon-white faces and politely murmured words. Then all the figures resolved themselves again into their former positions; he was standing beside Joel’s mother, looking at her with a helpless and bewildered face; she put one hand swiftly, lightly on his arm, and in a kind and quiet voice said to him: “You sit down here, next to me.”

Then she sat down again in her chair—a big, wicker chair with a vast, fan-shaped back, he sat down beside her, and sank gratefully into oblivion while the other people resumed their interrupted conversation.

“No, but—POLLY! SURELY not! You know, she actually did not go through with it?” said a strong, protesting voice, in which yet an eager curiosity was evident. “You know, they stopped the thing before she went the whole way?”

“My dear,” said Polly firmly—she had evidently been well named: in the moonlight her face showed sharp and pointed, with a big nose, and the shrewd, witty, and rather malicious features of a parrot— “my dear, I KNOW she DID. I was visiting Alice Bellamy at Newport when it happened: I got the whole story straight from her. The family were perfectly frantic—they were calling Hugh Bellamy up or running in to see him a dozen times a day to find out if something could be done—how to get it annulled—But I tell you,” Polly cried, shaking her head obstinately and speaking in a tone of unmistakable conviction, “—I know what I’m talking about! There’s no doubt about it whatever—she MARRIED him—the ceremony was ACTUALLY performed—”

“And she really LIVED with him—with this—this STABLE-BOY?”

“LIVED with him!” Polly cried. “My dear, they’d been living together for almost two weeks before old Dick Rossiter found them. Now, of course,” she said piously, but with a faint, malicious smirk, “—I don’t know what they’d been doing all that time— perhaps the whole affair had been quite idyllic, but—well, my dear, you can use your own imagination. My own experience with ostlers is rather limited, but I shouldn’t think they were particularly renowned for their platonic virtues.”

“No,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly, but with an unmistakable note of level and obdurate cynicism in her voice, “—nor Ellen Rossiter either—not if I know the breed! . . . After all,” she went on in a moment, in a voice that was characterized by its grimly quiet conviction, “what else could you expect out of that crowd? . . . There’s bad blood there! Bad blood in the whole lot of them,” her voice rose on a formidable and powerful note of unrelenting judgment. “—Everyone in Society knows that old Steve Buchanan, that girl’s grandfather, was a thorough-going rotter,” she bit the word off almost viciously. “His reputation was so bad that most people wouldn’t even have him in their house—that was the reason he spent the last twenty years of his life in France: he had become an outcast over here, no one would speak to him—he had to get out
Heavens! A STABLE-BOY!” she laughed again, and this time her laugh was almost hard and ugly. “What a blow to Myra— after all her years of scheming and contriving to get Timmy Wilson and his millions into the family! . . . I knew it! I knew it!” she shook her head with formidable, obstinate conviction. “I could have told them long ago they’d have trouble with that girl before they were done with her! There’s bad blood there! Of course, it was BOUND to happen, sooner or later, anyway—Myra’s a fool of the first water: she never had the brains of a rabbit. But to think!— Heavens! what a let-down after all her scheming: a stable-boy! I bet she had a fit!”

“Still,” suggested a young man named Howard, at this propitious moment, in his mincing, lisping, and effeminately mannered tone, “—as Irene Cartwright said, it was the only original thing that Ellen Rossiter ever did, and it was rather a pity to break the romance off. . . . I thought,” he went on casually, “that the story they told about the ostler was rather touching—asking her to send his letters back, you know!”

“No!” cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone. “Did he? . . . Well!” she went on eagerly. “And did she send them? . . . Go on, Howard!”

“But, of course,” said Howard. “And the wedding-ring, and everything else that he had given her. . . . I read the letter that he wrote her: it was really TOO pathetic—he said he was going with another girl—a housemaid, I believe—and he didn’t want it to get out that he had paid attentions to someone else. . . . ‘I have spoke it all over with my mother,’ he said,” Howard quoted drolly, “‘and she thinks the same as me, you ought to let me have them back’”—

“Oh, HOWARD!” Mrs. Pierce shrieked faintly. “You KNOW he didn’t! Simply PRICELESS!”

For a moment her splendid, even teeth flashed brilliantly in the moonlight: she lifted the long cigarette-holder in her hand and took a long, deliberate puff: the fragrant, acrid smoke of Turkish tobacco coiled upward in the moonlight air like filings of light steel. Turning to the young man beside her, she addressed him with the somewhat patient and dutiful kindliness of a person receiving a strange guest in her home for the first time.

“Well,” she said, “and how did you find the trip up? Did Joel frighten you out of your wits by his driving? He does everyone else.”

“Well, he did go pretty fast,” the youth admitted. “He had me hanging on once or twice—when we left the main road we took the curve on two wheels, but he seemed to know what he was doing.”

“I assure you,” said Mrs. Pierce, with a stern laugh, “that he does not. I wish I could share your confidence, but I can’t. I don’t think he has the faintest notion what he’s doing.”

“But, after all,” the very quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice of a young man whose name was George Thornton now took up the thread of the discussion—“after all, I should think that any reasonable man would be content with a speed of thirty-five or forty miles an hour. After all,” he said very quietly again, “perhaps the most important things in life are not to be got at through speed—perhaps all the things that are most worth living for are not to be had if we always go a mile a minute.”

“That’s just it, George!” Mrs. Pierce put in with decisive satisfaction. “That’s just it! Any reasonable man WOULD be content with thirty-five or forty miles an hour—but Joel is not reasonable. When he gets in a car he’s like a child that’s been given a new toy to play with for the first time.”

“The greatest things in life, the highest values,” George Thornton went on in his quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice, which now, despite the air of telling reasonableness with which he spoke— the air of temperance, moderation and control—was, somehow, indefinably tinged by a sombre fatality: the tone of a man whose extreme reasonableness comes from a fear of madness, whose temperance from some fatal impulse to insane excess—“the greatest things in life,” he went on in his quiet, toneless voice, almost as if he were talking to himself and had not heard what Mrs. Pierce had said—“are not to be got from machinery or speed, or any material object in the world whatever. . . . Christ,” he continued with his quiet, utterly reasonable, and implacable finality, “said that the greatest thing in life is love. Buddha said that the greatest thing in life is the illumination of the human spirit. Socrates found that man’s highest duty was obedience to his country’s laws. And Confucius, after weighing life and death against each other, found man’s only reason for living in keeping as many of the conventions of society as he could. . . . And that, Joel, perhaps is the real reason, the only reason, why you should not drive your car at reckless speed. . . . You break your country’s law by doing so . . . and you cause pain and worry and anxiety to other people who may love you. For that reason, if for nothing else, you ought not to do it.”

He delivered this judgment in his quiet and toneless voice, without vanity or arrogance, but with a finality that was almost prophetic and that left no room for argument. When he was done speaking there was a deep, impersonal silence for a moment, and then the voice of Joel’s sister, Rosalind—a voice that was still the voice of a girl, but that was also sweet and low and womanly, full of noble tenderness and warmth—could be heard in all its affectionate young impulsiveness:

“Oh, but, George!—you’re an ANGEL about everything! If everyone were like you, life would be heaven!” She took his hand between her strong, warm hands and squeezed it—an impulsive and natural gesture with her that revealed, as much as anything else, the deep and true affection of her nature. “—Darling,” she said, “—you make all of us—everyone else—feel so mean—and small—and—so petty. . . . I mean,” she went on with the earnest and naďve sincerity, the spontaneous admiration, of a generous and warm- spirited girl—“the way you live—the way you have spent your whole life, George, in helping other people—the way you have found out all these wonderful things about—about—Buddha and Confucius and Socrates—you KNOW so much, George!” she cried enthusiastically— “you have learned so much, while the rest of us were just leading an idle, stupid, empty kind of life—and the way you give it all away to others—the way you give your money away to anyone who needs it—the—the—way,” she faltered suddenly, and her voice was choked with tears—“the way you have looked after poor Dick all these years”—she blurted out.

“Rosalind!” Mrs. Pierce cried out sharply and warningly, yet not with reproof so much as with apprehension.

“I don’t care!” cried Rosalind impulsively—”I—I think he’s wonderful! George, you’re a SAINT!” she said, and clasped his hand again.

No one spoke for a moment: George sat quietly on the terrace step, his fine and small bronzed head, his very still eyes, in whose steady, quiet depths the fatal madness which would destroy him was already legible, turned out across the great sward of moon-drenched lawn towards the shine and wink and velvet mystery of the noble river far below. In the quality of silence that held all these people, there was a sense of profound emotion—the reference to “poor Dick” had touched some sorrowful fact that all of them knew about, and one could sense this deep feeling now in the stony silence that held all of them. It was broken in a moment by Mrs. Pierce, who betrayed, by the studied matter-of-factness of her tone, the emotion which she, too, had felt.