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CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 14 page

for several miles along a road that was new to him, and then through a

wood on bad advice from a colored woman... losing himself entirely. A

passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the

sky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the

trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing

crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent

batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally,

through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees

where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge

of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and

try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far down

the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten

steps before him, except when the lightning made everything vivid and

grotesque for great sweeps around.

 

Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low,

husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever was singing was very close

to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his

restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his

consciousness:

 

 

"Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur

Monotone."

 

 

The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The

girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely

from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him.

 

Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared and

hung and fell and blended with the rain:

 

 

"Tout suffocant

Et bleme quand

Sonne l'heure

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure...."

 

 

"Who the devil is there in Ramilly County," muttered Amory aloud, "who

would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?"

 

"Somebody's there!" cried the voice unalarmed. "Who are you?--Manfred,

St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?"

 

"I'm Don Juan!" Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the

noise of the rain and the wind.

 

A delighted shriek came from the haystack.

 

"I know who you are--you're the blond boy that likes 'Ulalume'--I

recognize your voice."

 

"How do I get up?" he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither he

had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge--it was so dark

that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that

gleamed like a cat's.

 

"Run back!" came the voice, "and jump and I'll catch your hand--no, not

there--on the other side."

 

He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay,

a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto the

top.



 

"Here you are, Juan," cried she of the damp hair. "Do you mind if I drop

the Don?"

 

"You've got a thumb like mine!" he exclaimed.

 

"And you're holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face."

He dropped it quickly.

 

As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he looked

eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feet

above the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but a

slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands with

the thumbs that bent back like his.

 

"Sit down," she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. "If

you'll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half of the raincoat,

which I was using as a water-proof tent until you so rudely interrupted

me."

 

"I was asked," Amory said joyfully; "you asked me--you know you did."

 

"Don Juan always manages that," she said, laughing, "but I shan't call

you that any more, because you've got reddish hair. Instead you can

recite 'Ulalume' and I'll be Psyche, your soul."

 

Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and rain.

They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay with

the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest.

Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche, but the lightning refused to

flash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn't

beautiful--supposing she was forty and pedantic--heavens! Suppose,

only suppose, she was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had

Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini

men to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she

exactly filled his mood.

 

"I'm not," she said.

 

"Not what?"

 

"Not mad. I didn't think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn't

fair that you should think so of me."

 

"How on earth--"

 

As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be "on a

subject" and stop talking with the definite thought of it in their

heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had

followed the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea

that others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first.

 

"Tell me," he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, "how do you know about

'Ulalume'--how did you know the color of my hair? What's your name? What

were you doing here? Tell me all at once!"

 

Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light and

he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers.

Oh, she was magnificent--pale skin, the color of marble in starlight,

slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blinding

glare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy

and with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness

and a delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay.

 

"Now you've seen me," she said calmly, "and I suppose you're about to

say that my green eyes are burning into your brain."

 

"What color is your hair?" he asked intently. "It's bobbed, isn't it?"

 

"Yes, it's bobbed. I don't know what color it is," she answered, musing,

"so many men have asked me. It's medium, I suppose--No one ever looks

long at my hair. I've got beautiful eyes, though, haven't I. I don't

care what you say, I have beautiful eyes."

 

"Answer my question, Madeline."

 

"Don't remember them all--besides my name isn't Madeline, it's Eleanor."

 

"I might have guessed it. You _look_ like Eleanor--you have that Eleanor

look. You know what I mean."

 

There was a silence as they listened to the rain.

 

"It's going down my neck, fellow lunatic," she offered finally.

 

"Answer my questions."

 

"Well--name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road;

nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather--Ramilly Savage;

height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose,

delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny--"

 

"And me," Amory interrupted, "where did you see me?"

 

"Oh, you're one of _those_ men," she answered haughtily, "must lug

old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge sunning

myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant,

conceited way of talking:

 

 

"'And now when the night was senescent'

(says he)

'And the star dials pointed to morn

At the end of the path a liquescent'

(says he)

'And nebulous lustre was born.'

 

"So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for

some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head.

'Oh!' says I, 'there's a man for whom many of us might sigh,' and I

continued in my best Irish--"

 

"All right," Amory interrupted. "Now go back to yourself."

 

"Well, I will. I'm one of those people who go through the world giving

other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into

men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the

stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I

never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen."

 

The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostly

surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side.

Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had

never met a girl like this before--she would never seem quite the same

again. He didn't at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate

feeling in an unconventional situation--instead, he had a sense of

coming home.

 

"I have just made a great decision," said Eleanor after another pause,

"and that is why I'm here, to answer another of your questions. I have

just decided that I don't believe in immortality."

 

"Really! how banal!"

 

"Frightfully so," she answered, "but depressing with a stale, sickly

depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet--like a wet hen;

wet hens always have great clarity of mind," she concluded.

 

"Go on," Amory said politely.

 

"Well--I'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber

boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn't

believe in God--because the lightning might strike me--but here I am and

it hasn't, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't any

more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, like

I was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist and I was fraternizing

with the hay when you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death."

 

"Why, you little wretch--" cried Amory indignantly. "Scared of what?"

 

"_Yourself!_" she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and

laughed. "See--see! Conscience--kill it like me! Eleanor Savage,

materiologist--no jumping, no starting, come early--"

 

"But I _have_ to have a soul," he objected. "I can't be rational--and I

won't be molecular."

 

She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and

whispered with a sort of romantic finality:

 

"I thought so, Juan, I feared so--you're sentimental. You're not like

me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

 

"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is

that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic

person has a desperate confidence that they won't." (This was an ancient

distinction of Amory's.)

 

"Epigrams. I'm going home," she said sadly. "Let's get off the haystack

and walk to the cross-roads."

 

They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her

down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud

where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to

her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the

fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent

delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen

and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor's

arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he

should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting

wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he

did when he walked with her--she was a feast and a folly and he wished

it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life

through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she

faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out

of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths

flitted in and out of Amory's window; all night large looming sounds

swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain--and he lay awake in

the clear darkness.

 

*****

 

SEPTEMBER

 

Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.

 

"I never fall in love in August or September," he proffered.

 

"When then?"

 

"Christmas or Easter. I'm a liturgist."

 

"Easter!" She turned up her nose. "Huh! Spring in corsets!"

 

"Easter _would_ bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter has her hair braided,

wears a tailored suit."

 

 

"Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet.

Over the splendor and speed of thy feet--"

 

 

quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: "I suppose Hallowe'en is a better

day for autumn than Thanksgiving."

 

"Much better--and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but

summer..."

 

"Summer has no day," she said. "We can't possibly have a summer love. So

many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is

only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the

warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without

growth.... It has no day."

 

"Fourth of July," Amory suggested facetiously.

 

"Don't be funny!" she said, raking him with her eyes.

 

"Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?"

 

She thought a moment.

 

"Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one," she said finally, "a

sort of pagan heaven--you ought to be a materialist," she continued

irrelevantly.

 

"Why?"

 

"Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke."

 

To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew

Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward

himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods.

Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair,

her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to

Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud.

They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read,

than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half

into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now?

He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but even

while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them

could care as he had cared once before--I suppose that was why they

turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to make

everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend

tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the

place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much

of a dream.

 

One poem they read over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and

four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw

the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many

frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him,

and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum,

repeating:

 

 

"Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,

To think of things that are well outworn;

Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,

The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?"

 

 

They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her

history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter,

Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory

imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to

America, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to stay

with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at

the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the

country in March, having quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore

relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd

had come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously

condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an

esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents

still redolent of St. Timothy's and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian

naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of

a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged,

subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather

who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as far

as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.

 

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his

mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the

sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly

think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there

on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move

over--sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more,

before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

 

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even

progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging

and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes--two years of

sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind

had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with

Eleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever

spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of

his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of

his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.

 

Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together.

For months it seemed that he had alternated between being borne along a

stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies

he had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave's top and

swept along again.

 

"The despairing, dying autumn and our love--how well they harmonize!"

said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.

 

"The Indian summer of our hearts--" he ceased.

 

"Tell me," she said finally, "was she light or dark?"

 

"Light."

 

"Was she more beautiful than I am?"

 

"I don't know," said Amory shortly.

 

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of

glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor,

dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin love

moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness

of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be

nearly musical.

 

"Light a match," she whispered. "I want to see you."

 

Scratch! Flare!

 

The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to be

there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow oddly familiar.

Amory thought how it was only the past that ever seemed strange and

unbelievable. The match went out.

 

"It's black as pitch."

 

"We're just voices now," murmured Eleanor, "little lonesome voices.

Light another."

 

"That was my last match."

 

Suddenly he caught her in his arms.

 

"You _are_ mine--you know you're mine!" he cried wildly... the moonlight

twisted in through the vines and listened... the fireflies hung upon

their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

 

*****

 

THE END OF SUMMER

 

"No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the water

in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so inters

the golden token in its icy mass," chanted Eleanor to the trees that

skeletoned the body of the night. "Isn't it ghostly here? If you can

hold your horse's feet up, let's cut through the woods and find the

hidden pools."

 

"It's after one, and you'll get the devil," he objected, "and I don't

know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch dark."

 

"Shut up, you old fool," she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over,

she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. "You can leave your old plug

in our stable and I'll send him over to-morrow."

 

"But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old plug at

seven o'clock."

 

"Don't be a spoil-sport--remember, you have a tendency toward wavering

that prevents you from being the entire light of my life."

 

Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her, grasped

her hand.

 

"Say I am--_quick_, or I'll pull you over and make you ride behind me."

 

She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.

 

"Oh, do!--or rather, don't! Why are all the exciting things so

uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada? By

the way, we're going to ride up Harper's Hill. I think that comes in our

programme about five o'clock."

 

"You little devil," Amory growled. "You're going to make me stay up all

night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day to-morrow, going

back to New York."

 

"Hush! some one's coming along the road--let's go! Whoo-ee-oop!" And

with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a series of

shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly,

as he had followed her all day for three weeks.

 

The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, a

graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative

pyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamental

teens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.

 

 

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he

pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever

know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:

 

"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said... yet Beauty

vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...

 

--Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:

 

"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his

sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing

you to a thousandth June, and no one ever _know_ that you were

Beauty for an afternoon.

 

 

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark

Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man

wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare _must_ have desired, to have

been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should

live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is

that if he had cared _more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnet

would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have

read it after twenty years....

 

This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in the

morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by the cold

moonlight. She wanted to talk, she said--perhaps the last time in her

life that she could be rational (she meant pose with comfort). So they

had turned into the woods and rode for half an hour with scarcely

a word, except when she whispered "Damn!" at a bothersome

branch--whispered it as no other girl was ever able to whisper it. Then

they started up Harper's Hill, walking their tired horses.

 

"Good Lord! It's quiet here!" whispered Eleanor; "much more lonesome

than the woods."

 

"I hate woods," Amory said, shuddering. "Any kind of foliage or

underbrush at night. Out here it's so broad and easy on the spirit."

 

"The long slope of a long hill."

 

"And the cold moon rolling moonlight down it."

 

"And thee and me, last and most important."

 

It was quiet that night--the straight road they followed up to the edge

of the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an occasional negro

cabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight, broke the long line of

bare ground; behind lay the black edge of the woods like a dark frosting

on white cake, and ahead the sharp, high horizon. It was much colder--so

cold that it settled on them and drove all the warm nights from their

minds.

 

"The end of summer," said Eleanor softly. "Listen to the beat of our

horses' hoofs--'tump-tump-tump-a-tump.' Have you ever been feverish

and had all noises divide into 'tump-tump-tump' until you could swear

eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That's the way I feel--old

horses go tump-tump.... I guess that's the only thing that separates

horses and clocks from us. Human beings can't go 'tump-tump-tump'

without going crazy."

 

The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and

shivered.

 

"Are you very cold?" asked Amory.

 

"No, I'm thinking about myself--my black old inside self, the real one,

with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked

by making me realize my own sins."


Date: 2015-02-16; view: 577


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