Chapter 6. Magic

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_ CHAPTER VI. MAGIC

The next day after luncheon, as Stephen walked from his club to his office, he lived over again his evening with Margaret. "If she cared for me it might be different," he mused; and then, through some perversity of memory, Margaret's pensive smile became suddenly charged with emotion, and he asked himself if he had not misinterpreted her innocent frankness? Even if she cared, he knew that she would die rather than betray her preference by a word or a look. "Whether she cares or not, and it is just possible that she does care in her heart, she will marry me if I ask her," he thought; and decided immediately that there was no necessity to act impulsively in the matter. "If I ask her she will persuade herself that she loves me. She will marry me just as hundreds of women have married men in the past; and we should probably live as long and as happily as all the others." That was the way his father and mother had married; and why were he and Margaret different from the generations before them? What variable strain in their natures impelled them to lead their own separate lives instead of the collective life of the family? "I suppose Mother is right as far as she sees," he admitted. "To marry Margaret and settle down would be the best thing that could happen to me." Yet he had no sooner put the thought into words than the old feeling of suffocation rushed over him as if his hopes were smothered in ashes.

Yes, he would settle down, of course, but not now. Next year perhaps, or the year after, he would sincerely fall in love with Margaret, and then everything would be different.

He was passing through the Square at the moment; and while he played with the idea of his marriage with Margaret, he found himself glancing expectantly at the car which was waiting in front of the Governor's door. "I wonder if she is going out," he thought, while a superficial interest brightened the dull hours before him. "It would be no more than she deserved if I were to go in and ask after her ankle." In obedience to the mocking impulse, he entered the gate and reached the steps just as Patty came out on the porch. She was walking with ease, he noticed at once, and she wore again the red cape and the little hat with red wings.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "it is you!"

"I stopped to ask after your ankle," he retorted with ironic gaiety. "I am glad it doesn't keep you from walking."

"That's the new way of treating a sprain," she replied calmly. "Haven't you heard of it?"

"Yes, I've heard of it." He glanced down at her stocking of thin gray silk. "But I thought even then there were bandages."

She smiled archly--he felt that he wanted to slap her--and glanced up at him with playful concern. The gray-green rays were brighter in the daylight than he had remembered them and her mocking lips were the colour of cherries. He thought of the thin pink curve of Margaret's mouth and wondered if the war had corrupted his taste.

Yes, Margaret was womanly; she was well bred; she possessed every attribute that in theory he admired; yet she had never awakened this sparkling interest, this attraction which was pungently flavoured with surprise that he could be so strangely attracted. He could gaze unmoved by the hour on Margaret's smooth loveliness; but the tantalizing vision of this other girl's face, of her cloudy black hair and her clear skin and her changeable eyes, with their misty gleam like a firefly lost in a spring marsh--all these things were a part not of the tedious actuality, but of that hidden country of romance and adventure. For the first time since his return from France, he was carried far outside of himself on the wave of an impulse; he was interested and excited. Not for an instant did he imagine that he was falling in love. His thoughts did not leave the immediate present when he was with her; and a part of the adventure was the feeling that each vivid moment he spent with her might be the last. It was, he would have said had he undertaken to analyse the situation, merely an incident; but it was an incident that delighted him. He knew nothing of Patty Vetch except that she charmed him against his will; and, for the moment at least, this was sufficient.

"Oh, there are sprains and sprains," she answered, with the quiver of her lip he remembered so disturbingly. "Didn't you learn that in the trenches?" Was she really pretty, or was it only the provocative appeal to his imagination, the dangerous sense that you never knew what she would dare to say next?

"I didn't go there to learn about sprains," he responded gravely.

"Nor about maneuvers apparently?" She hesitated over the word as if it were unfamiliar.

At her charge the light of battle leaped to his eyes. "Then it was a maneuver? I suspected as much."

The audacity of her! The unparalleled audacity! "But I am not so much interested in maneuvers," he added merrily, "as I am in the strategy behind them."

She looked puzzled, though her manner was still mocking. "Is there always strategy," she pronounced the word with care, "behind them?"

"Always in the art of warfare."

"But can't there be a maneuver without warfare?" He could see that she was venturing beyond her depths; but he realized that a confession of ignorance was the last thing he must ever expect from her. Whatever the challenge she would meet it with her natural wit and her bright derision.

"Never," he rejoined emphatically. "A campaign goes either before or afterward."

A thoughtful frown knit her forehead. "Well, one didn't go before, did it?" she inquired with an innocent air. "So I suppose--"

He ended her sentence on a note of merriment. "Then I must be prepared for the one that will follow!"

She threw out her hand with a gesture of mock despair. "Oh, you may have been mistaken, you know!"

"Mistaken? About the campaign?"

"No, about the maneuver. Perhaps there wasn't any such thing, after all."

"Perhaps." Though his voice was stern, his eyes were laughing. "I am not so easily fooled as that."

"I doubt if you could be fooled at all." It was the first bit of flattery she had tossed him, and he found it strangely agreeable.

"I am not sure of that," he answered, "but the thing that perplexes me--the only thing--is why you should have thought it worth while."

Her eyes grew luminous with laughter, and the little red wings quivered as if they were about to take flight over her arching brows. "How do you know that I thought about it at all? Sometimes things just happen."

"But not in this case. You had arranged the whole incident for the stage."

"Do you mean that I fell down on purpose?"

"I mean that you were laughing up your sleeve all the time. You weren't hurt and you knew it."

Her expression was enigmatical. "You think then that I arranged to fall down and risk breaking my bones for the sake of having you pick me up?" she asked demurely.

Put so plainly the fact sounded embarrassing, if not incredible. "I think you fell for the fun of it. I think also that you didn't for a second risk breaking your bones. You are too nimble for that."

"I ought to be," she retorted daringly, "since I was born in a circus."

Surprised into silence, he studied her with a regard in which admiration for her courage was mingled with blank wonder at her recklessness. If she had inherited her father's gift of expression, she appeared to possess also his dauntless humour. For an instant Stephen felt that her gaiety had entered into his spirit; and while his impression of her danced like wine in his head, he answered her in her own tone of mocking defiance.

"Well, everything that is born in a circus isn't a clown."

Her eyes widened. "Is that meant for a compliment?"

"No, merely for a reminder. But if you were born in a circus, I assume that you didn't perform in one."

She shook her head. "No, they took me away when I was a baby--just after Mother died. I never lived with the circus people, and Father didn't either except when he was a child. Not that I should have been ashamed of it," she hastened to explain. "They are very interesting people."

"I am sure of it," he answered gravely, and he was very sure of it now.

"When I was a child," she went on in a matter-of-fact tone, "I used to make Father tell me all he could remember about the 'freaks,' as they called them. The fat woman--her name was really Mrs. Coventry--was very kind to him when he was little, and he never forgot it. He never forgets anybody who has ever been kind to him," she concluded with simple dignity.

An emotion which he could not define held Stephen speechless; and before he could command his words, she began again in the same cool and quiet voice. "His mother ran away to marry his father. She came of a very good family in Fredericksburg, and her people never forgave her or spoke to her afterward. But she was happy, and she never regretted it as long as she lived. It was love at first sight. Grandfather was Irish and he was--was--" she hesitated for a word, and at last with evident care selected, "magnificent." "He was magnificent," she repeated emphatically, "and she saw him first on horseback when she was out riding. Her horse became frightened by one of the animals in the circus, and he caught it and stopped it. It began that way, and then one night she stole out of the house after her family had gone to bed, and they ran away and were married. I think she was right," she added thoughtfully, "but then I reckon--I mean I suppose it is in my blood to take risks."

She looked up at him and he responded. "But where did you learn to see things like this, and to put them into words? Not in a circus?"

"I told you I couldn't remember the circus. Mother was in one, and though Father never told me how he fell in love with her--he never talks of her--I think it must have been when he went back to see the people. He always took an interest in them and tried to help them. He does still. Even now, if anybody belonging to a circus asks him for something, he never refuses him. When he was twelve years old somebody took him away and sent him to school, but he always says he never learned anything at school except misinformation about life. No books, he says, ever taught him the truth except the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe.' He used to read me chapters of those every day--and he does still when he has the time."

What a strange world it was! How full of colour and incident, how drenched with the quality of the unusual!

"And what did you learn?" he asked.

"I?" She was speaking earnestly. "Oh, I learned a great many--no, a multitude of things about life."

At this he broke into a laugh of pure delight. "With a special course of instruction in maneuvers," he rejoined.

Though her smile showed perplexity she tossed back his innuendo with defiance. "And by the time we meet again I shall have learned about--strategy."

How ready she was to fence, and how quick with her attack! It was easy to believe that there was Irish blood in her veins and an Irish sparkle in her wit.

"Oh, then you will out-general me entirely! Isn't it enough to force me to acknowledge your superior tactics?"

She appeared to scrutinize each separate letter. "Tactics? Have I been using superior tactics without knowing it?"

"That I can't answer. Is there anything that has escaped your instinctive understanding?"

She laughed softly. "Well, there's one thing you may be sure of. I'll know a great deal more about some things by the time I see you again." Then, with one of her darting bird-like movements, she ran down the steps and into the car. "I wish Father were here," she said, looking out at him. "He wants to talk to you."

"I should like to talk to him. I shall come again, if I may."

"Oh, of course, and next time we may both be at home." As the car started she called out teasingly. "My next maneuver may be more successful, you know!"

How provoking she was, and how inspiriting! Was she as shrewd, as sophisticated, as she tried to appear, or was he merely, he asked himself, the victim of her irrepressible humour, of a prodigious display of the modern spirit? At least she was a part of her time--not, like Margaret and himself, a discordant note, a divergent atom, in the general march toward recklessness and unrestraint. Young as she was, he felt that she had already solved the problems which he had evaded or pushed aside. She had learned the secret of transition--a perpetual motion that went in circles and was never still. Here, he realized, was where he had lost connection, where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability--were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power to make quick decisions and the inability to cling to convictions; the nervous high pitch and the failure to sustain the triumphant note; energy without direction; success without stability; martyrdom without faith. And around, above, beneath, the pervading mediocrity, the apotheosis of the average. Was this the best that democracy had to offer mankind? Was there no depth below the shallows? Was it impossible, even by the most patient search, to discover some justification of the formlessness of the age, of the crazy instinct for ugliness? He could forgive it all, he might eventually bring his mind to believe in it, if there were only some logical design informing the disorder. If he could find that it contained a single redeeming principle that was superior to the old order, he felt that he should be able to surrender his disbelief.

He was leaving the gate when a woman, walking slowly in front of the house, spoke to him abruptly.

"If I wait here shall I see the Governor come out?"

With the feeling that he was passing again through a familiar nightmare, he turned quickly and looked down on the pathetic figure he had seen the evening before. In the daylight she seemed more pitiable and less repellent than she had appeared in the darkness. The hollowness of her features gave a certain dignity to her expression--the look of one who is returning from the shadows of death. Years ago, before illness or dissipation had wrecked her health and her appearance, she may have been attractive, he surmised, in a common and obvious fashion. Her black eyes were still striking, and the sunlight revealed a quantity of coarse black hair on which he detected the claret tinge of fading dye.

"I am sorry," she added as she recognized him. "I did not know it was you." As soon as she had spoken she became confused and tried to pass on; but he made a movement to detain her.

"Have you any particular reason for wishing to see the Governor?"

"Oh, no, I am a stranger here." Her accents were ordinary, yet there was a note of the unusual in her appearance and manner. Whatever she was, she was not commonplace.

"But you were waiting to see him?" he said.

Her gaze left his face and travelled uncertainly over the mansion. "Oh, yes, I thought I might see him. I've never seen a Governor."

"You do not wish to speak to him?"

"No; why should I wish to speak to him? I'm a stranger, that's all. I like to see whatever is going on. Was that his daughter who went out just now?"

"Yes, that was his daughter."

"Then she is pretty--almost as pretty as--Thank you, sir. I will go along now. I'm staying not far from here, and I come out when I get the chance to watch the squirrels in the Square."

The explanation sounded simple enough; yet he suspected, though he could not have defined his reason, that she was not telling the truth. Again he asked himself if she could have known Gideon Vetch in the past? It was possible; it was not even improbable. Once, even ten or fifteen years ago, she may have been handsome in her coarse and showy style; and he had no proof, except Patty, that the Governor had ever possessed a fastidious taste.

The woman had turned with furtive haste in the direction of the outer gate; and when Stephen started on again toward the library, he crossed a man who was rapidly ascending the brick walk from the fountain at the foot of the hill. By his jaunty stride and his air of excessive joviality--the mark of the successful local politician--Stephen recognized Julius Gershom, the campaign-maker, as people called him, who had stood behind Gideon Vetch from the beginning of his career. "What an unconscionable bounder the fellow is," thought Stephen as he passed him. What an abundance of self-assertiveness he had contrived to express in his thin spruce figure, his tightly curling black hair, which grew too low on his forehead, and his short black moustache with pointed ends which curved up like polished metal from his full red lips.

"I suppose he is on his way to the Governor," mused the young man idly. "How on earth does Vetch stand him?"

But to his surprise, when he glanced back again, he saw that Gershom had passed the mansion, and was hurrying down the walk which the strange woman had followed a moment before. Stephen could still see her figure approaching a distant gate; and he observed presently that Gershom was not far behind her, and that he appeared to be speaking her name. She started and turned quickly with a movement of alarm; and then, as Gershom joined her, she went on again in the direction she had first taken. A few minutes later their rapidly moving figures left the Square and passed down the street beyond the high iron fence.

"I wonder what it means?" thought Stephen indifferently. "I wonder what the deuce Gershom has got up his sleeve?"

By the time he reached his office the wonder had vanished; but it returned to him on his way home that afternoon when he dropped into the old print shop for a word with Corinna.

"I passed that fellow Gershom in the Square to-day," he said. "Do you know him by sight?"

She shook her head. "What is he like? Patty tells me that he has become a nuisance."

"Ah, then you have seen Patty?"

A smile turned her eyes to the colour of November leaves. "She was here for an hour this morning. I have great hopes of her. I think she is going to supply me with an interest in life."

"Then she still amuses you?"

"Amuses me? My dear, she enchants me. She stands for the suppressed audacities of my past."

He looked at her thoughtfully. "I wonder how much of her is real?"

"Probably half. She is real, I think, in her courage, but not in her conventions."

"Well, I confess that she puzzles me. I can't see just what she means."

"I doubt if she means anything. She is a vital spirit; she chafes at chains; and she is smarting from a sense of inferiority. There is a thirst for power in her little body that may make her either an actress or a politician."

"Now, it seems to me that if she has any sense it is one of superiority. She treated me like a brick under her feet."

For a minute Corinna was silent. The smile on her lips had grown tenderly humorous; and there was a softness in her eyes which made him sorry that he had not known her when he was a child. "Do you know what she told me to-day?" she said. "She studies a page of the dictionary every morning, and she tries to remember and practise all day the new words that she learns. She is now in the letter M."

A peal of merriment interrupted her. "That explains it!" exclaimed Stephen with unaffected delight, "maneuver--misinformation--multitude--"

"So she has practised on you too?"

"Oh, they all practise on me," he retorted. "It is what I was made for."

"Well, as long as it is only words, you are safe, I suppose."

He denied this with a gesture. "It is everything you can possibly practise with--from puddings to pigeons."

"My poor dear, so you have been eating Margaret's puddings. Weren't they good ones?"

"Oh, perfection! But I wasn't thinking of Margaret."

"I know you weren't. For your mother's sake I wish that you were."

His face looked suddenly tired. "Margaret is perfection, I know; but I feel sometimes that only perfect people can endure perfection."

"Yes, I know." Her smile had faded now. "I admire Margaret tremendously, but I feel closer to Patty."

"Perhaps. I am not sure. Somehow I have been sure of nothing since I came out of the trenches--least of all of myself. I am trying to find out now what I am in reality."

As he rose to go she held out her hand. "I think,--I am not certain, but I think," she responded gaily, "that Patty's dictionary may give you the definition." _

Read next: Chapter 7. Corinna Goes To War

Read previous: Chapter 5. Margaret

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