Chapter 7

PLAYING WITH FIRE.

In the late afternoon, Philip returned to find Lawrence still sitting before the fire, his mind centered on ideas for his future work. Claire had disappeared behind the canvas curtain which was stretched before her bed.

"It is almost Christmas," announced Philip, as he entered.

Lawrence straightened up. "Back again?" he said, carelessly. "It's been a beastly day."

Claire came out from her partition, laughing. "If you don't take one of us with you next time," she said, "I won't answer for the tragedy that may follow."

Philip laughed, and shook the snow from his big coat.

"Too much of your own continuous company?" he asked.

"Yes"--her tone was light, but he saw that she was in earnest--"we are so accustomed to each other that we both need a rest." She drew up a chair for Philip before the fire.

His dark eyes looked searchingly at her.

"If you knew the path to peace," he said, "you would be happier. I see that I must take you out with me and teach you the hidden entrance to that mystic roadway."

"You know one, then?" Lawrence's voice was amusedly skeptical.

"It lies through the heart of man into the heart of"--Philip paused--"shall I say God?"

"You may as well, though it isn't especially clear." Lawrence smiled. "God is a big, but vague, term."

"I find it so," Philip answered, seriously. "There are days, however, and this was one of them, when I am sure of the meaning of that term. Claire must go forth with me and see."

"Yes, do let me go," she said, eagerly. Then, with a little laugh: "If your mystery out there is as discomforting as the Lawrence mystery in here, I sha'n't worship him, however."

"He isn't." Philip arose and crossed to his books. "He is the mighty God who speaks in solitude." He drew down a volume, and returned to his chair.

"I find here in these mountains the medicine that _Hamlet_ should have had. He would have been no _Hamlet_ had he ranged this plateau for a day in winter."

"And the world would be the loser," Lawrence interposed.

Claire rose and started to prepare their evening meal. She had taken over the duties of housekeeping from the time her ankle had allowed her to walk.

"If you two are going to plunge the house into an argument such as that one promises to be," she said gaily, "I am going to reenforce the inner man so that at least you won't suffer from physical exhaustion."

Both men laughed, and one of them listened to her thoughtfully as she moved about, while the other watched her, his dark eyes full of a keen appreciation of her grace and her concise, accurate movements.

"How good it is to have her here," thought Philip. Aloud, he said, seriously: "I do not think the world gains enough from _Hamlet_ to make it worth the price he paid."

"Why not?" Lawrence was quick to respond. "Whatever his agony, whatever his failures and his death, he left the world a picture of man's heroic struggles to solve the riddle of the universe, his wisdom, his strength--and his weakness."

"But that is just what we don't want--the picture of man's weakness. It is made all the worse when it is presented with the power of a sublime work."

Claire turned from the stove, and looked at Philip. His eyes were burning with a deep, earnest fire that held her fascinated. She thought him the most beautiful of all the men she knew. It was not his face, not his appearance generally, but his eyes. Oh, the loss of such eyes! she thought--yes, they are what makes him a finer man than Lawrence. Why hasn't Lawrence such eyes?

"Believe me, friend," Philip was speaking again, "if I could erase from my knowledge the weakness of man, I would not need to trail my feet through these snow-buried forests to find an hour's rest from life."

Claire saw his fingers move nervously on the arms of his chair, and thought: "That is it, then; I was right; he has his tragedy." She looked at him again, and as she met his eyes she felt that she was sorrier for him than she had ever been for Lawrence. Yes, she was sorrier for this man whose soul burned out of his eyes than for that other whose soul was always curtained by the expressionless mask that hid him.

"I can't quite agree with you," Lawrence was saying; "I, too, know the weakness of man, but there is, nevertheless, the glory of sublime beauty which alone stands, immortal. I should indeed mourn for man if he were unable to be truly immortal even in his created work. That, it seems to me, saves him."

"Or loses him," Philip added. "One golden life of unbroken sunshine, dead at last and laid away in the memory of friends is worth more than your greatest poem."

"I should call that sentimentality," Lawrence laughed.

"So it is," Philip flashed, "and why not? Must we kill sentiment and go about with hearts of ice because our world is hard?"

"Is there no way to keep ourselves warm without poultices?" retorted Lawrence.

Claire sat down at the table. "Come on and enjoy your venison, you two, and have done with the ills of the universe."

The two men joined her. It was a strange trio: Claire, a dashing boy in Philip's made-over corduroys; Lawrence wearing his host's summer serge as though it were his own, and Philip looking at them, amusedly.

"I never quite recover from the charm of you in male attire," Ortez remarked, looking into her face.

"I've tried at times since our fortunate misfortune to imagine her in evening gowns and furs," said Lawrence; "but I always fail and end by getting her into some sort of barbaric costume belonging to the distant past."

"You are both flattering and both foolish," she told them. "It's my business to look well in clothes, you know, and it's masculine to admit my efficiency in a particularly feminine line."

"You were scarcely fascinatingly efficient in the garb in which you first appeared to me." Philip laughed at the recollection.

"That isn't fair. I would have been if I had had enough to eat."

She looked at him, and her eyes sparkled gaily.

"I surrender," he said. "You would have been. Too fascinating!"

"That also depends on circumstances," said Lawrence. "She wouldn't be fascinatingly efficient in that back-to-nature garb if she were doing charity work at home or if she were taking a trip in an airplane."

"You carry your point," she agreed. "I shouldn't care to try."

"Which leads me," Lawrence went on, "to observe that our friend, Shakespeare, was, after all, right in bequeathing _Hamlet_ to us. He might not look well in our own castle, but as a portrait viewed in our neighbor's house, or in a house unspecified, he is the high point of subjective tragedy."

Ortez did not answer for a moment, then he said, quietly: "I had rather lose my winter's work than lost _Hamlet_ from my memory, yet when I think of what there is in life for a man, did he not have _Hamlet's_ doubt to face, I think perhaps we would all be better off for no knowledge of that subjective war. Man has too much to do to lift himself out of the still clinging primordial slough to dally with subjectiveness. We should be acting, aggressive, strident in the strength of the war we wage toward freedom."

"Of course," agreed Lawrence, "but that requires only one thing, the master passion to do, because for us, doing is life. I cannot regret _Hamlet's_ hesitating failure. It was his life. To every man there is but one way, his way, and whether it be failure or success does not depend upon an avenged wrong, a successful marriage, or even a great work done for humanity. The test is, is his life worth the price he pays to live it? I imagine _Hamlet's_ was."

"Fallacies!" interrupted Claire. "Why, then, the tragedy?"

"Because _Hamlet_ did not know that the governing laws to which he strove to hold himself were not laws, not true, not necessary."

"You mean," Ortez inquired, "that he was not bound to avenge his father and punish his mother?"

"I mean just that. Why should he? She was satisfied, his father was dead, and _Hamlet_ gained nothing by his moral strutting and raving against his own hesitating hand."

"But you have swept aside all moral law," protested Philip.

"What moral law is there that is external to me? What, indeed, is moral law?"

"That which makes for life, perhaps, as some one has said," offered Claire.

"For my life, yes. That which to me means life, is good. That which to me means less life, is bad."

"Yet you carried Claire through the mountains," Philip's voice was hard.

"Because I needed her, because she was essential to my life."

"Then you would have left her, had she been a hindrance?"

"That depends," answered Lawrence slowly. "Had she made my life uncertain when otherwise I might have lived, I think I would. Of course, if her being there merely increased my trouble, I should have brought her."

Claire was watching Philip's face. It was a study. On it there was something that made her heart beat faster, she found herself unable to tell why. She glanced at Lawrence. There he sat, his strong, stern face, calm and soulless. She wondered why blindness robbed this man of his rightful appearance. He had a soul, and it was a wild, beauty-loving soul, she knew, but blindness quite mantled it. On the other hand, Philip's was a mighty fire within, which shone in beauty through his eyes. Lawrence had quietly spoken of how he would have left her under other circumstances. Philip would have died at her side, she knew it. What a difference between them!

"But if you feel as you declare, why take that extra trouble to save her?" Philip asked.

"Because I have a certain dislike of death and don't care to cause it myself if I can help it."

Claire laughed. "But death, you said once, is a mere stopping of animal action. Why dread that?"

"Because I myself do not care to die, I would not care to cause your death."

Philip rose and went to the fire. "I do not believe you could live by your theory," he asserted.

"I do live by it. There is but one thing I dread worse than death. I would die rather than give up my creative impulse."

"And he would sacrifice your life or mine for art's sake," merrily added Claire. "It's a good thing he doesn't think we are hindrances to art."

Philip also laughed. "Well," he said, "there might come a time when I, too, would want a thing enough to kill in order to obtain it."

"What, for example?" asked Lawrence. "That is the best way to determine your value of life."

Philip did not answer for a few minutes, then his voice vibrated.

"The things that mean more than life to me. I know that one holds his own life dear, but there are things, love, courage, honor, for example, that he holds even above life."

"Would you kill me, for instance," asked Lawrence pleasantly, "if I stood between you and Claire?"

"That is scarcely answerable," nervously interposed Claire. "You see, you don't and the man who does--though it's all absurd, since we none of us here are the least in love--is my husband."

"I had almost forgotten him," said Lawrence, his voice lingering softly on the word "almost."

Philip laughed. "Why, yes, in the abstract, I should say that if anything would make me kill you, it would be your standing between me and the woman I loved. Of course, the case is fair, but scarcely probable enough to make any of us worry."

"True"--Lawrence joined him at the fire--"and by the way, while I think of it, I want a knife and a block of soft wood. I'm going to entertain myself these days."

Quickly Claire looked up.

"And you shall entertain me, Philip," she said gaily.