A group of eight or ten people were gathered on the terrace. Joel introduced Eugene swiftly, quietly, in an eager, whispering voice, as always, with his fine, kind intuition, mindful of another person’s embarrassment and confusion: the moonlit figures rose, looked toward him, passed and swam and mixed around him in a blur of names and moon-white faces and politely murmured words. Then all the figures resolved themselves again into their former positions; he was standing beside Joel’s mother, looking at her with a helpless and bewildered face; she put one hand swiftly, lightly on his arm, and in a kind and quiet voice said to him: “You sit down here, next to me.”
Then she sat down again in her chair — a big, wicker chair with a vast, fan-shaped back, he sat down beside her, and sank gratefully into oblivion while the other people resumed their interrupted conversation.
“No, but — POLLY! SURELY not! You know, she actually did not go through with it?” said a strong, protesting voice, in which yet an eager curiosity was evident. “You know, they stopped the thing before she went the whole way?”
“My dear,” said Polly firmly — she had evidently been well named: in the moonlight her face showed sharp and pointed, with a big nose, and the shrewd, witty, and rather malicious features of a parrot — “my dear, I KNOW she DID. I was visiting Alice Bellamy at Newport when it happened: I got the whole story straight from her. The family were perfectly frantic — they were calling Hugh Bellamy up or running in to see him a dozen times a day to find out if something could be done — how to get it annulled — But I tell you,” Polly cried, shaking her head obstinately and speaking in a tone of unmistakable conviction, “— I know what I’m talking about! There’s no doubt about it whatever — she MARRIED him — the ceremony was ACTUALLY performed —”
“And she really Lived with him — with this — this Stable-Boy?”
“LIVED with him!” Polly cried. “My dear, they’d been living together for almost two weeks before old Dick Rossiter found them. Now, of course,” she said piously, but with a faint, malicious smirk, “— I don’t know what they’d been doing all that time — perhaps the whole affair had been quite idyllic, but — well, my dear, you can use your own imagination. My own experience with ostlers is rather limited, but I shouldn’t think they were particularly renowned for their platonic virtues.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly, but with an unmistakable note of level and obdurate cynicism in her voice, “— nor Ellen Rossiter either — not if I know the breed! . . . After all,” she went on in a moment, in a voice that was characterized by its grimly quiet conviction, “what else could you expect out of that crowd? . . . There’s bad blood there! Bad blood in the whole lot of them,” her voice rose on a formidable and powerful note of unrelenting judgment. “— Everyone in Society knows that old Steve Buchanan, that girl’s grandfather, was a thorough-going rotter,” she bit the word off almost viciously. “His reputation was so bad that most people wouldn’t even have him in their house — that was the reason he spent the last twenty years of his life in France: he had become an outcast over here, no one would speak to him — he had to get out! — But! Heavens! A STABLE-BOY!” she laughed again, and this time her laugh was almost hard and ugly. “What a blow to Myra — after all her years of scheming and contriving to get Timmy Wilson and his millions into the family! . . . I knew it! I knew it!” she shook her head with formidable, obstinate conviction. “I could have told them long ago they’d have trouble with that girl before they were done with her! There’s bad blood there! Of course, it was BOUND to happen, sooner or later, anyway — Myra’s a fool of the first water: she never had the brains of a rabbit. But to think! — Heavens! what a let-down after all her scheming: a stable-boy! I bet she had a fit!”
“Still,” suggested a young man named Howard, at this propitious moment, in his mincing, lisping, and effeminately mannered tone, “— as Irene Cartwright said, it was the only original thing that Ellen Rossiter ever did, and it was rather a pity to break the romance off. . . . I thought,” he went on casually, “that the story they told about the ostler was rather touching — asking her to send his letters back, you know!”
“No!” cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone. “Did he? . . . Well!” she went on eagerly. “And did she send them? . . . Go on, Howard!”
“But, of course,” said Howard. “And the wedding-ring, and everything else that he had given her. . . . I read the letter that he wrote her: it was really TOO pathetic — he said he was going with another girl — a housemaid, I believe — and he didn’t want it to get out that he had paid attentions to someone else. . . . ‘I have spoke it all over with my mother,’ he said,” Howard quoted drolly, “‘and she thinks the same as me, you ought to let me have them back’"—
“Oh, HOWARD!” Mrs. Pierce shrieked faintly. “You KNOW he didn’t! Simply PRICELESS!”
For a moment her splendid, even teeth flashed brilliantly in the moonlight: she lifted the long cigarette-holder in her hand and took a long, deliberate puff: the fragrant, acrid smoke of Turkish tobacco coiled upward in the moonlight air like filings of light steel. Turning to the young man beside her, she addressed him with the somewhat patient and dutiful kindliness of a person receiving a strange guest in her home for the first time.
“Well,” she said, “and how did you find the trip up? Did Joel frighten you out of your wits by his driving? He does everyone else.”
“Well, he did go pretty fast,” the youth admitted. “He had me hanging on once or twice — when we left the main road we took the curve on two wheels, but he seemed to know what he was doing.”
“I assure you,” said Mrs. Pierce, with a stern laugh, “that he does not. I wish I could share your confidence, but I can’t. I don’t think he has the faintest notion what he’s doing.”
“But, after all,” the very quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice of a young man whose name was George Thornton now took up the thread of the discussion —“after all, I should think that any reasonable man would be content with a speed of thirty-five or forty miles an hour. After all,” he said very quietly again, “perhaps the most important things in life are not to be got at through speed — perhaps all the things that are most worth living for are not to be had if we always go a mile a minute.”
“That’s just it, George!” Mrs. Pierce put in with decisive satisfaction. “That’s just it! Any reasonable man WOULD be content with thirty-five or forty miles an hour — but Joel is not reasonable. When he gets in a car he’s like a child that’s been given a new toy to play with for the first time.”
“The greatest things in life, the highest values,” George Thornton went on in his quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice, which now, despite the air of telling reasonableness with which he spoke — the air of temperance, moderation and control — was, somehow, indefinably tinged by a sombre fatality: the tone of a man whose extreme reasonableness comes from a fear of madness, whose temperance from some fatal impulse to insane excess —“the greatest things in life,” he went on in his quiet, toneless voice, almost as if he were talking to himself and had not heard what Mrs. Pierce had said —“are not to be got from machinery or speed, or any material object in the world whatever. . . . Christ,” he continued with his quiet, utterly reasonable, and implacable finality, “said that the greatest thing in life is love. Buddha said that the greatest thing in life is the illumination of the human spirit. Socrates found that man’s highest duty was obedience to his country’s laws. And Confucius, after weighing life and death against each other, found man’s only reason for living in keeping as many of the conventions of society as he could. . . . And that, Joel, perhaps is the real reason, the only reason, why you should not drive your car at reckless speed. . . . You break your country’s law by doing so . . . and you cause pain and worry and anxiety to other people who may love you. For that reason, if for nothing else, you ought not to do it.”
He delivered this judgment in his quiet and toneless voice, without vanity or arrogance, but with a finality that was almost prophetic and that left no room for argument. When he was done speaking there was a deep, impersonal silence for a moment, and then the voice of Joel’s sister, Rosalind — a voice that was still the voice of a girl, but that was also sweet and low and womanly, full of noble tenderness and warmth — could be heard in all its affectionate young impulsiveness:
“Oh, but, George! — you’re an ANGEL about everything! If everyone were like you, life would be heaven!” She took his hand between her strong, warm hands and squeezed it — an impulsive and natural gesture with her that revealed, as much as anything else, the deep and true affection of her nature. “— Darling,” she said, “— you make all of us — everyone else — feel so mean — and small — and — so petty. . . . I mean,” she went on with the earnest and na?ve sincerity, the spontaneous admiration, of a generous and warm-spirited girl —“the way you live — the way you have spent your whole life, George, in helping other people — the way you have found out all these wonderful things about — about — Buddha and Confucius and Socrates — you KNOW so much, George!” she cried enthusiastically — “you have learned so much, while the rest of us were just leading an idle, stupid, empty kind of life — and the way you give it all away to others — the way you give your money away to anyone who needs it — the — the — way,” she faltered suddenly, and her voice was choked with tears —“the way you have looked after poor Dick all these years”— she blurted out.
“Rosalind!” Mrs. Pierce cried out sharply and warningly, yet not with reproof so much as with apprehension.
“I don’t care!” cried Rosalind impulsively —“I— I think he’s wonderful! George, you’re a SAINT!” she said, and clasped his hand again.
No one spoke for a moment: George sat quietly on the terrace step, his fine and small bronzed head, his very still eyes, in whose steady, quiet depths the fatal madness which would destroy him was already legible, turned out across the great sward of moon-drenched lawn towards the shine and wink and velvet mystery of the noble river far below. In the quality of silence that held all these people, there was a sense of profound emotion — the reference to “poor Dick” had touched some sorrowful fact that all of them knew about, and one could sense this deep feeling now in the stony silence that held all of them. It was broken in a moment by Mrs. Pierce, who betrayed, by the studied matter-of-factness of her tone, the emotion which she, too, had felt.
“But it IS an extraordinary thing, George — a simply astonishing thing — to find a young man of your age who has read and studied — and — and — PREPARED himself for life the way you have. It’s SIMPLY astonishing!” she concluded, and then did what was perhaps an astonishing thing for her — quickly and vigorously she blew her nose. “But SIMPLY astonishing!” she said again, as she thrust the handkerchief away and put a cigarette into her eight-inch holder.
“No, I think not,” he said quietly, and without a trace of vanity or false modesty. “It would have been astonishing if I had not done it. After all, my debt to society for all that it has done for me is great enough as it is: I could not with any decency look the world in the face if I knew that I had not made some effort to repay it.”
“How few rich young men feel that way about it,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly. “I wish more did!”
The conversation was now turned to other, lighter channels of discussion: gossip, spirited but light debate. Mrs. Pierce renewed her conversation with Howard and Polly; farther away upon the steps Rosalind, Seaholm, a dark girl named Ruth, and George Thornton talked, gossiped and laughed together with the charming intimacy of youth, and Joel and Miss Telfair were engaged in eager and excited debate — Joel, for the most part, listening with the eager, respectful, bent-forward attentiveness, the devoted courtesy of reverence, that marked all of his relations with women, and Miss Telfair doing most of the talking. She talked the way she looked and dressed and acted, the way she was: a speech fragile, empty, nervous, brittle, artificial and incisive as one of the precious bits of china, the costly, rare, enamelled little trinkets that filled up her house, her life, her interest.
“No, Joel!” she was saying with a voice that had a curious, shell-like penetration — a positive, brittle, but incisively certain voice —“you are absolutely wrong! You are COMPLETELY mistaken about that! The thing cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called Sienese! It is PURE Ravenna — PERFECT Ravenna — ABSOLUTELY!” she cried, shaking her enamelled face with obdurate conviction. “It’s nothing else on earth but the PUREST and MOST PERFECT Ravenna — and Fourteenth Century Ravenna at that! . . . No! No!” she cried incisively, cutting him off shortly, and shaking her head stubbornly as he tried to put in a smiling, whispered word of courteous doubt. “My dear child, you are dead wrong! You don’t know what you’re talking about! . . . I was an authority on these things before you were born. . . . I’ve forgotten more about Ravenna than you’ll ever know! . . . No! . . . No! . . . Absolutely NOT! . . . You’re ALL wrong!”
He received this stubborn, arrogant and almost insulting rebuttal as he always did — with the whispered, gracious humility of his beautiful good nature: laughing softly and enthusiastically over her arrogant and contemptuous denial, as if he were merely the victim of the most tender and high-spirited raillery.
At this moment, however, when, with a sense of resentment and displeasure he was listening to the naked and arrogant penetrations of Miss Telfair’s voice, Rosalind Pierce rose from her seat on the terrace step, left the other young people there, came swiftly to where Eugene was seated, and sat down beside him.
“Why are you sitting here all by yourself — so quiet and so alone?” she said in her warm, sweet, lovely, and affectionate young voice. “Can I sit here and talk to you?” she said, and even as she spoke these words, she slipped her arm through his and clasped him by the hand. The whole life and character of this beautiful, fine and lovely girl were in that simple, natural and spontaneous gesture. That gesture did what words could never do, explained what years of living with many people could not explain: in an instant she communicated to him the whole quality of her life, told him the kind of person she was. And the kind of person she was was unbelievably good and beautiful.
“What have you been thinking of all the time you have been sitting here?” she whispered in her low, sweet voice. “I could see you sitting here, listening, looking at us, and all the time it was just as if you were a million miles away. What were you thinking? — that we are all an idle, shallow lot, with nothing to do except to chatter and gossip about other useless people like ourselves?”
“Why — no — no,” he stammered. “Why — not at all —” He looked at her with a red embarrassed face, but there was no guile or mockery in her. She was not clever enough for sarcasm or malice, not witty enough for irony: she was a creature full of innocence and ardour, without profound intelligence, but with a nature full of warmth, generous enthusiasm, and affection.
“I— I— think you’re all fine,” he blurted out. “I think you’re great.”
“Do you, darling?” she said softly. “Well, we’re not.” She pulled him towards her with a gesture of friendly intimacy, and said: “Come on: let’s leave them all for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”
They got up, and still with her warm hand clasped in his, they walked along the terrace and around the great, moon-whitened wings of the house on to the road that swept in an oval before it.
“Do you really like us?” she said, as they walked on down the road away from the house under a deep, nocturnal mystery of great trees through which the moonlight shone and swarmed upon the earth in mottles of light. “Don’t you like Joel? Don’t you think he’s grand?”
“I— I think he’s the best fellow in the world,” he said. “He’s — he’s just TOO good!”
“Oh, he’s a saint,” she said in her quiet, sweet voice. “There was never anyone like him: he’s the loveliest person I’ve ever known. . . . Aren’t people wonderful?” she said, and turned and paused in the moonlit road and looked at him. “I mean, there are a lot of mean ones . . . and useless ones . . . and sort of shabby ones like . . . like — well, like some of those people there tonight . . . but there’s something good in all of them — even poor little Howard Martin has something sweet and good in him: he has a kind heart — he really has — he wants to be amusing and to entertain people, he wants everyone to be happy and have a good time. . . . And when you meet someone like Joel, it makes up for everything else, doesn’t it? . . . Or George Thornton — don’t you like him? Don’t you think he’s a grand person, too?”
“He — seems fine,” he answered with some difficulty. “I— I never met him till tonight.”
“Oh, you’ll LOVE him when you get to know him,” the girl said earnestly. “— Everybody does. . . . He’s another saint, just like Joel . . . and he’s so brave, and kind, and good — and his life has been so terrible.”
“Terrible? I— I thought he said —”
“Oh, he IS, darling — he DOES have everything THAT way — money, I mean. He’s terribly rich: one of the richest young men in the world. . . . Only he doesn’t spend it on himself, he gives it all away and then . . . you see, darling, George has had an unhappy life of it from the beginning. . . . His father died a raving madman, there’s been insanity in his family for generations back, his mother was a horrible woman who deserted him when he was a child and ran off with a man, and he was brought up by an aunt — his father’s sister — who was half cracked herself. . . . Now he lives all alone on this big place that he’s inherited — he has one brother, Dick, who is two years older than he is — and he has spent practically his whole life in looking after Dick.”
“Looking after him?”
“Yes,” the girl said quietly, “— Dick is insane too — a raving maniac; they have guards for him, they have to watch him every minute of the time — when George comes to see him, Dick tries to kill him. . . . And George loves him, he’d give his life for him, he does everything he can to make Dick happy — and Dick hates him so that he’d kill him if he could. . . . And George has this thing hanging over him all the time, he can’t forget about it for a moment, it’s made his whole life wretched, and yet you’d never know it when you talk to him: he never mentions it, he’s always the same to people — always kind and good and gentle, never thinking of himself.”
“I see. And is that the reason why he studies all these different philosophies — Christ and Socrates and Confucius? —”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “— And Buddha. I think so. . . . He would never admit it . . . he has never said so . . . and of course no one COULD ask him. . . . But I think that’s the reason. . . . There’s something . . . something desperate . . . lost . . . in his eyes sometimes,” she said slowly, after a pause. “ . . . It’s . . . it’s not good to look at . . . it’s . . . I imagine it’s like the look you would see in the eyes of a drowning man.”
“And you think that he may be afraid of . . . of insanity?”
She was silent for a moment, and did not answer him directly.
“He’s been studying Buddhism for the last two years,” she said. “He’s had all kinds of people at the house to teach him. . . . Hindus, mystics, scholars — learned people . . . he’s . . . he’s become more and more . . . I don’t know,” she said in a puzzled tone. “— I don’t know what you’d call it — sort of mystical.” Again she was silent, and presently added matter-of-factly: “He’s going to India next year.”
“To study?”
“Yes, I think so,” the girl said, and again was silent. “Somehow — it’s a dreadful thought, isn’t it?” she said in a low tone after a moment —“But sometimes I have wondered if George would ever come back. . . . Perhaps,” she concluded quietly, “ . . . perhaps that is why we all love him so much . . . it’s like loving someone who is brave and good and gentle that you know has got to die.”
For some time they walked on slowly down the moon-white road without further speech.
“I want you to know Carl, too,” she said. “He seems very cold and strange at first — but that is just his foreign way. He is really one of the loveliest, sweetest people that ever lived. . . . You know,” she said presently, “we are going to be married in October.”
“Yes, I know. Joel told me. . . . Will you live here — in this country?”
“No. I’m afraid not. . . . You see, Carl is in the diplomatic service, and they get moved around a great deal. They have to go where they get sent.”
“And where will you go first? Do you know?”
“Yes, I think they are sending him to Paris next.”
“Will you like that? Do you think you’ll like living in Paris?”
“Of COURSE,” she said with her rich, warm, easy laugh. “I’m awfully easy to please — I like everything — I’m happy anywhere — wherever I am. Is that very bad of me?” she said with a kind and gently teasing smile.
“No, that’s very good of you. . . . Have you ever been to Paris?”
“Yes,” she cried in a rich, enthusiastic tone, “and I love it. I adore it. I studied music there. Mother and I lived there for two years before I came out.”
“But now you’ll have to learn Swedish and German and Italian and Spanish and Russian — all those languages — now that you’re getting married to a diplomat. Won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said with her sweet and careless laugh —“Everything! One must become a regular little walking Berlitz school of languages — only I shan’t mind very much: I’m very stupid, but my husband is so kind and clever I’m sure I’ll learn in spite of everything.”
“And you’ll live in Paris and Rome and London and Berlin — all those places? Won’t you?”
“Yes, darling,” she said in her warm, sweet tone that always had something maternal and tolerantly amused in its humour, “— and in Copenhagen and Stockholm and Bucharest and Madrid — even in Pogo Pogo or in China or Peru — wherever they choose to send us. We’ll be two international hoboes, darling — that’s the kind of life we’ll have to lead.”
“God!” he said bluntly. “It sounds wonderful! What a thing to happen to anyone! — and to happen to you at your age! . . . But won’t if make all this — this place here — seem awfully far away, and very strange — when you think back on it?”
“Yes,” the girl said quietly, and added so softly that she seemed to breathe the words — so softly that he could scarcely hear her, “— and quite impossibly lovely!”
He stared at her in blank astonishment for a minute: she had clasped her hands against her breast in a natural and simple gesture, the moon had made an aureole of magic around the silken strands of her brown hair, and suddenly he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears.
“Very, very far away,” she said in a low tone, “and enormously beautiful. . . . You see,” she said simply, “this is my home. . . . I was born here, and I love it.” She was silent for a moment longer, and then she said quietly but in a more matter-of-fact way:
“Don’t you think our place — this country here — is beautiful?”
He did not answer her for a moment: at first he was not even conscious that he had heard her. He kept staring at her with a comical expression of gape-jawed and hypnotic fascination. He was conscious of a queer, bewildered and inappropriate feeling of surprise — a kind of numb, absurd wonder that if he had read all the books and poems in the world, and then tried to imagine for himself something as impossibly lovely as this girl and the whole scene around her, he could never, by any soaring stretch of the imagination, have come within a million miles of it.
Behind her head the moon was making its spun aura of enchanted light, the dress she was wearing was of some sweet gossamer stuff of light moon-blue that seemed spun out of the very substance of the moon itself — to float, to move like some aerial fume of magic smoke, but the girl herself was lovely, sweet and strong as the whole earth around her. She was herself no creature of elves’ fantasy, she was not lithe and slender, fleeting as a nymph: she was a warm, strong-bodied girl, wide in the hips for children, a nature warm and soft and gentle as a cow, but radiant and lovely with fair girlhood, too, and full of sweetness, strength, and tender, jolly humour.
She stood there in the middle of the white, empty road with the enchanted radiance of the moon upon her, and he stared at her unbelievingly, like a man who meets some vision in a dream and does not know if he is dreaming or awake, and yet knows all the time that it is real. Then he would take his fascinated gaze away from her, and look down at the moon-white road, and stamp it with his foot, and kick and scurf the ground of the moon-white road to see if it was real, and then lift his head and look at her again, and turn and see the great, sweet fields and meadows dreaming in the moonlight, and cows down upon their knees, facing toward him with their strange and silent stare, or faced one way and grazing towards him through the moon pastures with sweet, wrenching pull of teeth; and then he would see the dark and sleeping woods of night, with all their mystery and loveliness and wild and solemn joy, and secret terror, and all the grand and casual folds and convolutions of the sleeping, moon-enchanted earth, and far away the moon-blaze and wink, the herring glamour, and the dancing scallop fires and all the darkness, coolness, and the velvet-breasted mystery of the strange and silent river, the haunted river, the great Hudson River, drawing on for ever from the dark and secret earth the sources of its depthless tides, and in the night-time, in the dark, with soundless movings of its tide, drawing on for ever like time and silence past the strange and secret land, the mysterious earth, the sleeping cities and the lost and lonely little towns of dark America.
It was all so strange, so impossibly lovely, so hauntingly familiar — the grand and casual landscape of America — and it seemed past words and past belief, to be so much a part of this girl’s life, and she a part of it, that all the haunting mystery of the secret earth, the silent river, and all its sweetness, fragrance and fertility, its casual homeliness, and its unuttered loveliness had entered into her, had fed her life, had shaped her to its special quality, and like a solemn music was mixed into the conduits of her blood and life and soul for ever, so that now he could not bear to see her taken from it, he felt a cruel and ruinous loss and waste in this destructive separation — a loss that touched not only this girl’s life, but the life of the great earth and all America as well — a loss as if a rare and glorious flower were brutally uprooted from the only earth that could produce or nurture it and which would henceforth be, by reason of its treasured loss, bereft. And feeling so, a blind and bitter resentment surged up in his heart, his whole life and spirit were set against her going, and in his soul an unforgiving and protesting voice kept saying doggedly:
“Why has she got to go? Why must she be lost? Why does she have to go and marry that damned Swede?”
In the great moon-drenched field beside the road, the cows were moving towards them slowly, grazing, pulling the fragrant meadow grass of night with sweet, cool wrenching, with rustling stir, and with whisking of dry tails.
The girl walked over to the wire fence, and one of the cows, after regarding her with its grave, gentle stare, moved slowly towards her, rattling the fence wires as it thrust its gentle, bending head across the fence and nuzzled her soft palm.
“She seems to know you,” said the youth.
“Yes,” the girl answered. “I know them all by name, they all know me. I gave them all their names: this one’s Brindle. Aren’t they lovely creatures?” she said quietly, as she stroked the cow. “Such — such — gentle pets,” she said, “with their kind looks and great, soft eyes. They all know me, and will come to me when I call their names.”
The other cows, indeed, were now standing still, faced toward her, looking at her with slow, gaunt and gentle heads. Now, slowly, they started to move toward her, making a cool, sweet rustling through night grasses as they came. The moonlight burst upon their short, curved horns, it burst upon the rich bright patches of their mottled hides, upon their stringy, dung-bespattered rumps, their soft eyes, and the slow, gentle wonder of their long, gaunt heads.
And it was all so wonderful — the sleeping woods, the moon-enchanted fields, the slow, light grazings of the moonlit cows, and all the fragrance of the night, the grass, the clover and the meadow spells, and the magic warmth and loveliness of the girl, and her sweet, low voice beside him in the moonlight — that it seemed to him that all his life had been a prelude and a preparation to this wonder. He did not know what he could say, it came swelling up in a wild flood of tenderness and passion, he felt that he must tell her somehow, and he had no words for saying it; he seized her hands and stammered:
“Look here — if I live to be a million years I’ll never — the way the river was tonight, the moon, and the way Joel met me and then finding you and your mother and your friends there in the moonlight — and the river down below — and now this walk with you — this road — the field — and all these cows there in the field — and you here — why, by God!” he cried thickly, incoherently, “you are the finest girl I ever saw in all my life! — this place — tonight here — the most wonderful —”
“Come on,” she said quietly, with her warm, young laugh, and took him by the arm again. “We must be going back:— the others will be waiting for us — but it HAS been lovely, hasn’t it?”
“Why,” he muttered thickly and seized her hand again, “— why! By God! By God!”
When they got back to the house the guests had risen for departure, but were standing in an interested group around George Thornton, who was showing them gymnastics.
“Another thing,” he was saying, in his very quiet, pleasant, toneless voice, “— another thing that you can try is this.” With these words he stretched his slight and graceful figure — which was as tough as hickory and as flexible as a whip — flat out upon the bricked floor of the terrace.
“Try this some time,” he continued in his quiet, even tone that had a curiously hushed, still and almost sombre penetration in the deep moon-silence of the night. “Try lying flat out on your back some time — like this.” And he lay there, small, graceful, beautifully lithe, completely relaxed.
“And then what?” said Mrs. Pierce in an interested tone. “What do you do then, George?”
“Nothing,” he said with toneless quiet. “You just lie there — it relaxes you: a Hindu showed me how to do it.”
“Oh, but anyone could do that!” Howard Martin protested, in his mannered and rather effeminate voice. “Even I could do that, George.”
“It’s not as easy as you think,” George said. “You see,” he went on quietly, “it’s really a greater effort to be relaxed than most of us realize. Most of us are all tied up in a knot — so much more tense than we know we are. The thing you’ve got to do,” he went on with his quiet and fatal tonelessness, “is to relax — utterly relax — just let everything relax. You’ve got to lie so that everything — the back of your head, your shoulders, your spinal column — the whole thing — lies flat upon the floor. Like this,” he said, and just lay there, small, fragile, beautifully lithe and strong, and utterly, quietly, “relaxed”— his voice coming with a quiet and strange penetration from a figure that seemed inanimate. “— It’s not easy to do, but you can master it if you try.”
“Oh, let me see! I’m going to try!” little Howard Martin cried with the good-natured and unselfconscious eagerness that was really one of his attractive and appealing qualities. And completely unruffled by the laughter of the group, he immediately lay down and stretched himself out beside George, his dapper little figure looking indescribably comical as he tried to follow George’s instructions and imitate his posture:
“How’s that, George?” he said presently, without moving. “Have I got it?”
George turned and observed him keenly for a moment.
“No,” he said quietly, “you haven’t got it yet, Howard. You see, you’ve got to flatten out completely. You’ve just got to let everything go limp — relax — so that your whole back is flat upon the ground.”
“But I AM flat! I AM flat!” little Howard protested in such a mincing and comical tone of protest that everyone burst out in hearty laughter, and even George smiled his fine, rare, and grave smile. “My GOD!” Howard said in an agonized tone when the laughter had subsided, “if I was any flatter I’d feel like a pancake.”
“No, Howard,” George Thornton said quietly after another moment of observant silence. “You haven’t got it yet. You see, your back is really arched — you’re not RELAXED— your back is not upon the floor — the thing is to make yourself lie out as flat as a board — like this,” and with the fingers of his strong, small, bronzed hand he gently but firmly pushed Howard’s stomach down towards the floor. Howard grunted protestingly, but lay there after George had taken his hand away, and George, after looking at him closely for a moment, nodded approvingly and said:
“Yes, that’s better. You’re getting it now. But you’ve really got to practise every day. It looks easy, but it’s hard to do.”
“But, George,” Mrs. Pierce broke in, as Howard scrambled to his feet, “— what I’m interested in knowing is how you keep that beautiful, strong athlete’s figure that you’ve got! And that dancer’s WAIST! My dear sir, that is the curse of a woman’s life: so if you can tell me what to do to take it off around the waist and hips I’ll be eternally grateful to you.”— She was, as a matter of fact, herself as lean and well-conditioned as a race-horse, but George, still lying flat upon the floor, answered quietly:
“Did you ever try this, Ida? I think you’ll find it very useful for keeping the waist down. — You lie flat on your back — like this. You keep your arms flat at your sides — you mustn’t raise them or lift your head. You keep your legs straight — you mustn’t bend them at the knees — and then,” slowly, and with a sense of infinite, hard-muscled power and lean endurance, he suited the action to the words, “you raise your legs to right angles with your body — straighten out again — raise — straighten — raise — straighten — raise — straighten — if you do that a hundred times a day, when you get up and when you go to bed, I don’t think you’ll ever be troubled by fat around the waist,” he concluded quietly.
“I know,” Joel whispered, nodding with vigorous agreement. “I’ve tried that. That’s a good one. But a hundred times is a lot! It’s more than most people can do at first.”
“Yes,” said George quietly. “But you get used to it if you do it every day! I can do it a hundred times with no difficulty whatever,” he concluded quietly.
“Oh, of COURSE!” Joel whispered instantly. “But then, you’re hard as a rock, George. You can do anything.”
“But that doesn’t look hard,” Howard said again with blithe confidence. “Oh, I just KNOW that I can do THAT one,” he said mincingly. And without further ado, while everyone laughed, he stretched himself out again, extended his dapper flannelled legs as George instructed him, and then slowly raised them, lowered them, raised them again with such a painful grunt that everyone burst out again in hearty laughter. After the fourth effort he was through, admitting defeat with a painful “Gosh! If I had to do that for a hundred times I’d be ready for the undertaker,” and scrambled to his feet again.
“Then,” said George in his quiet, pleasant tone, “I think you’ll find this one good, Ida, for strengthening the muscles of the back and stomach. You ARCH,” he said, “you arch with the neck and feet — like this,” and instantly his strong, frail, beautifully proportioned figure was arched as lithely and gracefully as a bow, “— you come down slow like this,” he said, and sank slowly toward the ground, “you arch again like this”— again the light and graceful human bow.
“Oh, but that looks terribly hard to do, George!” Mrs. Pierce protested. “I could never learn to do that: it’s a regular circus stunt.”
“No,” he said in his quiet and toneless fashion, “you could do it, Ida. Of course, it IS hard at first, but it would come with practice. . . . It makes you very strong,” he went on with a completely detached matter-of-factness. “Do you see that?” He arched his whip-cord body again and held it in that posture —“I could keep that up indefinitely — it makes you hard as nails,” he went on quietly, and without an atom of vanity or self-consciousness. “I could support the whole weight of a man’s body there without any difficulty — and LIFT him, too.”
“Not REALLY!” Joel whispered in an astounded tone. “Simply incredible!”
“But not at all,” said George quietly. “It’s the easiest thing on earth if you’re used to it. Come here, Howard,” he said quietly, without moving from his arched position. “Sit down on me.”
“Sit DOWN on you?” said Howard, in a comically bewildered tone. “WHERE, George?”
“On my stomach,” George replied. “Go on,” he said, smiling his fine, grave smile at sight of Howard’s hesitation. “It’s all right. You won’t hurt me at all. Sit down.”
“Like — like this?” said Howard, and squatted gingerly and gently, settling down finally upon George’s arched stomach and looking about with such a comically troubled and inquiring expression that everyone burst out in hearty laughter again. “Is that all right?” he said, turning anxiously and looking down at his supporter.
“Yes, perfectly,” said George. “Now draw your knees up and hold them with your arms so that your whole weight is on me. . . . Good! . . . Now! Are you ready? . . . One, two . . . One, two . . . One, two,” his lithe, whip-cord figure rose and fell, arched and straightened, with little Howard sitting on top of him, and looking around with the expression of a frightened, huddled mannikin. When the demonstration was finished, both young men got to their feet, and Joel’s face could be seen raised in an expression of radiant admiration, his voice could be heard in an astounded whisper, saying:
“SIMPLY incredible!”
And Mrs. Pierce, her voice stronger, more powerful, and penetrating, in slow, decisive declaration:
“GEORGE! I— think — that — is — the — MOST— ASTONISHING— I think — that — is — the — MOST—”
Words failed her, and as she looked at him, standing quietly composed before her, with all his beautiful, lithe grace and stillness, he smiled his grave, rare smile, and displayed his only playful raillery of the evening:
“But really, Ida,” he said quietly, as he smiled his fine, slow smile at her, “if you’re worried about that girlish figure you ought to try THIS some time.” With these words he bent over backward, as lithe and limber as a whip, and with his fingers arched upon the floor, suddenly, with effortless grace and speed, and without moving an inch from his position, whirled off a dozen brilliant cartwheels that would have done credit to a circus tumbler.
He came gracefully, unweariedly erect again, to standing posture, amid an ovation of breathlessly uttered wonder, frank applause.
But now the time had come for parting: there was the sound of a motor in the drive before the house, in a moment a maid-servant came quietly out upon the terrace and informed Miss Telfair that her car had come. She gathered her evening cloak about her fragile, ivory shoulders — that were somehow like a piece of her own rare porcelain — thrust her hand out towards Mrs. Pierce in swift and firm farewell, and turned, saying in her crisp, incisive voice: “Well, children, I’m departing. . . . Joel,” she said, pausing a moment as she went, “I shall expect you and your young friend at my house for tea tomorrow.”
“And are you coming to the pool tomorrow morning, Margaret?” Mrs. Pierce called after her.
“That, my dear, I couldn’t tell you,” she said, going. “If I do not get a call from town. We shall see what we shall see — good night, all,” and she went through the moonlit door into the house.