Chapter 5

Anne had never met him. He had been in India When she had married Ridgeley, and then there had been a few years in Egypt where he had studied some strange germ, of which she could never remember the name. He had plenty of money, hence he was not tied to a practice. But when the war began, he had offered his services, and had made a great record. "He is one of the big men of the future," Ridgeley Dunbar had said.

But when Christopher came back with an infected arm, which might give him trouble, it was not the time to talk of futures. He was invited to spend July at the Dunbars' country home in Connecticut, and Ridgeley brought him out at the week-end.

The Connecticut estate consisted of a rambling stone house, an old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden a grove of white birches.

"What a heavenly place," Christopher said, toward the end of dinner; "how did you happen to find it?"

"Oh, Anne did it. She motored for weeks, and she bought it because of the birches."

Anne's eyes were shining. "I'll show them to you after dinner."

She had decided at once that she liked Christopher. He still wore his uniform, and had the look of a soldier. But it wasn't that--it was the things he had been saying ever since the soup was served. No one had talked of the war as he talked of it. There had been other doctors whose minds had been on arms and legs--amputated; on wounds and shell shock--And there had been a few who had sentimentalized. But Christopher had seemed neither to resent the frightfulness nor to care about the moral or spiritual consequences. He had found in it all a certain beauty of which he spoke with enthusiasm--"A silver dawn, and a patch of Blue Devils like smoke against it--;" ... "A blood-red sunset, and a lot of airmen streaming across--"

He painted pictures, so that Anne saw battles as if a great brush had splashed them on an invisible canvas. There were just four at the table--the two men, Anne, and her second cousin, Jeanette Ware, who lived the year round in the Connecticut house, and was sixty and slightly deaf, but who wore modern clothes and had a modern mind.

It was not yet dark, and the light of the candles in sconces and on the table met the amethyst light that came through, the wide-flung lattice. Anne's summer gown was something very thin in gray, and she wore an Indian necklace of pierced silver beads. Christopher had sent it to her as a wedding-present and she had always liked it.

When they rose from the table, Christopher said, "Now for the birches."

Somewhere in the distance the telephone rang, and a maid came in to say that Dr. Dunbar was wanted. "Don't wait for me," he said, "I'll follow you."

Jeanette Ware hated the night air, and took her book to the lamp on the screened porch, and so it happened that Anne and Christopher came alone to the grove where the white bodies of the birches shone like slender nymphs through the dusk. A little wind shook their leaves.

"No wonder," said Christopher, looking down at Anne, "that you wanted this--but tell me precisely why."

She tried to tell him, but found it difficult. "I seem to find something here that I thought I had lost."

"What things?"

"Well--guardian angels--do you believe in them?" She spoke lightly, as if it were not in the least serious, but he felt that it was serious.

"I believe in all beautiful things--"

"I used to think when I was a little girl that they were around me when I was asleep--

'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-- Bless the bed that I lie on--'"

her laugh was a bit breathless--"but I don't believe in them any more. Ridgeley doesn't, you know. And it does seem silly--"

"Oh, no, it isn't--"

"Ridgeley feels that it is a bit morbid--and perhaps he is right. He says that we must eat and drink and--be merry," she flung out her hands with a little gesture of protest, "but he really isn't merry--"

"I see. He just eats and drinks?" He smiled at her.

"And works. And his work is--wonderful."

They sat down on a stone bench which had been hewn out of solid gray rock. "I wish Ridgeley had time to play," Anne said; "it would be nice for both of us--"

The amethyst light had gone, and the dusk descended. Anne's gray dress was merged into the gray of the rock. She seemed just voice, and phantom outline, and faint rose fragrance. Christopher recognized the scent. He had sent her a precious vial in a sandalwood box. Nothing had seemed too good for the wife of his old friend Dunbar.

"Life for you and Ridgeley," he told her, "should be something more than work or play--it should be infinite adventure."

"Yes. But Ridgeley hasn't time for adventure."

"Oh, he thinks he hasn't--"

As Christopher talked after that, Anne was not sure that he was in earnest. He complained that romance had fallen into disrepute. "With all the modern stories--you know the formula--an ounce of sordidness, a flavor of sensationalism, a dash of sex--" One had to look back for the real thing--Aucassin and Nicolette, and all the rest. "That's why I haven't married."

"Well, I have often wondered."

"If I loved a woman, I should want to make her life all glow and color--and mine--with her--"

Anne's eyes were shining. What a big pleasant boy he was. He seemed so young. He had a way of running his fingers up through his hair. She was aware of the gesture in the dark. Yes, she liked him. And she felt suddenly gay and light-hearted, as she had felt in the days when she first met Ridgeley.

They talked until the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return until the following Friday.

Anne and Christopher were thus left together for a week to get acquainted. With only old Jeanette Ware to play propriety.

II

It did not take Christopher long to decide that Ridgeley was no longer in love with his wife. "Of course he would call it love. But he could live just as well without her. He has made a machine of himself."

He spoke to Dunbar one night about Anne. "Do you think she is perfectly well?"

"Why not?"

"There's a touch of breathlessness when we walk. Are you sure about her heart?"

"She has never been strong--" and that had seemed to be the end of it.

But it was not the end of it for Christopher. He watched Anne closely, and once when they climbed a hill together and she gave out, he carried her to the top. He managed to get his ear against her heart, and what he heard drained the blood from his face.

As for Anne, she thought how strong he was--and how fair his hair was with the sun upon it, for he had tucked his cap in his pocket.

That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne's in a bad way." He told of the walk to the top of the hill.

Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his office, and did things to her. "But I don't see why you are doing all this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and made her draw long breaths while he listened.

"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."

"Well, I do. But there's nothing really the matter, is there?"

There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her. He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was away for a week.

In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John_!"

He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from within, like an alabaster lamp.

Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.

But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train on his way back to Anne.

But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--

"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she'd never grow less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"

For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he pleased--but there had not been a word between them.

Once more the thought flashed, "If I were a gipsy to follow the road--"

As his train sped through the countryside, he became aware of flaming bill-boards--a circus was showing in the towns--the fences fairly blazed with golden chariots, wild beasts, cheap gods and goddesses, clowns in frilled collars and peaked hats. He remembered a glorious day that he had spent as a boy!

"I'll take Anne," was his sudden decision.

He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn balls--the entrancing smell of sawdust--the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East.

He reached his destination at seven o'clock. Dunbar met him at the station. Anne sat with her husband, and Jeanette was in the back seat. Christopher had, therefore, a side view of Anne as she turned a little that she might talk to him. The glint of her bright hair under her gray sports hat, the light of welcome in her eyes--!

"I am going to take you to the circus to-morrow. Ridgeley, you'll go too?"

Dunbar shook his head. "I've got to get back to town in the morning. And I'm not sure that the excitement will be good for Anne."

"Why not?" quickly. "Aren't you well, Anne?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Ridgeley seems to think I'm not. But the circus can't hurt me."

Nothing more was said about it. Christopher decided to ask Ridgeley later. But the opportunity did not come until Anne had gone up-stairs, and Dunbar and Christopher were smoking a final cigar on the porch.

"What's the matter with her?" Christopher asked.

Dunbar told him, "She can't get well."

III

Anne, getting ready for bed, on the evening of Christopher's arrival, felt unaccountably tired. His presence had been, perhaps, a bit over-stimulating. It was good to have him back. She scarcely dared admit to herself how good. After dinner she and Ridgeley and Christopher had walked down to the grove of birches. There had been a new moon, and she and Ridgeley had sat on the stone bench with Christopher at their feet. She had leaned her head against her husband's shoulder, and he had put his arm about her in the dark and had drawn her to him. He was rarely demonstrative, and his tenderness had to-night for some reason hurt her. She had learned to do without it.

She had talked very little, but Christopher had talked a great deal. She had been content to listen. He really told such wonderful things--he gave her to-night the full story of her silver beads, and how they had been filched from an ancient temple--and he had bought them from the thief. "Until I saw you wear them, I always had a feeling that they ought to go back to the temple--to the god who had perhaps worn them for a thousand years. If I had known which god, I might have carried them back. But the thief wouldn't tell me."

"It would have done no good to carry them back," Ridgeley had said, "and they are nice for Anne." His big hand had patted his wife's shoulder.

"Oh," Christopher had been eager, "I want you to hear those temple bells some day, Anne. Why won't you take her, Dunbar? Next winter--drop your work, and we'll all go--"

"I've a fat chance of going."

"Haven't you made money enough?"

"It isn't money. You know that. But my patients would set up a howl--"

"Let 'em howl. You've got a life of your own to live, and so has Anne."

Dunbar had hesitated for a moment--then, "Anne's better off here."

Anne, thinking of these things as she got out of her dinner dress and into a sheer negligee of lace and faint blue, wondered why Ridgeley should think she was better off. She wanted to see the things of which Christopher had told her--to hear the temple bells in the dusk--the beat of the tom-tom on white nights.

She stood at the window looking out at the moon. She decided that she could not sleep. She would go down and get a book that she had left on the table. The men were out-of-doors, on the porch; she heard the murmur of their voices.

The voices were distinct as she stood in the library, and Christopher's words came to her, "What's the matter with Anne?"

Then her husband's technical explanation, the scientific name which meant nothing to her, then the crashing climax, "She can't get well."

She gave a quick cry, and when the men got into the room, she was crumpled up on the floor.

Her husband reached her first. "My dear," he said, "you heard?"

"Yes. Do you mean that I am--going to die, Ridgeley?"

There was, of course, no way out of it. "It means, my dear, that I've got to take awfully good care of you. Your heart is bad."

Christopher interposed. "People live for years with a heart like that."

But her eyes sought her husband's. "How long do they live?"

"Many months--perhaps years--without excitement--"

This then had been the reason for his tenderness. He had known that she was going to die, and was sorry. But for ten years she had wanted what he might have given her--what he couldn't give her now--life as she had dreamed of it.

She drew a quivering breath--"It isn't quite fair--is it?"

It didn't seem fair. The two doctors had faced much unfairness of the kind of which she complained. But it was the first time that, for either of them, it had come so close.

They had little comfort to give her, although they attempted certain platitudes, and presently Ridgeley carried her to her room.

IV

She insisted the next morning on going to the circus with Christopher. She had not slept well, and there were shadows under her eyes. The physician in Christopher warred with the man. "You ought to rest," he said at breakfast. Dunbar had gone to New York in accordance with his usual schedule. There were other lives to think of; and Anne, when he had looked in upon her that morning, had seemed almost shockingly callous.

"No, I don't want to stay in bed, Ridgeley. I am going to the circus. I shall follow your prescription--to eat and drink and be merry--"

"I don't think I have put it quite that way, Anne."

"You have. Quite. 'Death is death and life is life--so make the most of it.'"

Perhaps she was cruel. But he knew, too, that she was afraid. "My dear," he said gently, "if you can get any comfort out of your own ideas, it might be better."

"But you believe they are just my own ideas--you don't believe they are true?"

"I should like to think they were true."

"You ought to rest," said Christopher at the breakfast table.

"I ought not. There are to be no more oughts--ever--"

He nodded as if he understood, leaning elbows on the table.

"I am going to pack the days full"--she went on. "Why not? I shall have only a few months--and then--annihilation--" She flung her question across the table. "You believe that, don't you?"

He evaded. "We sleep--'perchance to dream.'"

"I don't want to dream. They might be horrid dreams--"

And then Jeanette came down, and poured their coffee, and asked about the news in the morning paper.

Dressed for her trip to the circus, Anne looked like a girl in her teens--white skirt and short green coat--stout sports shoes and white hat. She wore her silver beads, and Christopher said, "I'm not sure that I would if I were you."

"Why not?"

"In such a crowd."

But she kept them on.

They motored to the circus grounds, and came in out of the white glare to the cool dimness of the tent as if they had dived from the sun-bright surface of the sea. But there the resemblance ceased. Here was no silence, but blatant noise--roar and chatter and shriek, the beat of the tom-tom, the thin piping of a flute--the crash of a band. But it was the thin piping which Christopher followed, guiding Anne with his hand on her arm.

Following the plaintive note, they came at last to the snake-charmer--an old man in a white turban. The snakes were in a covered basket. He sat with his feet under him and piped.

Christopher spoke to him in a strange tongue. The piping broke off abruptly and the man answered with eagerness. There was a quick interchange of phrases.

"I know his village," Christopher said; "he is going to show you his snakes."

A crowd gathered, but the snake-charmer saw only the big man who had spoken to his homesick heart, and the girl with the silver beads. He knew another girl who had had a string of beads like that--and they had brought her luck--a dark-skinned girl, his daughter. Her husband had bestowed the beads on her marriage night, and her first child had been a son.

He put the thin reed to his lips, and blew upon it. The snakes lifted their heads. He drew them up and out of the basket, and put them through their fantastic paces. Then he laid aside his pipe, shut them in their basket, and spoke to Christopher.

"He says that no evil can teach you while you wear the beads," Christopher told Anne.

The old man, with his eyes on her intent face, spoke again. "What you think is evil--cannot be evil," Christopher interpreted. "The gods know best."

They moved toward the inner tent.

"Are you tired?" Christopher asked. "We don't have to stay."

"I want to stay," and so they went in, and presently with a blare of trumpets the great parade began. They looked down on men and women in Roman chariots, men on horseback, women on horseback, on elephants, on camels--painted ladies in howdahs, painted ladies in sedan chairs--Cleopatra, Pompadour--history reduced to pantomime, color imposed upon color, glitter upon glitter, the beat of the tom-tom, the crash of the band, the thin piping, as the white-turbaned snake-charmer showed in the press of the crowd.

Christopher's eyes went to Anne. She was leaning forward, one hand clasping the silver beads. He would have given much to know what was in her mind. How little she was and how young. And how he wanted to get her away from the thing which hung suspended over her like a keen-edged sword.

But to get her away--how? He could never get her away from her thoughts. Unless....

Suddenly he heard her laughing. Two clowns were performing with a lot of little dogs. One of the dogs was a poodle who played the fool. "What a darling," Anne was saying.

There was more than they could look at--each ring seemed a separate circus--one had to have more than a single pair of eyes. Christopher was blind to it all--except when Anne insisted, "Look--look!"

Six acrobats were in the ring--four men and two women. Their tights were of a clear shimmering blue, with silver trunks. One could not tell the women from the men, except by their curled heads, and their smaller stature. They were strong, wholesome, healthy. Christopher knew the quality of that health--hearts that pumped like machines--obedient muscles under satin skins. One of the women whirled in a series of handsprings, like a blue balloon--her body as fluid as quicksilver. If he could only borrow one-tenth of that endurance for Anne--he might keep her for years.

Then came Pantaloon, and Harlequin and Columbine. The old man was funny, but the youth and the girl were exquisite--he, diamond-spangled and lean as a lizard, she in tulle skirts and wreath of flowers. They did all the old tricks of masks and slapping sticks, of pursuit and retreat, but they did them so beautifully that Anne and Christopher sat spellbound--what they were seeing was not two clever actors on a sawdust stage, but love in its springtime--girl and boy--dreams, rapture, radiance.

Then, in a moment, Columbine was dead, and Harlequin wept over her--frost had killed the flower--love and life were at an end.

Christopher was drawing deep breaths. Anne was tense. But now--Columbine was on her feet, and Harlequin was blowing kisses to the audience!

"Let's get out of this," Christopher said, almost roughly, and led Anne down the steps and into the almost deserted outer tent. They looked for the snake-charmer, but he was gone. "Eating rice somewhere or saying his prayers," Christopher surmised.

"How could he know about the gods?" Anne asked, as they drove home.

"They know a great deal--these old men of the East," Christopher told her, and talked for the rest of the way about the strange people among whom he had spent so many years.

V

Ridgeley did not come home to dinner. He telephoned that he would be late. It was close and warm. Christopher, sitting with Anne and Jeanette on the porch, decided that a storm was brewing.

Anne was restless. She went down into the garden, and Christopher followed her. She wore white, and he was aware of the rose scent. He picked a rose for her as he passed through the garden. "Bend your head, and I'll put it in your hair."

"I can't wear pink."

"It is white in the dusk--" He put his hands on her shoulders, stopped her, and stuck the rose behind her ear. Then he let her go.

They came to the grove of birches, and sat down on the stone seat. It had grown dark, and the lightning flashing up from the horizon gave to the birches a spectral whiteness--Anne was a silver statue.

"It was queer," she said, "about the old man at the circus."

"About the beads?"

"Yes. I wonder what he meant, Christopher? _'What you think is evil--cannot be evil'?_ Do you think he meant--Death?"

He did not answer at once, then he said, abruptly, "Anne, how did it happen that you and Ridgeley drifted apart?"

"Oh, it's hard to tell."

"But tell me."

"Well, when we were first married, I expected so much ... things that girls dream about--that he would always have me in his thoughts, and that our lives would be knit together. I think we both tried hard to have it that way. I used to ride with him on his rounds, and he would tell me about his patients. And at night I'd wait up for him, and have something to eat, and it was--heavenly. Ridgeley was so ... fine. But his practice got so big, and sometimes he wouldn't say a word when I rode with him.... And he would be so late coming in at night, and he'd telephone that I'd better go to bed.... And, well, that was the beginning. I don't think it is really his fault or mine ... it's just ... life."

"It isn't life, and you know it," passionately. "Anne, if you had married me ... do you think...?" He reached out in the dark and took her hand. "Oh, my dear, we might as well talk it out."

She withdrew her hand. "Talk what out?"

"You know. I've learned to care for you an awful lot. I had planned to go away. But I can't go now ... not and leave you to face things alone."

He heard her quick breath. "But I've got to face them."