Virginia

"Getting along pretty well, then?"

"As well as I expected to."

"That"s good," said Cyrus mildly. "That"s good. I just dropped in to make sure that you were getting along, that"s all."

"Thank you," responded Oliver, and tried from the bottom of his soul to make the words sincere.

"If the time ever comes when you feel that you have changed your mind, I"ll find a place out at Matoaca City for you. I just wanted you to understand that I"d do as much for Henry"s son then as now. If you weren"t Henry"s son, I shouldn"t think twice about you."

"You mean that you"ll still give me the job if I stop writing plays?"

"Oh, I won"t make a point of that as long as it doesn"t interfere with your work. You may write in off hours as much as you want to. I won"t make a point of that."

"You mean to be generous, I can see--but I don"t think it likely that I shall ever make up my mind to take a regular job. I"m not built for it."

"You"re not thinking about getting married, then, I reckon?"

A dark flush rose to Oliver"s forehead, and turning away, he stared with unseeing eyes out of the window.

"No. I haven"t any intention of that," he responded.

A certain craftiness appeared in Cyrus"s face.

"Well, well, you"re young yet, and you may be in want of a wife before you"re many years older."

"I"m not the kind to marry. I"m too fond of my freedom."

"Most of us have felt like that at one time or another, but when the thought of a woman takes you by the throat, you"ll begin to see things differently. And if you ever do, a good steady job at twelve hundred a year will be what you"ll look out for."

"I suppose a man could marry on that down here," said Oliver, half unconscious that he was speaking aloud.

"I married on less, and I"ve known plenty of others that have done so. A good saving wife puts more into a man"s pocket than she takes out of it."

As he paused, Oliver"s attention, which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle"s marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst of it, the unkempt, slack figure of Belinda, with her bitter eyes and her sagging skirt, pa.s.sed perpetually under the flickering gas-jet up and down the dimly lighted staircase. This was how one marriage had ended--one marriage among many which had started out with pa.s.sion and courage and the belief in happiness. Knowing but little of the April brevity of his uncle"s mating impulse, he had mentally embroidered the bare instinct with some of the idealism in which his own emotion was clothed. His imagination pictured Cyrus and Belinda starting as light-hearted adventurers to sail the chartless seas of romance. What remained of their gallant ship to-day except a stark and battered hulk wrecked on the pitiless rocks of the actuality? A month ago that marriage had seemed merely ridiculous to him. Standing now beside the little window, where the wan face of evening, languid and fainting sweet, looked in from the purple twilight, he was visited by one of those rare flashes of insight which come to men of artistic sensibility after long periods of spiritual warfare. Pity stabbed him as sharply as ridicule had done a moment before, and with the first sense of human kinship he had ever felt to Cyrus, he understood suddenly the tragedy that underlies all comic things. Could there be a deeper pathos, after all, than simply being funny? This absurd old man, with his lean, crooked figure, his mottled skin, and his piercing bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an overgorged bird of prey, appeared now as an object that moved one to tears, not to laughter. And yet because of this very quality which made him pitiable--this vulture-like instinct to seize and devour the smaller--he stood to-day the most conspicuously envied figure in Dinwiddie.

"I"m not the kind of man to marry," he repeated, but his tone had changed.

"Well, perhaps you"re wise," said Cyrus, "but if you should ever want to----" The confidence which had gone out of Oliver had pa.s.sed into him.

With his strange power of reading human nature--masculine human nature, for the silliest woman could fool him hopelessly--he saw that his nephew was already beginning to struggle against the temptation to yield. And he was wise enough to know that this temptation would become stronger as soon as Oliver felt that the outside pressure was removed. The young man"s pa.s.sion was putting forward a subtler argument than Cyrus could offer.

When his visitor had gone, Oliver turned back to the window, and resting his arms on the sill, leaned out into the velvet softness of the twilight. His wide vision had deserted him. It was as if his gaze had narrowed down to a few roofs and the single street without a turning--but beyond them the thought of Virginia lay always like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom. To think of her was to pa.s.s from the scorching heat of the day to the freshness of dew-washed flowers under the starlight.

"It is impossible," he said aloud, and immediately, as if in answer to a challenge, a thousand proofs came to him that other men were doing the impossible every day. How many writers--great writers, too--would have jumped at a job on a railroad to insure them against starvation? How many had married young and faced the future on less than twelve hundred dollars a year? How many had let love lead them where it would without b.u.t.ting their brains forever against the d.a.m.ned wall of expediency?

"It"s impossible," he said again, and turning from the window, made himself ready to go out. While he brushed his hair and pulled the end of his necktie through the loop, his gaze wandered back over the roofs to where a solitary mimosa tree drooped against the lemon-coloured afterglow. The dust lay like gauze over the distance. Not a breath stirred. Not a leaf fell. Not a figure moved in the town--except the crouching figure of a stray cat that crawled, in search of food, along the brick wall under the dead tree.

"G.o.d! What a life!" he cried suddenly. And beyond this parching desert of the present he saw again that enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom, which was Virginia. His resolution, weakened by the long hot afternoon, seemed to faint under the pressure of his longing. All the burden of the day--the heat, the languor, the scorching thirst of the fields, the brazen blue of the sky, the stillness as of a suspended breath which wrapt the town--all these things had pa.s.sed into the intolerableness of his desire. He felt it like a hot wind blowing over him, and it seemed to him that he was as helpless as a leaf in the current of this wind which was sweeping him onward. Something older than his will was driving him; and this something had come to him from out the twilight, where the mimosa trees drooped like a veil against the afterglow.

Taking up his hat, he left the room and descended the stairs to the wide hall where Tom Peachey sat, gasping for breath, midway of two open doors.

"I"ll be darned if I can make a draught," muttered the old soldier irascibly, while he picked up his alpaca coat from the bal.u.s.trade, and slipped into it before going out upon the front porch into the possible presence of ladies. His usually cheerful face was clouded, for his habitual apathy had deserted him, and he had reached the painful decision that when you looked things squarely in the face there was precious little that was worth living for--a conclusion to which he had been brought by the simple accident of an overdose of Kentucky rye in his mint julep after church. The overdose had sent him to sleep too soon after his Sunday dinner, and when he had awakened from his heavy and by no means quiet slumber, he had found himself confronting a world of gloom.

"I"m d.a.m.ned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is the matter with me," he had remarked crossly to his wife.

"The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" that sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory over Cyrus.

"Well, I ain"t," honest Tom had retorted. "I"ve gone on pretending for fifty years and I"m going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It hasn"t put a roof on, has it?"

"I told you you oughtn"t to go to sleep right on top of your dinner,"

she had replied soothingly. "I declare you"re perfectly purple. I never saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you can"t find a draught. You know it"s downright sinful to talk that way after the Lord has been so good to you."

But Philosophy, though she is una.s.sailable when she clings to her safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an open engagement with the particular.

"W-what"s He done for me?" demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of him.

Driven against that bleak rock of fact upon which so many shining generalizations have come to wreck, Mrs. Peachey had cast about helplessly for some floating spar of logic which might bear her to the firm ground of established optimism. "I declare, Tom, I believe you are out of your head!" she exclaimed, adding immediately, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself to be so ungrateful when the good Lord has kept you out of the poorhouse. If you weren"t tipsy, I"d give you a hard shaking.

Now, you take that palm-leaf fan and go right straight downstairs."

So Tom had gone, for his wife, who lacked the gift of argument, possessed the energy of character which renders such minor attributes unnecessary; and Oliver, pa.s.sing through the hall a couple of hours later, found him still helplessly seeking the draught towards which she had directed him.

"Any chance of a breeze springing up?" inquired the young man as they moved together to the porch.

The force which was driving him out of the house into the suffocating streets was in his voice when he spoke, but honest Tom did not hear it.

After the four war years in which he had been almost sublime, the old soldier had gradually ceased even to be human, and that vegetable calm which envelops persons who have fallen into the habit of sitting still, had endowed him at last with the perfect serenity of a cabbage. The only active principle which ever moved in him was the borrowed principle of alcohol--for when that artificial energy subsided, he sank back, as he was beginning to do now, into the spiritual inertia which sustains those who have outlived their capacity for the heroic.

"I ain"t felt a breath," he replied, peering southward where the stars were coming out in a cloudless sky. "I don"t reckon we"ll get it till on about eleven."

"Looks as if we were in for a scorching summer, doesn"t it?"

"You never can tell. There"s always a spell in June." And he who had been a hero, sat down in his cane-bottomed chair and waved the palm-leaf fan feebly in front of him. He had had his day; he had fought his fight; he had helped to make the history of battles--and now what remained to him? The stainless memory of the four years when he was a hero; a smoldering ember still left from that flaming glory which was his soul!

In the street the dust lay thick and still, and the wilted foliage of the mulberry trees hung motionless from the great arching boughs. Only an aspen at the corner seemed alive and tremulous, while sensitive little shivers ran through the silvery leaves, which looked as if they were cut out of velvet. As Oliver left the house, the town awoke slowly from its lethargy, and the sound of laughter floated to him from the porches behind their screens of honeysuckle or roses. But even this laughter seemed to him to contain the burden of weariness which oppressed and disenchanted his spirit. The pall of melancholy spread from the winding yellow river at the foot of the hill to the procession of cedars which stood pitch-black against the few dim stars on the eastern horizon.

"What is the use?" he asked himself suddenly, uttering aloud that grim question which lies always beneath the vivid, richly cl.u.s.tering impressions in the imaginative mind. Of his struggle, his sacrifice--of his art even--what was the use? A bitter despondency--the crushing despondency of youth which age does not feel and has forgotten--weighed upon him like a physical burden. And because he was young and not without a certain pride in the intensity of his suffering, he increased his misery by doggedly refusing to trace it back to its natural origin in an empty stomach.

But the laws that govern the variable mind of man are as inscrutable as the secret of light. Turning into a cross street, he came upon the tower of Saint James" Church, and he grew suddenly cheerful. The quickening of his pulses changed the aspect of the town as completely as if an invigorating shower had fallen upon it. The supreme, haunting interest of life revived.

He had meant merely to pa.s.s the rectory without stopping; but as he turned into the slanting street at the foot of the twelve stone steps, he saw a glimmer of white on the terrace, and the face of Virginia looked down at him over the palings of the gate. Immediately it seemed to him that he had known from the beginning that he should meet her. A sense of recognition so piercingly sweet that it stirred his pulses like wine was in his heart as he moved towards her. The whole universe appeared to him to have been planned and perfected for this instant. The languorous June evening, the fainting sweetness of flowers, the strange lemon-coloured afterglow, and her face, shining there like a star in the twilight--these had waited for him, he felt, since the beginning of earth. That fatalistic reliance upon an outside Power, which a.s.sumed for him the radiant guise of first love, and for Susan the stark certainties of Presbyterianism, dominated him as completely as if he were the predestined vehicle of its expression. Ardent, yet pa.s.sive, Virginia leaned above him on the dim terrace. So still she seemed that her breath left her parted lips as softly as the perfume detached itself from the opening rose-leaves. She made no gesture, she said no word--but suddenly he became aware that her stillness was stronger to draw him than any speech. All her woman"s mystery was brooding there about her in the June twilight; and in this strange strength of quietness Nature had placed, for once, an invincible weapon in the weaker hands. Her appeal had become a part of the terrible and beneficent powers of Life.

Crossing the street, he went up the steps to where she leaned on the gate.

"It has been so long," he said, and the words seemed to him hideously empty. "I have not seen you but three times since the party."

She did not answer, and as he looked at her closer, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

"Virginia!" he cried out sharply, and the next instant, at her first movement away from him, his arms were around her and his lips seeking hers.

The world stopped suddenly while a starry eternity enveloped them. All youth was packed into that minute, all the troubled sweetness of desire, all the fugitive ecstasy of fulfilment.