Part 12

When they came, however, to putting Augusta's plans into actual operation Jimmie had his misgivings. He knew himself. And he knew that, with all of his ready tongue and his genial effrontery in talking himself into and out of a situation, he was at bottom shy and diffident. He had never been able to do good, sincere work with anybody watching him. He had always loved to hug and hide his work until it was actually in print. He had never in his life been guilty of reading or even showing a manuscript to a friend. And he was shy now, even of Augusta's quick sympathy and understanding.

What was worse, he found that his mind was sluggish and lazy. After the months, in which he had thought only of rest and sleep and the feeding of his body, he found it almost impossible to spur his mind up to the point of nervous tension where he could create with any sequence. The fires of his brain were banked and choked with the accumulations which the greedy body was piling up for itself. He felt stupid, and yet he found that he could not even get irritated with himself over the fact.

To please Augusta, he kept on trying, for he knew how she must have set her heart on this plan of hers and he would have given everything that was in him to make it a success. Never in his life had he tried so hard and so consciously to write good lines. But the good lines would not come, even though he sat for hours dictating painfully and slowly while Augusta wrote. He knew that the work was not good, but he would say nothing, secretly hoping that she would soon tire of the drudgery and let him get at the machine, as he was now hungry to do, in his own way.

Augusta did not tire. But in the end she pronounced fatal judgment. One day in the middle of a long paragraph she dropped her hands from the keyboard and looked Jimmie squarely in the eye.

"Nothing but the truth, Jimmie," she demanded, "do I get in your way? This is not your good work."

"Had you noticed?" said Jimmie dryly.

"It is not bad," Augusta explained, springing loyally to the defence of anything that Jimmie had done. "For anybody else it would be perfectly all right. But it isn't just you, Jimmie. It's not just alive, you see. It's--It's--"

"Wooden," said Jimmie shortly and without stress.

Much as she hated to, Augusta let the criticism stand. She threw the cover over the machine without a word. That was the end of a dream which Augusta had been hugging to her heart for months. Now Augusta, as we know, was a high hearted, high handed little lady, and she always knew that her way was right. Remembering this, we may arrive at some idea of what it cost her to drop, without a whimper, even as she dropped the cover over the machine, her dearest, deepest laid little plan, and to say blithely:

"Come on for a run around the lake! Tomorrow you can have a pad and pencil and sit on the back of your neck with your feet up in the window and scribble your own way."

Wardwell knew the cost of it.

The next day was rainy and Jimmie was forced to sit about the house all day. He was still near enough to his recent sickness to feel peevish and irritable when it rained, he hated wind and rain. He grudgingly envied Augusta for the carelessness with which she could run out into the rain. He noticed that she made wholly unnecessary trips out to the stable, away beyond the end of the sugar cabin, to see if Donahue was all right. Donahue was perfectly all right, Jimmie was sure. He did not see that lumps of sugar did the old fool any good, anyhow.

In short, Jimmie was working himself into a thorough stew of working fever, ripping and tearing viciously at the work which he and Augusta had been so faithfully laboring on, and incidentally scrapping down some very good paragraphs which he knew, with a growl of satisfaction for each one, would stand the test.

He did not know that Augusta was having a little cry every time she went to the stable. Neither did he know that the lumps of sugar, which he denounced as being wholly unsuited to Donahue's digestion, were in reality the "thirty pieces of silver," with which, in Augusta's imagination, Donahue was being betrayed. So Jimmie could not know that Augusta, too, was developing a temperament. He was entirely unprepared for its demonstration.

"Rot!" he grunted, jabbing his pencil through something he had just written and beginning to write again furiously, meanwhile trying to sit on his left shoulder blade in the chair with his feet piled up in the window.

The room was small. The stove was smoking a little. It was only three o'clock. There were, for Augusta, interminable hours to be gone through before she could even pretend to busy herself with getting supper. And a certain matter was working vividly upon her conscience.

"Shucks!" she remarked. "I could write a book myself with less fuss, and not lose my temper about it, either."

"Of course, dear." Jimmie answered dutifully. He had not the remotest idea of what she had said.

After an interval of alternate cutting and hurried, excited writing, during which the room might have been moved out into the rain for all Jimmie would have known or cared, so long as he was not forcibly disturbed, it was slowly forced upon his attention that something was going on in the room. He was aware while he worked that Augusta had seated herself at the machine and was clicking away fitfully at it.

That fact in itself would not have been sufficient to draw his attention. He might well have supposed that she was merely practicing, to fill in a dull and rainy afternoon. But there was something dynamic in the air about Augusta. She clicked nervously and tentatively at intervals, and then hammered on viciously and desperately, as though she feared that the thought would escape her before she had time to nail it down in words.

Jimmie's jaw dropped and he sat staring at her in stupid amazement. He could see the delicate lines of her figure drawn tense and sharp like the body of some very beautiful animal straining before a leap. He could see that her whole mind and heart were being thrown into the words that she was driving down upon the paper, and it was not merely his loyalty, his faith in everything that Augusta did, which told him that what she was doing was fine. He knew that she was creating something worthy, by the very power that he saw straining in her effort. She was putting will and soul and a wonderful, untrammelled native intelligence into it, and it could be nothing less than good.

He waited excitedly for the end of the page, to see what she would do. Augusta was orderly above all other things. Jimmie was making hasty bets with himself as to whether her little god of order would prevail and make her take the paper out carefully and look at it before starting another, as a sane person would do, or would she throw it down and race on with another without looking at what she had done. If she did the latter, then the fever had indeed taken her and she was lost.

He gave a mental whoop of sympathy as Augusta, coming with a bang to the end of the sheet, fairly tore it from the machine and threw it down without looking to see whether it fell on the table or the floor. With the same motion of her swift hands she had swept down upon another sheet of paper and without even waiting to straighten it had jammed it into the machine and was banging away for dear life upon the over-lapping sentence.

"Another good cook and honest citizen lost!" Jimmie groaned to himself. "Once that fever has bitten her she won't care which side the fish is burned on." Nevertheless, with the eagerness and adroitness of a thieving cat, he stole across the floor and picked up the paper from where it had fallen, without disturbing Augusta.

He read the page that Augusta had written, without comment of any kind. Then with a sort of stupid solemnity he gathered up the pages at which he himself had been scribbling and examined them gravely, as though his reading of Augusta's page had put them in an entirely new light. He laid down his own work on his knees and beside it he laid the page that Augusta had written, and read wonderingly from one and from the other.

In his own work he had gone back to the point where he had left the story months ago. He had not used a single one of the ideas which he had so laboriously dictated to Augusta, but had struck into an entirely new turn. Augusta could not have known what he was doing or thinking today. Yet she had taken his idea just where he had left it and she was carrying it through the very drift which he had just today thought of.

He reached into an inner pocket for a fountain pen and examined it carefully. Then he cleared his pad and began to write slowly and precisely. He was not now inventing. He was a critic, a just judge, a man having authority; in short, an editor. He took impartially, with cold and fearless discrimination, from Augusta's paper and from his own. And it was an astonishing fact that he was hardly obliged to add even connectives. A paragraph of hers fitted in after one of his so neatly that there was not a seam of divergence between. And there were even sentences which he could begin in Augusta's words, and end with his own. He was not now excited. He was working with the cool and certain precision of the trained man who has his tools right and is finding perfect materials ready to his hand.

He did not care where the materials came from. He had no compunction that Augusta's thoughts were sacredly her own and that he had no right to use them so. Neither, on the other hand, did he feel the smallest resentment when he found himself bound to drop one of his own best regarded lines and replace it with one from Augusta's. He cared for nothing but what he saw was the excellence of the finished product.

When Augusta had finished her second sheet he rescued it from the floor where it, too, had fallen disregarded, and went on with his editing.

By the time when Augusta's third and fourth sheets came from her hurrying fingers he found that she was reaching far beyond the point to which he had come in nearly a whole day's work. She was going, straight and true, with far less words than he had found necessary, swiftly towards the conclusion for which he had been merely groping. Now he was really put to it to keep his pace with Augusta's flying thought, to anticipate the hurrying turn of her fancy, to drive in with the thrust of his own quick, excited words.

It was a crazy, disorderly method of work, but Jimmie knew that they were both working on the very edge of inspiration and he knew that it was all good. For two solid hours they worked madly, Augusta all unconscious of the fact that she was taking part in a desperate race. Finally Jimmie saw that she was trembling with fatigue and strain.

He went over quickly and swooped her up bodily into his arms and carried her, protesting, over to his chair. When he had brought cold water and bathed her forehead and eyes, for he knew how they must be smarting and dancing with fever and strain, he said:

"Rest a little, dear; and then I am going to show you something."

"Have you been looking at what I did?" she asked quickly, seeing her pages where he had laid them.

"I have, Augusta, and they're great. And on top of that I've taken the most impudent liberty. But you shall be judge."

"Why? What have you been doing?"

"Well, read this first, will you please, dear," he evaded, giving her the stuff that he himself had scribbled at all day.

"But, it's just like," she said, when half way through it. "I had no idea what you were thinking of."

"I know you didn't," said Jimmie with a grin. "I didn't myself. Now read your own."

She glanced eagerly over it, and for a moment Jimmie was sorry, sorry that the will to write had come to her. For Augusta would be a terrible critic upon herself. Immediately he saw the frown of the artist's discontent with her work clouding her face. Augusta was too clever not to see the raw and badly tooled places in her own work just as she saw them in his work. And Jimmie thought of several men whom he knew, fairly successful as writers, too, who never knew this discontent, who could sit down and gloat over everything they wrote, fatuously thinking it all good merely because it was theirs. Augusta had gone farther in this afternoon than those men had progressed in years. He counted the cost for her and knew what she would suffer from her own sensitive and merciless judgment. Nevertheless, he knew, with a sort of helpless fatalism, that he would not now try to stop her.

"Now," he said, handing her the finished product which he had made from her work and his, "here is the impudence. It's for you to tear it up or let it stand."

She took it without a question and began to read carefully, while Jimmie stood by waiting for the verdict. He felt that Augusta had every right to be hurt by his ruthlessly grabbing and mutilating to his own purposes her first little heart-wrung work. But he soon saw from her hurrying breath and shining eyes that he had not done wrong.

At the end, she jumped up and hugged him, crying:

"It's fine, Jimmie! And it's yours and mine! _Ours!_"

After a little Jimmie said:

"Yes, the spiteful relatives may say that it has its great uncle's red hair and that they can't imagine where it gets its good looks from anyway, but it's _ours_."

Augusta hid her face in the general region of Jimmie's vest pocket, and when she finally looked up the change of subject was complete.

"I'll have to sell Donahue," she said quietly. And her face was set and steady, as though she had been thinking of nothing but this decision.

Now here Jimmie failed. He should have been ready with argument, balderdash, or discussion of some sort. He knew that Augusta would rather sell her last pair of shoes than sell Donahue. But he was curiously and fatally tongue-tied. He had never, since they had started out upon the road, been able to speak of money with Augusta. He had not at any time formed the slightest idea as to how much, or how little, she might have on which to go through with this venture on which she had staked everything. And he knew, a little guiltily, that it was not altogether delicacy that kept him from asking out and facing the details with her.

He was ashamedly conscious of a little lingering, subtle, unworthy resentment of the way that he had been bundled into this thing without being consulted. And, perhaps because he knew that it was altogether wrong and base, he could not speak, but had gone on weakly leaving all thought and worry upon Augusta. It would have been a simple matter, and he knew it, to have asked her just how real was the need of money. But he could not, or would not, do it.

When he did not answer, Augusta explained.

"We cannot afford to buy feed for him through the winter," she stated, with a matter-of-fact coolness which did not at all deceive Jimmie. "And neither he nor the wagon would be of any use to us in the deep snow."

"But, isn't there some other way? Couldn't I rake up some old stories, or something?"

"_No!_" And Augusta stamped her foot. "I wouldn't have you stop a minute from the book now for anything in the world."

That was the end of the discussion.

That afternoon was the beginning of a new and bewildering life for the two of them. Jimmie did honestly try to limit the amount of Augusta's work. But he soon recognized the uselessness of the attempt. She worked furiously when the work came to her, writing pages sometimes while he sweated and growled over a few scratched lines. They were both madly happy, asking nothing of life, or of the world; caring not a thought for the success that might come to them.

They never talked over the work that lay ahead. They did no concerted planning. Each of them began a chapter in his or her own way, without the slightest thought of how or where that chapter was to end. They were independent of plans, these two; for out of their own lives they had learned that the spinning wheel of truth takes no account of plans. One could only start, and keep on to see what the next turning would bring. So it was with the story that came turning swiftly out of their imaginations. It ran its own way with each of them, rushing along smoothly, stumbling, stopping, flashing on again.

Then at intervals Jimmie would stop and take just and unswerving measure of what they had done. At the first, in building the finished story out of the materials which they both had furnished, Jimmie had tried to make Augusta sit in judgment with him, had tried to consult with her as to what should go in and what should be left out. But Augusta would have none of this office. Jimmie was trained in the craft, and he must take the responsibility of selection and rejection. That was the way she put it. And Jimmie answered:

"You're a bigger man than I am, Augusta. Without at least a howl, I couldn't let William Shakespeare--and he's had time to learn some things, if he's been reading the things the critics say about his work--but I couldn't let even him maul my stuff the way I do yours."

"Well, _I_ wouldn't let William Shakespeare do it, either." And Jimmie answered:

"Oh."

So Augusta copied, faithfully and without comment or question, the story as Jimmie edited it.

In this time they were curiously detached and tolerant. They did not demand so much of each other. And, though neither of them would have admitted it, this was a relief. They were very far from being tired of each other. But, it is humanly impossible for two normal, independent willed people to live through the hours of every day and night for months in the exclusive society of each other without feeling a strain. Good nature, good sense, and even gentle, thoughtful love will fail sometime. And two people are, after all, just two human beings.

Now, when the mind of each of them was busy during waking hours with the doings of other people whom it was creating and trying to manage, Jimmie and Augusta each found that the other was delightfully easy to get along with. They came and went, worked or played, and Jimmie hunted and Augusta fished, when Jimmie wanted to hunt and when Augusta wanted to fish. Which arrangement they found to be immeasurably better, after all, than the one in which each had been laboriously trying to do only the things that the other wanted.

Jimmie had not forgotten that the problem of Donahue was before them. Augusta had spoken of it only that once, but he knew that she felt bound to sell the horse and that neither argument nor heart-break would deter her from what she conceived to be duty. He had, however, a hope--which he did not mention--that perhaps Augusta would not be able to sell Donahue, for any amount that would be worth considering, and that, finally, she would allow him to try to get some money out of scraps of stories. He was sure that he could hatch up some fairly good ones now. So he said nothing, and waited. For them, and for what they had needed, Donahue was the ideal horse. There was none to equal him. But as an article of commerce in the open and unprejudiced market Jimmie did not believe that Donahue would bring very much money. It was probable that most of the farmers in the hills had already more cattle and horses than they cared to feed through the winter. And it did not seem likely that any of them would pay a high price for the privilege of feeding Donahue through five or six months of idleness.

Of course, he underestimated Augusta's perseverance and business force.

On a gray October morning when there was already a threat of snow in the air Jimmie went rabbit hunting over the bowl of hills that encircled their little lake. He took no lunch, for he intended to be home before midday. But rabbits are not to be depended on in any weather. Besides, Jimmie followed a fox for two useless, scrambling hours. Therefore it was the middle of the short afternoon when Jimmie came home. The one big bare room which was the house they lived in, and which Augusta's warming, coloring personality alone had made into a home, was cold and dreary even after the brown bleakness of the hills. The fire must have been out for hours. Jimmie was tired and hungry, and he missed Augusta discontentedly.

Where could she have gone for all this time? She would not be fishing. It was too cold to sit holding a pole. Then where could she be, and why?

He lighted the fire and thought of cooking some bacon. But even the warmth of the fire did not drive away his discontent about Augusta. Suddenly he did not care for bacon. He put it back, and, just to prove that he was miserable, he beat up a bowl of the hated milk and eggs and forced himself to drink it.

He went out to the barn to see Donahue. The horse was not there. Augusta must have hitched up and gone down to Jethniah Gamblin's for provisions. Strange that she should not have told him. He had not heard that they were needing things. He went around to the shed, for confirmation of the obvious. Yes, the wagon was gone.

The utter desolation of the place fell upon him like a physical chill. Everything that was his was gone. He felt depressed and deserted. And there came upon him a cold foreboding that some day, through his own fault, Augusta would go and leave him thus alone, his lips dry and cracking with the caking ashes of dreams.

"Hills of Desire!" he growled, looking around in mockery at the bare trees and the rocky, storm gashed hillsides.

He got the axe and went at his woodpile, not with enthusiasm but with hatred. He had some good sized limbs of trees which had been broken off in a recent heavy storm, and it would have been less wasteful and far more easy to have cut them into proper lengths with a saw. But that would by no means have fitted the frame of his temper at that time. He wanted to hack and hew and destroy. And the vicious, swinging axe spoke his mind, while he grumblingly wondered what Augusta could be talking to Jethniah Gamblin about all this time, anyway. And it was a wonder that that bitter tongued old woman in the window had not put a stop to it before now.

Several times he dropped the axe to go out through the fringe of trees to watch for the wagon returning along the track that came up by the brook. Finally when the early dusk was beginning to fall, he gave up the pretense at the wood pile and went out and watched eagerly and frankly for Augusta. Could anything have happened to her? In fact, he would long ago have started down the track to meet her, but he knew how Augusta hated even the appearance of being followed. She had made a point of pride of her independence and her ability to take care of herself and to do things in her own way, and he knew it would only hurt her if he made any show of anxiety. So he waited, watching and nervously pacing about along the edge of the trees.

When, at last, she did come into sight over a rise in the path Jimmie could scarcely recognize her.

There was no wagon, nor did Donahue appear ambling along intent upon his own thoughts. Instead, there was just the lonely figure of a little girl, unbelievably little and pitifully alone in the dusk and the big stretches of the darkening hills, trudging uncertainly along a twisting path.

Jimmie could hardly persuade himself that it was really Augusta, for the little figure walked heavily and was disguised with an ugly, oddly hanging bundle that threw it out of all likeness to his Augusta with her free swinging, high hearted step. Altogether there was a look of defeat, of heartbreak about the little figure that caught Wardwell by the throat. For he knew that it was Augusta. And he guessed at what she had done and what she was feeling.

He halloed loudly to her and started running down the path to meet her.