Part 4

The circus ground was an apparently inexplicable tangle of canvas and lumber, threaded by men like unsubstantial, hurrying shadows. At the fence corner loomed the vague bulks of elephants, heaving ceaselessly, stamping with the dull clank of chains; a line of cages beyond was still indistinguishable. The confusion seemed hopeless--the hasty, desperate labor at the edges of the billowing, grey canvas, the virulent curses as feet slipped in the torn sod, the shrill, passionate commands, resembled an inferno of ineffectual toil for shades condemned to never-ending labor. The tent rose slowly, hardly detached from the thin morning gloom, and the hammering of stakes uprose with a sharp, furious energy. A wagonload of hay creaked into the lot; a horse whinnied; and, from a cage, sounded a longdrawn, despondent howl. The fusillade of hammering, the ringing of boards, increased. A harried and indomitable voice maintained an insistent grip upon the clamor. It grew lighter; pinched features emerged, haggard individuals in haphazard garbs stood with the sweat glistening on their blue brows.

The elephants, tearing apart a bale of hay, appeared ancient beyond all computation, infinitely patient, infinitely weary. Out of the sudden crimson that stained the east a ray of sunlight flashed like a pointed, accusing finger and rested on the garish, gilded bars and tarnished fringe of the cages; it hit the worn and dingy fur of an aged, gaunt lioness, the dim and bleared topaz of her eyes blinking against the flood of day; it fell upon a pair of lean wolves trotting in a quick, constricted circle; upon a ragged hyena with a dry and uplifted snout; upon a lithe leopard with a glittering, green gaze of unquenchable hate.

“Take a hold,” a husky voice had urged Anthony; “help the circus men put up the big tent, and get a free pass.” In the contagion of work he had pulled upon the hard canvas, the stiff ropes that cut like scored iron, and held stakes to be driven into the slushy sod. Thin shoulders strained against his own, gasping and maculate breaths assailed him. The flesh was tom from a man's palm; another, hit a glancing blow on the head with a mall, wandered about dazed, falling over ropes, blundering in paths of hasty brutality.

Anthony rested with aching muscles in the orient flood of the sun. The tent was erected, flags fluttered gaily aloft, the posters of the sideshow flung their startling colors abroad. A musical call floated upward from an invisible bugle: an air of gala, of triumphant and irresponsible pleasure, permeated the scene. “She's all right, isn't she?” Alfred Craik demanded at his side. He nodded silently, and turned toward home, his pulses leaping with joy at the dewy freshness of the morning, the knowledge of Eliza--a sparkling, singing optimism drawn from the unstained fountain of his youth.

XIV

LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf--at a super-union scale--for his mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade. From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the swirling stream--“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”

After the midday meal a minute review of the places where Eliza might be found discovered the Ellerton Country Club to hold the greatest possibility. Anthony was a virtual stranger to that focus of the newer Ellerton; except for the older enthusiasts who played golf every afternoon that it was humanly possible to remain outside it was the stronghold of the species Anthony had encountered in the dressing room at the Dreens' dance. The space at the back of the drugstore where he had lounged held unbroken the elder tradition of Ellerton. There he had cultivated a mild contempt for the studied urbanity, the formally organized converse and games, of the Club. But as a setting for Eliza it gained a compelling attraction. And, in his freshly-ironed flannels, he ordered his steps toward that goal. The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking--teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic.

Then he saw Eliza... she was on the tennis court, playing with a vigorous girl with a bare and stalwart forearm. He divined that the latter was winning, and conceived a sweeping distaste for her flushed, perspiring countenance and thickset ankles. “How beautiful you look!” Eliza called, as he propped himself against the wire netting that, overrun with honeysuckle, enclosed the courts. He watched her fleeting form, heard her breathless exclamations, with warm stirs of delight. When her opponent played the ball beyond her reach his dislike for that efficiency became an obsession. The flying shadows lengthened on the rolled, yellow surface of the court; the group on the porch emptied their teacups and moved away; and the final set of games won by the “beefsteak.”

Eliza slipped into a formless chocolate-colored coat: racket in hand she smiled at him. “I'm rather done,” she admitted. She hesitated, then: “I wonder--are you doing anything?--if you would drive me home?” He assured her upon that point with a celerity that wrought a momentary confusion upon them. “The Meadowbrook and roan at the sheds,” she directed. In the basketlike cart they swung easily over the road toward Hydrangea House. Checked relentlessly into a walk the roan stepped in a dainty fume.

Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes; her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal--her relaxed, drooping body filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time itself.

He had never before driven such an impatient and hasty animal; at the slightest slackening of the reins the horse broke into a sharp trot; and, beyond doubt, he could walk faster than any other brute alive. Already they were at the entrance to the driveway; the house appeared to hurry forward to intercept them. Eliza pressed a button, and a man crossed the grass to the roan's head. They descended, and she lingered on the steps with a murmur of gratitude. “Mrs. Dreen telephoned Ranke to meet the eight-forty,” a servant in the doorway replied to Eliza's query; “she's having dinner in town with Mr. Dreen.”

Eliza turned with a gesture of appeal. “Save me from a solitary pudding,” she petitioned Anthony; “you can go back with Ranke.... On the porch, such fun--father detests candles.” The voicing of his acceptance he felt to be an absurd formality. “Then if you can amuse yourself,” she announced, “I'll vanish for a little... cigars in the library and victrola in the hall.”

He crossed the sod to the porch on the other face of the house, and sat watching the day fade from the valley below. A violet blur of smoke overhung the chimney of the Ellerton Waterworks, printed thinly on the sky. A sense of detachment from that familiar scene enveloped him--the base ball field, the defunct garage, places and details, customary, normal, retreated into the distance, it seemed into the past, gathering upon the horizon of his thoughts as the roofs of Ellerton huddled beyond the hills, vanishing into shadows that inexorably deepened, blotted out the old aspects, stilled the accustomed voices, sounds.

A servant appeared, and placed a table upon the tiles, spreading a blanched cloth, gleaming crystal and silver. A low bowl of shadowy wood violets was ranged in the centre, and hooded candles lighted, spilling over the table, the flowers, a pale, auriferous pool of light in the purpling dusk. When Eliza followed, in filmy white, she seemed half materialized from the haunting vision of poignant beauty at the back of his brain. She was like moonlight, still and yet disturbing, veiled in illusion, in strange, ethereal influences that set athrill within him emotions immaterial, potent, snowy longing, for which he had no name.

The last plate removed, Anthony stirred his coffee in a state of dreamy happiness. The candlelight spread a wan gold veil over Eliza's delicate countenance, it slid over the pearls about her slim throat, and fell upon her fragile wrists. “It's been wonderful,” he pronounced solemnly.

“I've been terribly rude,” she told him, “I have hardly spoken. I have been busy studying you.”

“There's not much to study,” he disclaimed; “Mrs. Bosbyshell thinks I'm marked for failure.” In reply to her demand he gave a brief and diffident account of that eccentric old woman. “But,” Eliza discerned among the meagre details, “she trusts you, she lets you into her house. And you are perfect to her, of course.

“Any one could trust you, I think. Yet you are not a particle tiresome; most trustworthy people are so--so unexciting. But monotony is far as possible from your vicinity. What did you do, for instance, this morning?” He described to her the advent of the circus, the labor in the obscurity. “I was surprised to see the old thing up,” he ended: “it seemed so hopeless at first.”

“How wonderfully poetic!” she cried.

Until that moment poetry had occupied in his thoughts a place analogous to tea.--In his brief passage through the last school he had been forcibly fed with Gray's Elegy, discovering it unmitigated and sickening rot. When now, in view of her obvious pleasure, he would have to reconsider his judgment.

“That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark, unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others had. And then--oh! don't you see!--the great, snowy tent in the morning sun--a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.”

“How about the ones that loafed--didn't pull, or were drunk?”

“For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.”

“You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one else is good too.”

“But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good if I could--in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing; I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and stumbling-block to a young man.”

She had!

He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable, more warmly and delightfully human.

“I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown; “the accounts are, well--various. I don't mind your--your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.”

“It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills and streams.”

For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision; then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she announced.

Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train.

“You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?”

“Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the candles, the sweeping hem of night.

“I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have changed everything. The dinner was--I don't remember what it was,” he confessed; “but I remember an olive.”

He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot, passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves to nowhere.--A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again, he protested, to _this_.

XV

ANTHONY passed the few, intervening days to the excursion on the Wingohocking in a state of rapt absorption: his brain sounded with every tone of Eliza's voice; she smiled at him, in riding garb, over that delicate trail of freckles; he saw her in the misty, amber dress of the dance; in white, illusively lit by the candles against the shadowy veranda. Now, for the first time, day that had succeeded haphazard to day, without relation or plan, were strung together, bound into an intelligible whole, by the thread of romance. He must get a firm grip upon reality, construct a solid existence out of the unsubstantial elements of his living; but, in his new felicity, he was unable to direct his thoughts to details inevitably sordid; he was lost in the miracle of Eliza Dreen's mere presence; material considerations might, must, be deferred a short while longer.

A stainless afternoon sky overspread finally the group gathered about covered willow baskets on the green bank of the stream. Behind them the meadow swept level, turning back the flood of the sun with a blaze of aureate flowers, to a silver band of birch; the upstream reach, wrinkled and dark, was lost between tangles of wild grapes; below, with a smooth, virid rush, the water poured and broke over rocky shallows.

Anthony launched his canoe from a point of crystalline sand, and, holding it against the hank, gazed covertly at Eliza. She was once more in white, with a broad apple-green ribband about her waist: she stood above him, slenderly poised against the sky; and she was so rare, he thought, so ethereal, that she seemed capable of floating off into the blue. Then he bent, hastily rearranging a cushion, for she was descending toward him. He stepped skilfully after her into the craft, and they drifted silently over the surface of the stream. A thrust of the paddle, in a swirl of white bubbles, turned them about, and they advanced steadily against the sliding current.

The still, watery facsimile of the banks were broken into liquid blots of emerald and bronze by the bow of the canoe. The air rose coldly from the surface to Anthony's face; from the meadows on either hand came the light, dry fragrance of newly cut hay; before them trees, meeting above, formed a sombrous reach, barred with dusty gold shafts of sunlight that sank into the clear depths. He heard behind the distant dip of paddles, and floating voices, worlds removed.

Eliza trailed her hand in the water. An idyllic silence folded them which he was loath to break.... He had rolled up his sleeves, and the muscles of his forearms swelled rhythmically under the clear, brown skin.

“You are preposterously strong,” she approved. His elation, however, collapsed at the condition following. “But strength is simply brutality until it's wisely directed. Mazzini and not Napoleon was my ideal in history.” Who, he wondered unhappily, was Mazzini? “I hated school,” he told her briefly; “I don't believe I have ever read a book through; I'd rather paddle about--with _you_.”

“But you have read deep in the book of nature,” she reassured him; “only a very favorite few open those pages. You are such a child,” she added obliquely, “appallingly unsophisticated: that's what's nicest about you, really.” That form of laudation left him cold, and he drove the canoe with a vicious rush against the reflections. “A dear child,” she added, without materially increasing his pleasure.

“Words are rot!” he exploded suddenly; “they can't say any of the important things. I could talk a year to you without telling you what I feel--here,” he laid a hand momentarily on his spare, powerful chest; “it's all mixed up, like lead and fire; or that feeling when ice cream goes to your head. You see,” he ended moodily, “all rot.”

“It's very picturesque... and apparently painful. Words aren't necessary for the truly important things, Anthony.”

“Then you know--what I think of you; you know... how everything else has moved away and left only you; you know a hundred things, all important, all about yourself.”

She set an uncertain smile against the rush of his words. The stream narrowed between high banks drawn against the sheer deeps of sky; the water flowed swiftly, with a sustained whisper at the edges, and, for a silent space, he paddled vigorously. Then a profound, glassy pool opened, sodded bluely to the shores, with low, silvery clumps of willows casting sooty shadows across the verd water; and, with a sharp twist, he beached the canoe with a soft shock upon the shelving pebbles. As he held the craft steady he felt the light, thrilling impact of Eliza's palm as she sprang ashore.

The others followed rapidly. The canoes were drawn out of the water, and preparations for supper commenced. Eliza and Ellie Ball, accompanied by a youth with a pail, proceeded to a nearby farmhouse in quest of milk. Anthony lingered at the water's edge, ignoring the appeal for firewood. The glow of the westering sun faded from the air, and the reflection of the fire lighted behind him danced ruddy op the grass. At intervals small fish splashed invisibly, and a kingfisher cried downstream. Then he heard his sister's voice, and a familiar and moving perfume hovered in his nostrils. He turned and saw Eliza with her arms full of white lilacs. Her loveliness left him breathless, mingled with the low sun it blinded him. She seemed all made of misty bloom--a fragrant spirit of ineffable flowers. The scent of the lilacs stirred profound, inarticulate emotions within him, like the poignant impression left by a forgotten dream of shivering delight.

He scorned the fare soon spread on the clothed sod, burning his throat stoically with a cup of unsweetened coffee. Eliza sat beyond the charring remains of the fire sinking from cherry-red embers to impalpable white ash. He observed with secret satisfaction that she too ate little: an appetite on her part, he felt, would have been a calamity.

'The meadows and distant woods were vague against the primrose west, the cyanite curtain of the east, when the baskets were assembled for the return. Anthony delayed over the arrangement of his craft until Eliza and himself were last in the floating procession. Dense shadows, drooping from the trees, filled the banks; overhead the sky was clear green. They swept silently forward with the current, a rare dip of the paddle. Eliza's countenance was just palely visible. The lilacs lay in a pallid heap at their feet. On either hand the world floated back darkly like an immaterial void through which an ebon stream bore them beyond the stars.

At a bend he reached up and caught hold of an overhanging branch, and they swung into a shallow backwater. A deep shelf of stone lay under the face of the bank, closed in by a network of wildgrape stems. “This is where I sometimes stay at night,” he told her; “no one knows but you.”

XVI

SHE rose, and, without warning, stepped out upon the rock. “Here's where you build your fire,” she cried at the discovery of a blackened heap of ashes. He secured the canoe and followed her. “Ideal,” she breathed. The sound of the fall below was faintly audible; the quavering cry of an owl, the beating of heavy wings, rose above the bank. “Don't you envy the old pastoral people following their flocks from land to land, setting up their tents by streams like this, waking with the dawn on the world? or gipsies... you must read 'Lavengro.'”

“I don't envy any one on God's little globe,” he asserted; “to be here with you is the best thing possible.”

“Something more desirable would soon occur to you.”

“Than you!” he protested; “than you!”

“But people get tired of what they have.”

“It's what they don't have that makes them old and tired,” he told her with sudden prescience; “when I think of what I am going to lose, of what I can never have, it makes me crazy.”

“Why do you say that?... How can you know?”

She was standing close to him in the constricted space, the tangible shock of her nearness sweeping over him in waves of heady emotion. The water gurgling by the rock was the only sound in a world-stillness.

“I mean you.”

“Well, I'm not fairy gold; I'm not the end of the rainbow. I am just Eliza.”

“Just Eliza!” he scoffed. Then the possibility contained in her words struck him dumb. The feeling irresistibly returned that because of her heavenly ignorance, her charity, she mistook him to be worthy. The necessity to guard her from her own divinity impelled him to repeat, miserably, all that she had ignored.

“I'm not much account,” he said laboriously; “you see, I never stuck at anything, and, somehow, things have never stuck to me. It was that way at school--I was expelled from four. I'm supposed to be shiftless.”