The Silent Battle
Not satisfied with the rapidity of her diagnosis, he thrust his hand toward her for confirmation.
“I haven’t any fever, have I?”
Her fingers lightly touched his wrist.
“I’m afraid so. Your pulse is thumping pretty fast.”
“Very fast?”
“Yes.”
“You must be mistaken.”
“No, you have fever. You’ll have to rest to-day.”
“I don’t want to rest. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
“You must!” she said peremptorily. “There’s nothing but the firewood. I can get that.”
“There’s the shack to build,” he said.
“The shack must wait,” she replied.
“And the deer to be butchered?”
She looked at the carcass and then put her fingers over her eyes. But she looked up at him resolutely.
“Yes,” she persisted, “I’ll do that, too—if you’ll show me how.”
He looked at her a moment with a soft light in his deep-set eyes and then rose heavily to his feet.
“It’s very kind of you to want to make me an invalid,” he said, “but that can’t be. There’s nothing wrong with me. What I want is work. The more I have the better I’ll feel. I’m going to skin the deer.” And disregarding her protests, he leaned over and caught up the hind-legs of the creature, dragging it into the bushes.
The effort cost him a violent throbbing in the head and pains like little needle pricks through his body. His eyes swam and the hand that held his knife was trembling; but after a while he finished his work, and cutting a strong young twig, thrust it through the tendons of the hind legs and carried the meat back to camp, hanging it high on a projecting branch near the fire.
She watched him moving slowly about, but covered her eyes at the sight of his red hands and the erubescent carcass.
“Don’t you feel like a murderer?” she asked.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I think I do; half of me does—but the hunter, the primitive man in me is rejoicing. There’s an instinct in all of us that belongs to a lower order of creation.”
“But it—it’s unclean–”
“Then all meat is unclean. The reproach is on the race—not on us. After all we are only first cousins to the South-Sea gentlemen who eat one another,” he laughed.
“I don’t believe I can eat it,” she shuddered.
“Oh, yes, you will—when you’re hungry.”
“I’ll never eat meat again,” she insisted. “Never! The brutality of it!”
“What’s the difference?” he laughed. “In town we pay a butcher to do our dirty work—here we do it ourselves. Our responsibilities are just as great there as here.”
“That’s true—I never thought of that, but I can’t forget that creature’s eyes.” And while she looked soberly into the fire, he went down to the stream and cleansed himself, washing away all traces of his unpleasant task. When he returned she still sat as before.
“Why is it?” she asked thoughtfully, “that the animal appetites are so repellent, since we ourselves are animals? And yet we tolerate gluttony—drunkenness among our kind? We’re only in a larva state after all.”
He had sunk on the log beside her for the comfort of the blaze, and as she spoke the shadows under his brows darkened with his frown and the chin beneath its stubble hardened in deep lines.
“I sometimes think that Thoreau had the right idea of life,” she said slowly. “There are infinite degrees of gluttony—infinite degrees of drunkenness. I felt shame for you just now—for myself—for the blood on your hands. I can’t explain it. It seemed different from everything else that you have done here in the woods, for the forest is clean, sweet-smelling. I did not like to feel ashamed for you. You see,” she smiled, “I’ve been rating you very highly.”
“No,” he groaned, his head in his hands. “Don’t! You mustn’t do that!”
At the somber note she turned and looked at him keenly. She could not see his face, but the fingers that hid it were trembling.
“You’re ill!” she gasped. “Your body is shaking.”
He sat up with an effort and his face was the color of ashes.
“No, it’s nothing. Just a chill, I think. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
But she put her arm around him and made him sit on the log nearest to the fire.
“This won’t do at all,” she said anxiously. “You’ve got to take care of yourself—to let me take care of you. Here! You must drink this.”
She had taken the flask from her pocket and before he knew it had thrust it to his lips. He hesitated a moment, his eyes staring into space and then without question, drank deep, his eyes closed.
And as the leaping fires went sparkling through his body, he set the vessel down, screwed on the lid and put it on the log beside him. Two dark spots appeared beneath the tan and mounted slowly to his temples, two red spots like the flush of shame. An involuntary shudder or two and the trembling ceased. Then he sat up and looked at her.
“A mustard foot-bath and some quinine, please,” he asked with a queer laugh.
But she refused to smile. “You slept in your soaking clothes last night,” severely.
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed again.
“That’s nothing. I’ve done that often. Besides, what else could I do? If you had wakened me–”
“That is unkind.”
She was on the verge of tears. So he got to his feet quickly and shaking himself like a shaggy dog, faced her almost jauntily.
“I’m right as a trivet,” he announced. “And I’m going to call you Hebe—the cup-bearer to the gods—or Euphrosyne. Which do you like the best?”
“I don’t like either,” she said with a pucker at her brow. And then with the demureness which so became her. “My name is—is Jane.”
“Jane!” he exclaimed. “Jane! of course. Do you know I’ve been wondering, ever since we’ve been here what name suited you best, Phyllis, Millicent, Elizabeth, and a dozen others I’ve tried them all; but I’m sure now that Jane suits you best of all. Jane!” he chuckled gleefully. “Yes, it does—why, it’s you. How could I ever have thought of anything else?”
Her lips pouted reluctantly and finally broke into laughter, which showed her even white teeth and discovered new dimples.
“Do you really like it?”
“How could I help it? It’s you, I tell you—so sound, sane, determined and a little prim, too.”
“I’m not prim.”
“Yes,” he decided, “you’re prim—when you think that you ought to be.”
“Oh.”
He seated himself beside her, looking at her quizzically as though she was a person he had never seen before—as though the half-identity she provided had invested her with new and unexpected attributes.
“It was nice of you to tell me. My name is Phil,” he said.
“Is it?” she asked almost mechanically.
“Yes, don’t you like it?”
Her glance moved quickly from one object to another—the shelter, the balsam bed, and the crutch which leaned against the door flap.
“Don’t you like it?” he repeated eagerly.
“No,” quietly. “It isn’t like you at all.”
Probed for a reason, she would give none, except the woman’s reason which was no reason at all. Only when he ceased probing did she give it, and then voluntarily.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to change it then,” he laughed.
“Yes, change it, please. The only Phils I’ve ever known were men of a different stripe—men without purposes, without ambitions.” And then, after a pause, “I believe you to be different.”
“No! I have no purposes—no ambitions,” he said glowering again at the fire.
“That is not true.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you have ideals—of purity, of virtue, of courage.”
“No,” he mumbled, “I have no ideals. Life is a joke—without a point. If it has any, I haven’t discovered it yet.”
Her eyes sought his face in a vague disquiet, but he would not meet her look. The flush on his cheek had deepened, his gaze roved dully from one object to another and his fingers moved aimlessly upon his knees. She had proved him for three days, she thought, with the test of acid and the fire, but she did not know him at this moment. The thing that she had discovered and recognized as the clean white light of his inner genius had been suddenly smothered. She could not understand. His words were less disturbing than his manner, and his voice sounded gruff and unfamiliar to her ears.
She rose quietly and moved away, and he did not follow her. He did not even turn his head and for all she knew was not aware that she had gone. This was unlike him, for there had never been a moment since they had met when she could have questioned his chivalry, his courtesy or good manners. Her mind was troubled vaguely, like the surface of a lake which trembles at the distant storm.
A walk through the forest soothed her. The brook—her brook and his—sang as musically as before, the long drawn aisles had not changed, and the note of praise still swelled among the fretted vaults above. The birds made light of their troubles, too, and the leaves were whispering joyously the last gossip of the wood. What they said she could not guess, but she knew by the warm flush that had risen to her cheeks that it must be personal.
When she returned to camp her arms were full of asters and cardinal flowers. He greeted her gravely, with an almost too elaborate politeness.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” he begged her. “I don’t think I’m quite myself to-day.”
“Are you feeling better?” she questioned.
“Yes, I’m quite—quite comfortable. I was afraid I had offended you.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t understand you for a moment. That was all.” She lifted the flowers so that he might see them better. “I’ve brought these for our lunch-table.”
But he did not look at them. His eyes, still glowing unfamiliarly, sought only hers.
“Will you forgive me?”
“Yes, of course,” lightly.
“I want—I want your friendship. I can’t tell you how much. I didn’t say anything that offended you, did I? I felt pretty seedy. Everything seemed to be slipping away from me.”
“Not now?”
“Oh, no. I’m all right.”
He took the flowers from her arms and laid them at the foot of a tree. Then coming forward he thrust out both his hands suddenly and took her by the elbows.
“Jane!” he cried, “Jane! Look up into my eyes! I want you to see what you’ve written there. Why haven’t you ever seen it? Why wouldn’t you look and read? It’s madness, perhaps; but if it’s madness, then madness is sweet—and all the world is mad with me. There isn’t any world. There’s nothing but you and me—and Arcadia.”
She had turned her gaze to the ground and would not look at him but she struggled faintly in his embrace. The color was gone from her cheeks now and beneath the long lashes that swept her cheek—one great tear trembled and fell.
“No, no—you mustn’t,” she whispered, stifling. “It can’t—it mustn’t be. I don’t–”
But he had seized her more closely in his arms and shackled her lips with his kisses.
“I’m mad—I know—but I want you, Jane. I love you—I love you—I want the woods to hear–”
She wrenched one arm free and pushed away, her eyes wide, for the horror of him had dawned slowly.
“Oh!” she gasped. “You!”
As he seized her again, she drew back, mad with fear, shrunken within herself, like a snake in a thicket coiling itself to thrust and then struck viciously.
He felt the impact of a blow full in the face and staggered back releasing her. And her accents, sharp, cruel, vicious, clove the silence like sword-cuts.
“You cad! You brute! You utter brute!”
He came forward like a blind man, mumbling incoherently, but she avoided him easily, and fled.
“Jane!” he called hoarsely. “Come back to me, Jane. Come back to me! Oh, God!”
He stumbled and fell; then rose again, putting his hands to his face and running heavily toward the spot where she had vanished into the bushes—the very spot where three days ago she had appeared to him. He caught a glimpse of her ahead of him and blundered on, calling for forgiveness. There was no reply but the echo of his own voice, nor any glimpse of her. After that he remembered little, except that he went on and on, tripping, falling, tearing his face and clothes in the briars, getting to his feet and going on again, mad with the terror of losing her—an instinct only, an animal in search of its wounded mate.
He did not know how long he strove or how far, but there came a time when he fell headlong among some boulders and could rise no more.
That morning two Indian guides in search of a woman who had been lost, met another Indian at the headwaters of a stream, and together they followed a fresh trail—the trail of a big man wearing hob-nailed boots and carrying a burden. In the afternoon they found an empty shack beside which a fire was burning. Two creels hung side by side near the fire and upon the limb of a tree was the carcass of a deer. There were many trails into the woods—some made by the feet of a woman, some by the feet of a man.
The three guides sat at the fire for awhile and smoked, waiting.
Then two of them got up and after examining the smaller foot-marks silently disappeared. When they had gone the third guide, a puzzled look on his face, picked up an object which had fallen under a log and examined it with minute interest. Then with a single guttural sound from his throat, put the object in his pocket and bending well forward, his eyes upon the ground, glided noiselessly through the underbrush after them.
VII
ALLEGRO
A storm of wind and rain had fallen out of the Northwest, and in a night had blown seaward the lingering tokens of Autumn. The air was chill, the sunshine pale as calcium light, and distant buildings came into focus, cleanly cut against the sparkling sky at the northern end of the Avenue; jets of steam appeared overhead and vanished at once into space; flags quivered tensely at their poles; fast flying squadrons of clouds whirled on to their distant rendezvous, their shadows leaping skyward along the sunlit walls. In a stride Winter had come. The city had taken a new tempo. The adagio of Indian Summer had come to a pause in the night; and with the morning, the baton of winter quickened its beat as the orchestra of city sounds swung into the presto movement. Upon the Avenue shop-windows bloomed suddenly with finery; limousines and broughams, new or refurbished, with a glistening of polished nickel and brass, drew up along the curbs to discharge their occupants who descended, briskly intent on the business of the minute, in search of properties and backgrounds for the winter drama.
In the Fifth Avenue window of the Cosmos Club, some of the walking gentlemen gathered in the afternoon and were already rehearsing the familiar choruses. All summer they had played the fashionable circuit of house-parties at Narragansett, Newport and other brief stands, and all recounted the tales of the road, glad at last to be back in their own corners, using the old lines, the old gestures, the old cues with which they had long been familiar.
If its summer pilgrimage had worked any hardship, the chorus at the windows of the Cosmos Club gave no sign of it. It was a well-fed chorus, well-groomed, well-tailored and prosperous. Few members of it had ever played a “lead” or wished to; for the tribulations of star-dom were great and the rewards uncertain, so they played their parts comfortably far up-stage against the colorful background.
Colonel Broadhurst took up the glass which Percy Endicott had ordered and regarded it ponderously.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” he asked sententiously of no one in particular, “pretty, innocent, winking bubbles! Little hopes rising and bursting.”
“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,” put in the thirsty Percy promptly. “Luck, Colonel!” and drank.
With a long sigh the Colonel lifted his glass. “Why do we do it?” he asked again. “There’s nothing—positively nothing in it.”
“You never said a truer thing,” laughed Ogden Spencer, for the Colonel had set his empty glass upon the table.
“Oh, for the days of sunburnt mirth—of youth and the joyful Hippocrene!” the Colonel sighed again.
“Write—note—Chairman—House Committee,” said Coleman Van Duyn, arousing from slumber, thickly, “mighty poor stuff here lately.”
“Go back to sleep, Coley,” laughed Spencer. “It’s not your cue.”
Van Duyn lurched heavily forward for his glass, and drank silently. “Hippocrene?” he asked. “What’s Hippocrene?”
“Nectar, my boy,” said the Colonel pityingly, “the water of the gods.”
“Water!” and with a groan, “Oh, the Devil!”
He joined good naturedly in the laugh which followed and settled back in his leather chair.
“Oh, you laugh, you fellows. It’s no joke. Drank nothing but water for two months this summer. Doctors orders. Drove the water wagon, I did—two long months. Think of it!” The retrospect was so unpleasant that Mr. Van Duyn leaned forward immediately and laid his finger on the bell.
“Climb off, Coley?” asked Spencer.
“No, jumped,” he grinned. “Horse ran away.”
“You’re looking fit.”
“I am. Got a new doctor—sensible chap, young, ambitious, all that sort of thing. Believes in alcohol. Some people need it, you know. Can’t be too careful in choice of doctor. Wants me to drink Lithia water, though. What’s this Hippo—hippo–”
“Chondriac!” put in Percy.
“Hippocrene,” said Broadhurst severely.
“Sounds like a parlor car—or—er—a skin food. Any good, Colonel?”
“No,” said Colonel Broadhurst with another sigh, “It wouldn’t suit your case, Coley.”
A servant entered silently, took the orders and removed the empty glasses.
“Where were you, Coley?” asked Percy.
“Woods—Canada.”
“Fishing?”
“Yep—some.”
“See anything of Phil Gallatin?”
“No. I was with a big outfit—ten guides, call ’em servants, if you like. Air mattresses, cold storage plant, chef, bottled asparagus tips, Charlotte Russe—fine camp that!”
“Whose?”
“Henry K. Loring. You know—coal.”
“Oh—I see. There’s a girl, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
Van Duyn reached for his glass and lapsed into surly silence.
But Percy Endicott was always voluble in the afternoon.
“You didn’t hear about Phil?”
“No—not another–”
“Oh, no, he hasn’t touched a drop for weeks. Got lost up there. I heard the story at Tuxedo from young Benson who just come down. He had it from a guide. It seems that Phil got twisted somehow in the heart of the Kawagama country and couldn’t find his way back to camp. He’s not much of a woodsman—hadn’t ever been up there before, and the guide couldn’t pick up his trail–”
“Didn’t he lose his nerve?”
“Not he. He couldn’t, you see. There was a girl with him.”
“A girl! The plot thickens. Go on.”
“They met in the woods. She was lost, too, so Phil built a lean-to and they lived there together. Lucky dog! Idyllic—what?”
“Well, rather! Arcadia to the minute. But how did they get on?” asked the Colonel.
“Famously–”
“But they couldn’t live on love.”
“Oh, they fished and ate berries, and Gallatin shot a deer.”
“Lucky, lucky dog!”
“They’d be there now, if the guides hadn’t found them.”
“His guides?”
“Yes, and hers.”
“Hers! She wasn’t a native then?”
“Not on your life. A New Yorker—and a clinker. That’s the mystery. Her guide came from the eastward but her camp must have been—why, what’s the matter, Coley?”
Mr. Van Duyn had put his glass upon the table and had risen heavily from his easy chair, his pale blue eyes unpleasantly prominent. He pulled at his collar-band and gasped.
“Heat—damn heat!” and walked away muttering.
It was just in the doorway that he met Phil Gallatin, who, with a smile, was extending the hand of fellowship. He glowered at the newcomer, touched the extended fingers flabbily and departed, while Gallatin watched him go, not knowing whether to be angry or only amused. But he shrugged a shoulder and joined the group near the window.
The greetings were cordial and the Colonel motioned to the servant to take Gallatin’s order.
“No, thanks, Colonel,” said Gallatin, his lips slightly compressed.
“Really! Glad to hear it, my boy. It’s a silly business.” And then to the waiting-man: “Make mine a Swissesse this time. It’s ruination, sir, this drinking when you don’t want it—just because some silly ass punches the bell.”
“But suppose you do want it,” laughed Spencer.
“Then all the more reason to refuse.”
Gallatin sank into the chair that Van Duyn had vacated. These were his accustomed haunts, these were his associates, but he now felt ill at ease and out of place in their company. He came here in the afternoons sometimes, but the club only made his difficulties greater. He listened silently to the gossip of the widening group of men, of somebody’s coup down town, of Larry Kane’s trip to the Rockies, of the opening of the hunting season on Long Island, the prospects of a gay winter and the thousand and one happenings that made up the life of the leisurely group of men about him. The servant brought the tray and laid the glasses.
“Won’t change your mind, Phil?” asked Colonel Broadhurst again.
Gallatin straightened. “No, thanks,” he repeated.
“That’s right,” laughed the Colonel jovially. “The true secret of drinking is to drink when you don’t want it—and refuse when you do.”
“Gad! Crosby, for a man who never refuses—” began Kane.
“It only shows what a martyr I am to the usages of society,” concluded the Colonel with a chuckle.
“How’s the crop of buds this year?” queried Larry Kane.
“Ask ‘Bibby’ Worthington,” suggested Percy Endicott. “He’s got ’em all down, looks, condition, action, pedigree–”
“Bigger than usual,” said the gentleman appealed to, “queens, too, some of ’em.”
“And have you picked out the lucky one already?” laughed Spencer.
“Bibby” Worthington, as everybody knew, had been “coming out” for ten years, with each season’s crop of debutantes, and each season had offered his hand and heart to the newest of them.
But the question touched his dignity in more than one tender spot, and he refused to reply.
“They’re all queens,” sighed the Colonel, raising his glass. “I love ’em all, God bless ’em, their rosy faces, their round limpid eyes–”
“And the smell of bread and jam from the nursery,” put in Spencer, the materialist, dryly. “Some newcomers, aren’t there, Billy?”
“Oh, yes, a few Westerners.”
“Oh, well, we need the money, you know.”
The crowd broke up into groups of two and three, each with its own interests. Gallatin rose and joined Kane and Endicott at the window, where the three sat for awhile watching the endless procession of vehicles and pedestrians moving up and down the Avenue.
“Good sport in Canada, I hear, Phil,” said Percy in a pause of conversation.
Gallatin glanced quickly at his companion.
“Fishing—yes,” he said quietly, unable to control the flush that had risen unbidden to his temples. “No shooting.”
“That’s funny,” went on the blissful Endicott with a laugh. “I heard you got a deer, Phil.”
“Oh, yes, one–”
“A two-legged one—with skirts.”
Gallatin started—his face pale.
“Who told you that?” he asked, his jaw setting.
“Oh, don’t get sore, Phil. Somebody’s brought the story down from Montreal—about your being lost in the woods—and—and all that,” he finished lamely. “Sorry I butted in.”
“So am I,” said Gallatin, stiffly.
Percy’s face crimsoned, and he stammered out an apology. He knew he had made a mistake. Gossip that he was, he did not make it a habit to intrude upon other men’s personal affairs, especially men like Gallatin who were intolerant of meddlers; but the story was now common property and to that extent at least he was justified.
“Don’t be unpleasant, Phil, there’s a good chap. I only thought–”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter in the least,” said Gallatin, rising, suddenly aware of the fact that the whole incident would only draw his adventure into further notoriety. “Somebody’s made a good story of it,” he laughed. “I did meet a—a girl in the woods and she stayed at my camp until her guides found her, that’s all. I don’t even know who she was,” he finished truthfully.
Percy Endicott wriggled away, glad to be let off so easily; and after a word with Kane, Gallatin went quietly out.
He reached the street and turning the corner walked northward blindly, in dull resentment against Percy Endicott, and the world that he typified. Their story of his adventure, it appeared, was common property, and was being handed with God knows what hyperbole from one chattering group to another. It didn’t matter about himself, of course. He realized grimly that this was not the first time his name had played shuttlecock to the fashionable battledore. It was of her he was thinking—of Jane. Thank God, they hadn’t found a name to couple with his. What they were telling was doubtless bad enough without that, and the mere fact that his secret was known had already taken away some of the idyllic quality with which he had invested it. He knew what fellows like Ogden Spencer and Larry Kane were saying. Had he not himself in times past assisted at the post mortems of dead reputations, and wielded his scalpel with as lively a skill as the rest of them?