The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (99 page)

Mrs. Fanhall, with the two children, the Worcester girls, and Hollanden, clambered down the rocky path. Miss Fanhall and Hawker had remained on top of the ledge. Hollanden showed much zeal in conducting his contingent to the foot of the falls. Through the trees they could see the cataract, a great shimmering white thing, booming and thundering until all the leaves gently shuddered.

“I wonder where Miss Fanhall and Mr. Hawker have gone?” said the younger Miss Worcester. “I wonder where they’ve gone?”

“Millicent,” said Hollander, looking at her fondly, “you always had such great thought for others.”

“Well, I wonder where they’ve gone?”

At the foot of the falls, where the mist arose in silver clouds and the green water swept into the pool, Miss Worcester, the elder, seated on the moss, exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Hollanden, what makes all literary men so peculiar?”

“And all that just because I said that I could have made better digestive organs than Providence, if it is true that he made mine,” replied Hollanden, with reproach. “Here, Roger,” he cried, as he dragged the child away from the brink, “don’t fall in there, or you won’t be the full-back at Yale in 1907, as you have planned. I’m sure I don’t know how to answer you, Miss Worcester. I’ve inquired of innumerable literary men, and none of ’em know. I may say I have chased that problem for years. I might give you my personal history, and see if that would throw any light on the subject.” He looked about him with chin high until his glance had noted the two vague figures at the top of the cliff. “I might give you my personal history — —”

Mrs. Fanhall looked at him curiously, and the elder Worcester girl cried, “Oh, do!”

After another scanning of the figures at the top of the cliff, Hollanden established himself in an oratorical pose on a great weather-beaten stone. “Well — you must understand — I started my career — my career, you understand — with a determination to be a prophet, and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carved upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves. I was informed from time to time that I was making no great holes in the universal plan, and I came to know that one person in every two thousand of the people I saw had heard of me, and that four out of five of these had forgotten it. And then one in every two of those who remembered that they had heard of me regarded the fact that I wrote as a great impertinence. I admitted these things, and in defence merely builded a maxim that stated that each wise man in this world is concealed amid some twenty thousand fools. If you have eyes for mathematics, this conclusion should interest you. Meanwhile I created a gigantic dignity, and when men saw this dignity and heard that I was a literary man they respected me. I concluded that the simple campaign of existence for me was to delude the populace, or as much of it as would look at me. I did. I do. And now I can make myself quite happy concocting sneers about it. Others may do as they please, but as for me,” he concluded ferociously, “I shall never disclose to anybody that an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, a juggler of comic paragraphs, is not a priceless pearl of art and philosophy.”

“I don’t believe a word of it is true,” said Miss Worcester.

“What do you expect of autobiography?” demanded Hollanden, with asperity.

“Well, anyhow, Hollie,” exclaimed the younger sister, “you didn’t explain a thing about how literary men came to be so peculiar, and that’s what you started out to do, you know.”

“Well,” said Hollanden crossly, “you must never expect a man to do what he starts to do, Millicent. And besides,” he went on, with the gleam of a sudden idea in his eyes, “literary men are not peculiar, anyhow.”

The elder Worcester girl looked angrily at him. “Indeed? Not you, of course, but the others.”

“They are all asses,” said Hollanden genially.

The elder Worcester girl reflected. “I believe you try to make us think and then just tangle us up purposely!”

The younger Worcester girl reflected. “You are an absurd old thing, you know, Hollie!”

Hollanden climbed offendedly from the great weather-beaten stone. “Well, I shall go and see that the men have not spilled the luncheon while breaking their necks over these rocks. Would you like to have it spread here, Mrs. Fanhall? Never mind consulting the girls. I assure you I shall spend a great deal of energy and temper in bullying them into doing just as they please. Why, when I was in Brussels — —”

“Oh, come now, Hollie, you never were in Brussels, you know,” said the younger Worcester girl.

“What of that, Millicent?” demanded Hollanden. “This is autobiography.”

“Well, I don’t care, Hollie. You tell such whoppers.”

With a gesture of despair he again started away; whereupon the Worcester girls shouted in chorus, “Oh, I say, Hollie, come back! Don’t be angry. We didn’t mean to tease you, Hollie — really, we didn’t!”

“Well, if you didn’t,” said Hollanden, “why did you — —”

The elder Worcester girl was gazing fixedly at the top of the cliff. “Oh, there they are! I wonder why they don’t come down?”

Stanley, the setter, walked to the edge of the precipice and, looking over at the falls, wagged his tail in friendly greeting. He was braced warily, so that if this howling white animal should reach up a hand for him he could flee in time.

The girl stared dreamily at the red-stained crags that projected from the pines of the hill across the stream. Hawker lazily aimed bits of moss at the oblivious dog and missed him.

“It must be fine to have something to think of beyond just living,” said the girl to the crags.

“I suppose you mean art?” said Hawker.

“Yes, of course. It must be finer, at any rate, than the ordinary thing.”

He mused for a time. “Yes. It is — it must be,” he said. “But then — I’d rather just lie here.”

The girl seemed aggrieved. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t stop. It’s dreadful to talk like that, isn’t it? I always thought that painters were — —”

“Of course. They should be. Maybe they are. I don’t know. Sometimes I am. But not to-day.”

“Well, I should think you ought to be so much more contented than just ordinary people. Now, I — —”

“You!” he cried—”you are not ‘just ordinary people.’”

“Well, but when I try to recall what I have thought about in my life, I can’t remember, you know. That’s what I mean.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” he told her.

“But why do you insist that life should be so highly absorbing for me?”

“You have everything you wish for,” he answered, in a voice of deep gloom.

“Certainly not. I am a woman.”

“But — —”

“A woman, to have everything she wishes for, would have to be Providence. There are some things that are not in the world.”

“Well, what are they?” he asked of her.

“That’s just it,” she said, nodding her head, “no one knows. That’s what makes the trouble.”

“Well, you are very unreasonable.”

“What?”

“You are very unreasonable. If I were you — an heiress — —”

The girl flushed and turned upon him angrily.

“Well!” he glowered back at her. “You are, you know. You can’t deny it.”

She looked at the red-stained crags. At last she said, “You seemed really contemptuous.”

“Well, I assure you that I do not feel contemptuous. On the contrary, I am filled with admiration. Thank Heaven, I am a man of the world. Whenever I meet heiresses I always have the deepest admiration.” As he said this he wore a brave hang-dog expression. The girl surveyed him coldly from his chin to his eyebrows. “You have a handsome audacity, too.”

He lay back in the long grass and contemplated the clouds.

“You should have been a Chinese soldier of fortune,” she said.

He threw another little clod at Stanley and struck him on the head.

“You are the most scientifically unbearable person in the world,” she said.

Stanley came back to see his master and to assure himself that the clump on the head was not intended as a sign of serious displeasure. Hawker took the dog’s long ears and tried to tie them into a knot.

“And I don’t see why you so delight in making people detest you,” she continued.

Having failed to make a knot of the dog’s ears, Hawker leaned back and surveyed his failure admiringly. “Well, I don’t,” he said.

“You do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You just say the most terrible things as if you positively enjoyed saying them.”

“Well, what did I say, now? What did I say?”

“Why, you said that you always had the most extraordinary admiration for heiresses whenever you met them.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that sentiment?” he said. “You can’t find fault with that!”

“It is utterly detestable.”

“Not at all,” he answered sullenly. “I consider it a tribute — a graceful tribute.”

Miss Fanhall arose and went forward to the edge of the cliff. She became absorbed in the falls. Far below her a bough of a hemlock drooped to the water, and each swirling, mad wave caught it and made it nod — nod — nod. Her back was half turned toward Hawker.

After a time Stanley, the dog, discovered some ants scurrying in the moss, and he at once began to watch them and wag his tail.

“Isn’t it curious,” observed Hawker, “how an animal as large as a dog will sometimes be so entertained by the very smallest things?”

Stanley pawed gently at the moss, and then thrust his head forward to see what the ants did under the circumstances.

“In the hunting season,” continued Hawker, having waited a moment, “this dog knows nothing on earth but his master and the partridges. He is lost to all other sound and movement. He moves through the woods like a steel machine. And when he scents the bird — ah, it is beautiful! Shouldn’t you like to see him then?”

Some of the ants had perhaps made war-like motions, and Stanley was pretending that this was a reason for excitement. He reared aback, and made grumbling noises in his throat.

After another pause Hawker went on: “And now see the precious old fool! He is deeply interested in the movements of the little ants, and as childish and ridiculous over them as if they were highly important. — There, you old blockhead, let them alone!”

Stanley could not be induced to end his investigations, and he told his master that the ants were the most thrilling and dramatic animals of his experience.

“Oh, by the way,” said Hawker at last, as his glance caught upon the crags across the river, “did you ever hear the legend of those rocks yonder? Over there where I am pointing? Where I’m pointing? Did you ever hear it? What? Yes? No? Well, I shall tell it to you.” He settled comfortably in the long grass.