Part 8

It was a good picture to take home in your mind for remembrance, when walls should be brick and rooms ornate and life hackneyed, and the Girl shut her eyes for a second, experimentally, to fix the vision in her consciousness.

When she opened her eyes again the Man was struggling through the doorway dragging a small, heavy trunk.

"Oh, don't go yet!" he exclaimed. "Here are a lot of your things in this trunk. I brought them in to show you."

And he dragged the trunk to the middle of the room and knelt down on the floor and commenced to unlock it.

"_My_ things?" cried the Girl in amazement, and ran across the room and sat down on the floor beside him. "_My_ things?"

There was a funny little twist to the Man's mouth that never relaxed all the time he was tinkering with the lock. "Yes--_your_ things," was all he said till the catch yielded finally, and he raised the cover to display the full contents to his companion's curious eyes.

"Oh--_books_!" she cried out, with a sudden, sweeping flush of comprehension, and darted her hand into the dusty pile and pulled out a well-worn copy of the Rubaiyat. Instinctively she clasped it to her.

"I thought so!" said the Youngish Man quizzically. "I thought that was one of your books.

"When Time lets slip a little, perfect hour, Oh, take it--for it will not come again."

His eyes narrowed, and his hands reached nervously to regain possession of the volume. Then he laughed.

"_I_, also, used to think that Life was made for me," he scoffed teasingly. "It's a glorious idea--as long as it lasts! You take every harsh old happening and every flimsy friendship and line it with your own silk, and then sit by and say, 'Oh, _isn't_ the World a rustly, shimmery, luxurious place!' And all the time the happening _is_ harsh, and the friendship _is_ flimsy, and it's just your own perishable silk lining that does the rustle and the shimmer and the luxury act. Oh, I suppose that's 'woman talk' about silk linings, but I know a thing or two, even if I am a man."

But the radiancy of the Girl's face defied his cynicism utterly. Her eyes were absolutely fathomless with Youth.

Then his mood changed suddenly. He reached out with a little brooding gesture of protection. "These are my college books," he confided, "my Dream Library. I've scarcely thought of them for a dozen years. I don't meet many dreamers nowadays. You've probably got a lot of newer books than these, but I'll wager you anything in the world that every book here is a precious friend to you. I shouldn't wonder if your own copies opened exactly to the same places. Here's young Keats with his shadowing tragedy. How you have mooned over it. And here's Tennyson. What about the starlit vision:

"And on her lover's arm she leant, And round her waist she felt it fold,--"

The Girl took up the words softly in unison:

"And far across the hills they went To that new world which is the old."

In rushing, eager tenderness she browsed through one book after another, sometimes silently, sometimes with a little crooning quotation, where corners were turned down. And when she had quite finished, her eyes were like stars, and she looked up tremulously, and whispered:

"Why, we--like--just--the--same--things."

But the Youngish Man did not smile back at her. His face in that second turned suddenly old-looking and haggard and gray. He threw the books back into their places, and slammed the trunk-cover with a bang.

For just the infinitesimal fraction of a second the Man and the Girl looked into each other's eyes. For just that infinitesimal fraction of a second the Man's eyes were as unfathomable as the Girl's.

Then with a great sniff and scratching and whine, the White Bulldog pushed his way into the room, and the Girl jumped up in alarm to note that the sun was dropping very low in the west, and that the shadows of late afternoon crept palpably over her companion's face.

For a moment the two stood awkwardly without a word, and then the Girl with a conscious effort at lightness queried:

"But _where_ did the Runaway Road go to? I _must_ find out."

The Youngish Man turned as though something had startled him.

"Wouldn't you rather leave things just as they are?" he asked.

"NO!" The Girl stamped her foot vehemently. "NO! I want everything. I want the whole adventure."

"The whole adventure?" The Youngish Man winced at the phrase, and then laughed to cover his seriousness.

"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll show you just where the Runaway Road goes to."

Without further explanation he stepped to the dooryard and scooped up two heaping handfuls of gravel from the Road. As he came back into the room he trailed a little line of earth across the floor to the foot of the stairs, and threw the remaining handful up the steps just as a heedless child might have done.

"Go follow your Runaway Road," he smiled, "and see where it leads to, if you are so eager! I'm going down to the woods to see if my brother is quite lost in his clouds."

Wasn't that _another_ dare? It seemed a craven thing to tease for a climax and then shirk it. She had never shirked anything yet that was right, no matter how unusual it was.

She started for the stairs. One step, two steps, three steps, four steps--her riding-boots grated on the gravel. "Oh, you funny Runaway Road," she trembled, "where _do_ you go to?"

At the top stairs a tiny waft of earth turned her definitely into the first doorway.

She took one step across the threshold, and then stood stock-still and stared. It was a _woman's room_. And from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall flaunted an incongruous, moneyed effort to blot out all temperament and pang and trenchant life-history from one spot at least of the little old gray farmhouse. Bauble was there, and fashion and novelty, but the whole gay decoration looked and felt like the sumptuous dressing of a child whom one _hated_.

With a gasp of surprise the Girl went over and looked at herself in the mirror.

"Wouldn't I look queer in a room like this?" she whispered to herself. But she didn't look queer at all. She only felt queer, like a flatted note.

Then she hurried right down the stairs again, and went out in the yard, and caught the White Pony, and climbed up into her saddle.

The Youngish Man came running to say good-by.

"Well?" he said.

The Girl's eyes were steady as her hand. If her heart fluttered there was no sign of it.

"Why, it was a _woman's_ room," she answered to his inflection.

"Yes," said the Youngish Man quite simply. "It is my wife's room. My wife is in Europe getting her winter clothes. All people do not happen--to--like--the--same--things."

The Girl put out her hand to him with bright-faced friendliness.

"In Europe?" she repeated. "Indeed, I shall not be so local when I think of her. Wherever she is--all the time--I shall always think of your wife as being--most of anything else--_in luck_."

She drew back her hand and chirruped to the White Pony, but the Youngish Man detained her.

"Wait a second," he begged. "Here's a copy of Matthew Arnold for you to take home as a token, though there's only one thing in it for us, and you won't care for that until you are forty. You can play it's about the mountains that you pass going home. Here it is:

"Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, _THESE_ demand not that the things about them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."

"Rather cracked-ice comfort, isn't it?" the Girl laughed as she tucked the little book into her blouse.

"Rather," said the Youngish Man, "but cracked ice is good for fevers, and Youth is the most raging fever that I know about."

Then he stood back from the White Pony, and smiled quizzically, and the Girl turned the White Pony's head, and started down the Road.

Just before the first curve in the alders, she whirled in her saddle and looked back. The Youngish Man was still standing there watching her, and she held up her hand as a final signal. Then the Road curved her out of sight.

It was chilly now in the gloaming shade of the woods, and home seemed a long way off. After a mile or two the White Pony dragged as though his feet were sore, and when she tried to force him into a jarring canter the sharp corners of the Matthew Arnold book goaded cruelly against her breast.

"It isn't going to be a very pleasant ride," she said. "But it was quite an adventure. I don't know whether to call it the 'Adventure of the Runaway Road' or the 'Adventure of the Little Perfect Hour.'"

Then she shivered a little and tried to keep the White Pony in the rapidly fading sun spots of the Road, but the shadows grew thicker and cracklier and more lonesome every minute, and the only familiar sound of life to be heard was 'way off in the distance, where some little lost bossy was calling plaintively for its mother.

There were plenty of unfamiliar sounds, though. Things--nothing special, but just Things--sighed mournfully from behind a looming boulder. Something dark, with gleaming eyes, scudded madly through the woods. A ghastly, mawkish chill like tomb-air blew dankly from the swamp. Myriads of tiny insects droned venomously. The White Pony shied at a flash of heat lightning, and stumbled bunglingly on a rolling stone. Worst of all, far behind her, sounded the unmistakable tagging step of some stealthy creature.

For the first time in her life the girl was frightened--hideously, sickeningly frightened of Night!

Back in the open clearing round the tiny farmhouse, the light, of course, still lingered in a lulling yellow-gray. It would be an hour yet, she reasoned, before the great, black loneliness settled there. She could picture the little, simple, homely, companionable activities of early evening--the sputter of a candle, the good smell of a pipe, the steamy murmur of a boiling kettle. O--h! But could one go back wildly and say: "It is darker and cracklier than I supposed in the woods, and I am a wilful Girl, and there are fifteen wilful miles between me and home--and there is a cemetery on the way, and a new grave--and a squalid camp of gypsies--and a broken bridge--_and I am afraid! What shall I do?_"

She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village road below the hill.

Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a gap in the trees. "_Drat_ Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I _won't_! I _won't_! I _won't_!"

All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a stranger in a strange land--no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no lover, no anything--and now just for a flash, just for one "little, perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that _spoke her own language_, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another woman!

She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "_Nothing_ is mine forever. Nothing, _nothing_, NOTHING!" she sobbed.

A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her, and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one absolutely nonexistent, unborn, and tortured himself with the possibility of such a ghostly vacuum in his life. To the Girl suddenly it seemed as though puzzled, lonely, unmated, all her short years, she had stumbled now precipitously on the Great Cause Of It--a _vacuum_. It was not that she had lost any one, or missed any one. _It was simply that some one had never been born!_

The thought filled her with a whimsical new terror. She pounded the White Pony into a gallop and covered the last half-mile of the Runaway Road. At the crest of the hill the valley vista brightened palely and the White Pony gave a whimper of awakened home instinct. Cautiously, warily, with legs folding like a jack-knife he began the hazardous descent.

Was he sleepy? Was he clumsy? Was he footsore? Just before the Runaway Road smoothed out into the village highway his knees wilted suddenly under him, and he pitched headlong with a hideous lurch that sent the Girl hurtling over his neck into a pitiful, cluttered heap among the dust and stones, where he came back after his first panicky run, and blew over her with dilated nostrils, and whimpered a little before he strayed off to a clover patch on the highway below.

Twilight deepened to darkness. Darkness quickened at last to stars. It was Night, real Night, black alike in meadow, wood, and dooryard, before the Girl opened her eyes again. Part of an orange moon, waning, wasted, decadent, glowed dully in the sky.

For a long time, stark-still and numb, she lay staring up into space, conscious of nothing except consciousness. It was a floaty sort of feeling. Was she dead? That was the first thought that twittered in her brain. Gradually, though, the reassuring edges of her cheeks loomed into sight, and a beautiful, real pain racked along her spine and through her side. It was the pain that whetted her curiosity. "If it's my neck that's broken," she reasoned, "it's all over. If it's my heart it's only just begun."

Then she wriggled one hand very cautiously, and a White Doggish Something came over and licked her fingers. It felt very kind and refreshing.

Now and then on the road below, a carriage rattled by, or one voice called to another. She didn't exactly care that no one noticed her, or rescued her--indeed, she was perfectly, sluggishly comfortable--but she remembered with alarming distinctness that once, on a scorching city pavement, she had gone right by a bruised purple pansy that lay wilting underfoot. She could remember just how it looked. It had a funny little face, purple and yellow, and all twisted with pain. And she had gone right by. And she felt very sorry about it now.

She was still thinking about that purple pansy an hour later, when she heard the screeching toot of an automobile, the snort of a horse, and the terrified clatter of hoofs up the hill. Then the White Doggish Something leaped up and barked a sharp, fluttery bark like a signal.

The next thing she knew, pleasant voices and a lantern were coming toward her. "They will be frightened," she thought, "to find a body in the Road." So, "Coo-o! Coo-o!" she cried in a faint little voice.

Then quickly a bright light poured into her face, and she swallowed very hard with her eyes for a whole minute before she could see that two men were bending over her. One of the men was just a man, but the other one was the Boy From Home. As soon as she saw him she began to cry very softly to herself, and the Boy From Home took her right up in his great, strong arms and carried her down to the cushioned comfort of the automobile.

"Where--did--you--come--from?" she whispered smotheringly into his shoulder.

The harried, boyish face broke brightly into a smile.

"I came from Rosedale to-night, to find _you_!" he said. "But they sent me up here on business to survey a new Road."

"To survey a new Road?" she gasped. "That's--good. All the Roads that I know--go--to--Other People's Homes."

Her head began to droop limply to one side. She felt her senses reeling away from her again. "If--I--loved--you," she hurried to ask, "would--you--make--me--a--safe Road--_all my own_?"

The Boy From Home gave a scathing glance at the hill that reared like a crag out of the darkness.

"If I couldn't make a safer Road than _that_--" he began, then stopped abruptly, with a sudden flash of illumination, and brushed his trembling lips across her hair.

"I'll make you the safest, smoothest Road that ever happened," he said, "if I have to dig it with my fingers and gnaw it with my teeth."

A little, snuggling sigh of contentment slipped from the Girl's lips.

"Do--you--suppose," she whispered, "do--you--suppose--that--after--all--_this_--was--the real--end--of--the Runaway Road?"

SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER

MONDAY, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it had rained. Day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, it had rained and rained and rained and rained and rained, till by Friday night the great blue mountains loomed like a chunk of ruined velvet, and the fog along the valley lay thick and gross as mildewed porridge.

It was a horrid storm. Slop and shiver and rotting leaves were rampant. Even in Alrik's snug little house the chairs were wetter than moss. Clothes in the closets hung lank and clammy as undried bathing-suits. Worst of all, across every mirror lay a breathy, sad gray mist, as though ghosts had been back to whimper there over their lost faces.

It had never been so before in the first week of October.

There were seven of us who used to tryst there together every year in the gorgeous Scotch-plaid Autumn, when the reds and greens and blues and browns and yellows lapped and overlapped like a festive little kilt for the Young Winter, and every crisp, sweet day that dawned was like the taste of cider and the smell of grapes.

That is the kind of October well worth living, and seven people make a wonderfully proper number to play together in the country, particularly if six of you are men and women, and one of you is a dog.

Yet, after all, it was October, and October alone, that lured us. We certainly differed astonishingly in most of our other tastes.

Three of us belonged to the peaceful Maine woods--Alrik and Alrik's Wife and his Growly-Dog-Gruff. Four of us came from the rackety cities--the Partridge Hunter, the Blue Serge Man, the Pretty Lady, and Myself--a newspaper woman.

Incidentally, I may add that the Blue Serge Man and the Pretty Lady were husband and wife, but did not care much about it, having been married, very evidently, in some gorgeously ornate silver-plated emotion that they had mistaken at the time for the "sterling" article. The shine and beauty of the marriage had long since worn away, leaving things quite a little bit edgy here and there. Alrik's young spouse was, wonder of wonders, a transplanted New York chorus girl. No other biographical data are necessary except that Growly-Dog-Gruff was a brawling, black, fat-faced mongrel whose complete sense of humor had been slammed in the door at a very early age. For some inexplainable reason, he seemed to hold all the rest of the crowd responsible for the catastrophe, but was wildly devoted to me. He showed this devotion by never biting me as hard as he bit the others.

Yet even with Growly-Dog-Gruff included among our assets, we had always considered ourselves an extremely superior crowd.

There were seven of us, I said, who _used_ to tryst there together every autumn. But now, since the year before, three of us had _gone_, Alrik's Wife, Alrik's Dog, and the Blue Serge Man. So the four of us who remained huddled very close around the fire on that stormy, dreary, ghastly first night of our reunion, and talked-talked-talked and laughed-laughed-laughed just as fast as we possibly could for fear that a moment's silence would plunge us all down, whether or no, into the sorrow-chasm that lurked so consciously on every side. Yet we certainly looked and acted like a very jovial quartet.

The Pretty Lady, to be sure, was a black wisp of crape in her prim, four-footed chair; but Alrik's huge bulk tipped jauntily back against the wainscoting in a gaudy-colored Mackinaw suit, with merely a broad band of black across his left sleeve--as one who, neither affirming nor denying the formalities of grief, would laconically warn the public at large to "Keep Off My Sorrow." I liked Alrik, and I had liked Alrik's Wife. But I had loved Alrik's Dog. I do not care especially for temper in women, but a surly dog, or a surly man, is as irresistibly funny to me as Chinese music, there is so little plot to any of them.

But now on the hearth-rug at my feet the Partridge Hunter lay in amiable corduroy comfort, with the little puff of his pipe and his lips throbbing out in pleasant, dozy regularity. He had traveled in Japan since last we met, and one's blood flowed pink and gold and purple, one's flesh turned silk, one's eyes onyx, before the wonder of his narrative.

No one was to be outdone in adventurous recital. Alrik had spent the summer guiding a party of amateur sports along the Allagash, and his garbled account of it would have stocked a comic paper for a month. The Pretty Lady had christened a warship, and her eager, brooky voice went rippling and churtling through such major details as blue chiffon velvet and the goldiest kind of champagne. Even Alrik's raw-boned Old Mother, clinking dirty supper dishes out in the kitchen, had a crackle-voiced tale of excitement to contribute about a floundering spring bear that she had soused with soap-suds from her woodshed window.

But all the time the storm grew worse and worse. The poor, tiny old house tore and writhed under the strain. Now and again a shutter blew shrilly loose, or a chimney brick thudded down, or a great sheet of rain sucked itself up like a whirlpool and then came drenching and hurtling itself in a perfect frenzy against the frail, clattering window-panes.

It was a good night for four friends to be housed together in a red, red room, where the low ceiling brooded over you like a face and the warped floor curled around you like the cuddle of a hand. A living-room should always be red, I think, like the walls of a heart, and cluttered, as Alrik's was, with every possible object, mean or fine, funny or pathetic, that typifies the owner's personal experience.

Yet there are people, I suppose, people stuffed with arts, not hearts, who would have monotoned Alrik's bright walls a dull brain-gray, ripped down the furs, the fishing-tackle, the stuffed owls, the gaudy theatrical posters, the shelf of glasses, the spooky hair wreaths, the really terrible crayon portrait of some much-beloved ancient grandame; and, supplementing it all with a single, homesick Japanese print, yearning across the vacuum at a chalky white bust of a perfect stranger like Psyche or Ruskin, would have called the whole effect more "successful." Just as though the crudest possible room that represents the affections is not infinitely more worth while than the most esoteric apartment that represents the intellect.

There were certainly no vacuums in Alrik's room. Everything in it was crowded and scrunched together like a hard, friendly hand-shake. It was the most fiercely, primitively sincere room that I have ever seen, and king or peasant therefore would have felt equally at home in it. Surely no mere man could have crossed the humpy threshold without a blissful, instinctive desire to keep on his hat and take off his boots. Alrik knew how to make a room "homeful." Alrik knew everything in the world except grammar.

Red warmth, yellow cheer, and all-colored jollity were there with us.

Faster and faster we talked, and louder and louder we laughed, until at last, when the conversation lost its breath utterly, Alrik jumped up with a grin and started our old friend the phonograph. His first choice of music was a grotesque _duo_ by two back-yard cats. It was one of those irresistibly silly minstrel things that would have exploded any decent bishop in the midst of his sermon. Certainly no one of us had ever yet been able to withstand it. _But now no bristling, injuriated dog jumped from his sleep and charged like a whole regiment on the perfectly innocent garden._ And the duo somehow seemed strangely flat.