"I can"t tell you. Anyway, it won"t last. It can"t, ... Can it?"
She looked around at him, and they both laughed a little at her inconsequence.
"I feel better for pretending to tell you, anyway," she said, as they halted before high iron gates hung between two granite posts from which the woven wire fence of the game park, ten feet high, stretched away into the darkening woods on either hand.
"This is the Sachem"s Gate," she said; "here is the key; unlock it, please."
Inside they crossed a stream dashing between tanks set with fern and tall silver birches.
"Hurryon Brook," she said. "Isn"t it a beauty? It pours into the Gray Water a little farther ahead. We must hasten, or it will be too dark to see the trout."
Twice again they crossed the rushing brook on log bridges. Then through the trees stretching out before them they caught sight of the Gray Water, crinkling like a flattened sheet of hammered silver.
Everywhere the surface was starred and ringed and spattered by the jumping fish; and now they could hear them far out, splash! slap!
clip-clap! splash!--hundreds and hundreds jumping incessantly, so that the surface of the water was constantly broken over the entire expanse.
Now and then some great trout, dark against the glimmer, leaped full length into the air; everywhere fish broke, swirled, or rolled over, showing "colour."
"There is Scott," she whispered, attuning her voice to the forest quiet--"out there in that canoe. No, he hasn"t taken his rod; he seldom does; he"s perfectly crazy over things of this sort. All day and half the night he"s out prowling about the woods, not fishing, not shooting, just mousing around and listening and looking. And for all his dreadfully expensive collection of arms and rods, he uses them very little. See him out there drifting about with the fish breaking all around--some within a foot of his canoe! He"ll never come in to dress for dinner unless we call him."
And she framed her mouth with both hands and sent a long, clear call floating out across the Gray Water.
"All right; I"ll come!" shouted her brother. "Wait a moment!"
They waited many moments. Dusk, lurking in the forest, peered out, casting a gray net over sh.o.r.e and water. A star quivered, another, then ten, and scores and myriads.
They had found a seat on a fallen log; neither seemed to have very much to say. For a while the steady splashing of the fish sounded like the uninterrupted music of a distant woodland waterfall. Suddenly it ceased as if by magic. Not another trout rose; the quiet was absolute.
"Is not this stillness delicious?" she breathed.
"It is sweeter when you break it."
"Please don"t say such things.... _Can"t_ you understand how much I want you to be sincere to me? Lately, I don"t know why, I"ve seemed to feel so isolated. When you talk that way I feel more so. I--just want--a friend."
There was a silence; then he said lightly:
"I"ve felt that way myself. The more friends I make the more solitary I seem to be. Some people are fashioned for a self-imprisonment from which they can"t break out, and through which no one can penetrate. But I never thought of you as one of those."
"I seem to be at times--not exactly isolated, but unable to get close to--to Kathleen, for example. Do you know, Duane, it might be very good for me to have you to talk to."
"People usually like to talk to me. I"ve noticed it. But the curious part of it is that they have nothing to give me in exchange for my attention."
"What do you mean?"
He laughed. "Oh, nothing. I amuse people; I know it. You--and everybody--say I am all cleverness and froth--not to be taken seriously.
But did it ever occur to you that what you see in me you evoke.
Shallowness provokes shallowness, levity, lightness, inconsequence--all are answered by their own echo.... And you and the others think it is I who answer."
He laughed, not looking at her:
"And it happens that you--and the others--are mistaken. If I appear to be what you say I am, it is merely a form of self-defence. Do you think I could endure the empty nonsense of a New York winter if I did not present to it a surface like a sounding-board and let Folly converse with its own echo--while, behind it, underneath it, Duane Mallett goes about his own business."
Astonished, not clearly understanding, she listened in absolute silence.
Never in all her life had she heard him speak in such a manner. She could not make out whether bitterness lay under his light and easy speech, whether a maliciously perverse humour lurked there, whether it was some new mockery.
He said carelessly: "I give what I receive. And I have never received any very serious attention from anybody. I"m only Duane Mallett, identified with the wealthy section of society you inhabit, the son of a wealthy man, who went abroad and dabbled in colour and who paints pictures of pretty women. Everybody and the newspapers know me. What I see of women is a polished coquetry that mirrors my fixed smirk; what I see of men is less interesting."
He looked out through the dusk at the darkening water:
"You say you are beginning to feel isolated. Can anybody with any rudiment of intellect feel otherwise in the social environment you and I inhabit--where distinction and inherited position count for absolutely nothing unless propped up by wealth--where any a.s.s is tolerated whose fortune and lineage pa.s.s inspection--where there is no place for intelligence and talent, even when combined with breeding and lineage, unless you are properly ballasted with money enough to forget that you have any?"
He laughed.
"So you feel isolated? I do, too. And I"m going to get out. I"m tired of decorating a set where the shuttle-c.o.c.k of conversation is worn thin, frayed, ragged! Where the battledore is fashionable scandal and the players half dead with ennui and their neighbour"s wives----"
"Duane!"
"Oh, Lord, you"re a world-wise graduate at twenty-two! Truth won"t shock you, more"s the pity.... As for the game--I"m done with it; I can"t stand it. The amus.e.m.e.nt I extract doesn"t pay. Good G.o.d! and you wonder why I kiss a few of you for distraction"s sake, press a finger-tip or two, brush a waist with my sleeve!"
He laughed unpleasantly, and bent forward in the darkness, clasped hands hanging between his knees.
"Duane," she said in astonishment, "what do you mean? Are you trying to quarrel with me, just when, for the first time, something in this new forest country seemed to be drawing us together, making us the comrades we once were?"
"We"re too old to be comrades. That"s book rubbish. Men and women have nothing in common, intellectually, unless they"re in love. For company, for straight conversation, for business, for sport, a man would rather be with men. And either you and I are like everybody else or we"re going to really care for each other. Not for your pretty face and figure, or for my grin, my six feet, and thin shanks; I can care for face and figure in any woman. What"s the use of marrying for what you"ll scarcely notice in a month?... If you _are you_, Geraldine, under all your attractive surface there"s something else which you have never given me."
"Wh--what?" she asked faintly.
"Intelligent interest in me."
"Do you mean," she said slowly, "that you think I underestimate you?"
"Not as I am. I don"t amount to much; but I might if you cared."
"Cared for you?"
"No, confound it! Cared for what I could be."
"I--I don"t think I understand. What could you be?"
"A man, for one thing. I"m a thing that dances. A fashionable portrait painter for another. The combination is horrible."
"You are a successful painter."
"Am I? Geraldine, in all the small talk you and I have indulged in since my return from abroad, have you ever asked me one sincere, intelligent, affectionate question about my work?"
"I--yes--but I don"t know anything about----"
He laughed, and it hurt her.