Chapter 23

"If you lose your temper--" Howat commenced, but Mariana impatiently interrupted him. "Why shouldn't Jim lose his temper?" she demanded. "I would. Personally, I'd be glad if he did, although it mightn't be fortunate for Kingsfrere. He's a good deal of a dumpling. But I will be furious if you look guilty. Tell them we're mad about each other and that I am waiting for the smallest encouragement to go with you."

Howat Penny left Mariana at the door, and went in with Polder. Provost was seated, with an open paper; Kingsfrere studying the photograph of Scalchi. "This," said Howat generally, "is my guest, James Polder." Peter Provost extended his square, powerful hand; but the other, Jannan, made no movement. "Well?" Polder demanded aggressively. Howat Penny proceeded through the room to the porch, where he met Mariana. They walked to the further end and found chairs. "What makes me sick," Mariana proceeded, "is the way men calmly take everything into their own hands; as if women were still tied up, naughty bundles. Jim will have all the fun, and he has only said 'no' in horrified tones."

Again he could think of no adequate reply. He listened in vain for the sound of raised voices within. "What, in heaven's name, brought them?" Howat told her what he had heard. "I'm glad I did break up that mess they called a home," she asserted. "It was rotten with stale beer and half pounds of liver for that disgusting animal!"

The heat increased in waves; a wagon passing on the road below was enveloped in a cloud of dust. "I wish they'd hurry," Mariana said sharply. Howat Penny thought he heard Kingsfrere speaking in abrupt periods. Then a chair scraped, and Peter Provost's deliberate voice became audible. It was, however, impossible to distinguish his words; but suddenly Polder exclaimed, "Say something I can pound into you." Mariana rose, her hands clenched. "Go back to your mouldy little life!" James Polder continued. "I'm not surprised Miss Jannan wants to get out of it. I am sorry I hesitated. It seemed to me I couldn't offer her anything good enough; but that was before I'd listened to you.... And if you in particular come worming about me again I'll smash your flat face." The screen door was wrenched violently open, and James Polder strode up to Mariana. "Suppose we get out of this slag pit," he said, his chest labouring; "I can't breathe here."

"I am ready, Jimmy," she replied quietly; "perhaps Howat will look up a train and let Honduras drive us to the station." She laid her hand on his arm. "Now we can forget them," she said. They turned, and, together, vanished into the house. Howat Penny followed them slowly. He found Peter Provost apparently undisturbed. "Nothing to be done," the latter commented. "I saw that immediately he turned up. Kingsfrere made a short effort, but it wasn't conspicuously successful; I imagine it rather worse than failed. God knows what's getting into these young women, Howat--Eliza and the rest of 'em--it's a gamble they don't. All right, Kingsfrere." Jannan lingered with a dark mutter, but the other unceremoniously drove him into the waiting car.

Mariana soon descended, with Polder carrying two bags. "One seven," Howat told them. In the extraordinary situation he found nothing adequate to say. Mariana might have been going unremarkably to Charlotte and her home; she was absolutely contained. James Polder had a dazed expression; without his companion, Howat thought, he would blunder into the walls. He stood, holding the bags until told to put them down. Honduras was soon at the door. Mariana moved forward, and mechanically Howat Penny made his customary pretence of avoiding her kiss. The warm fragrance of her lips remained long after she had gone.

A pervasive stillness settled upon Shadrach; outside the sunlight lay on the hills in a thick, yellow veil; the cool interior held only the familiar crepitation of the old clock above. Now, he told himself, he could read the papers peacefully; but he sat with empty hands. Mariana had gone. "Outrageous conduct," he said aloud, without conviction. His voice sounded thin, unfamiliar. His dreams of her continued superiority to the commonplace, of her fine aloofness like the elevation of the strains of _Orfeo_, had been utterly destroyed. He could not imagine a greater descent than the one which had overtaken her. As he rehearsed its details they seemed increasingly disgraceful. He could not forgive James Polder for his relapse, his shocking failure to maintain the standards, the obligations, bred into himself, Howat Penny, by so many years, and by blood. It was that miserable old business of Jasper's once more, blighting the present, betraying Mariana.

This wheeled in his brain throughout summer. He had, as he expected, no word from her. Charlotte, too, sent no line; he was isolated in the increasing and waning heat, in a sea of greenery growing heavy and grey with dust, then swept by rain, and touched with the scarlet finality of frost. Rudolph lit again the hickory fires in the middle hearth; the days shortened rapidly; sitting before the glow of the logs he could see, through a western window, the afternoon expiring in a sullen red flame. The leaves streamed sibilantly by the eaves and accumulated in dry, russet heaps in angles and hollows; they burned in crackling fires, filling the air with a drifting haze rich with suggestion and memories. He saw the first snow on a leaden morning when the flexible and bald white covering, devoid of charm, held the significance of barrenness, death. All day this chilling similitude lingered in his mind. He walked about the house slowly, unpleasantly conscious of the striking of his feet on the wood floors.

At Christmas a revival of spirit overtook him; a long letter came from Mariana, Bundy Provost sent him a tall silver tankard, with a lid, for his night table. Howat, polishing his glass with a maroon bandanna, read Mariana's letter in the yellow light of the lamp and burning logs.

"I have been to see a new steel process," she wrote; "the Duplex, with immense tilting furnaces and the Bessemer blast. I know a great deal about iron now; far more than a Howat Penny who should be an authority. Jim is frightfully busy, but lately he has been able to sleep after the night shift, which makes it better for every one. He is one of the best men here, and that comes from the Works, and the reorganization is slowly but surely progressing, and we are progressing with it. I am not a particle lonely, with only one servant; really don't want another, and make a great deal more than desserts. You have no idea how absorbing it is to have a lot of things that must be done. The days simply fade. You mustn't worry about me, Howat; I always hated polite affairs and parties and people; even when I was young as possible I was more than anything else a Hell in the Corner."

He smiled, recognizing an old flippant phrase, and let his hand drop while he recalled Mariana--turning to him to hook her gown, constructing annoying towers with the dominoes, reprehensible and amusing. He resumed reading:

"It would be wonderful if--no, it is wonderful! But Howat, I can tell only you this, I wish oranges had never been invented." He drew his mouth into a compressed line. James was drinking. He remembered when the other first made the concoction of orange juice and brandy; he saw him clearly, leaning in the doorway to the dining room, with the emptied goblet, and a curious, introspective expression on his mobile countenance. "He ought to be hung!" he exclaimed sharply. The fellow should see himself as a mat for Mariana's feet. But that wasn't life, he realized; existence seemed to become more and more heedless of the proprieties, of the simplest concessions to duty. He saw the world as a ship which, admirably navigated a score or more years ago, had jammed its rudder. No one could predict what rocks the unmanageable sphere might be driving for.

The significance born by that sentence robbed the remainder of the letter of pleasure. He read that Mariana had ordered the customary gift of cigarettes, and hoped they would last him longer than everybody knew they would. The implied affection of all the paragraphs was visible in the last words. He put the letter carefully away. The cigarettes were sufficient for a considerable time beyond customary. Something of his appetite had gone; the periods of half wakeful slumber in his chair drew out through whole evenings. The actual world retreated; his memories, as bright as ever, became a little confused; the years, figures, mingled incongruously; famous arias were transposed to operas in which they had not been sung.

Winter retreated, but the latter part of March and April were bitterly cold; no leaves appeared; the ground remained barren; he seldom got out.

The albums of programmes were brought from their place on the low shelves, but now, more than often, they were barely opened, scanned. Then, on an evening when belated snow was sifting through the cracks of the solid shutters, he came on an oblong package, wrapped in strong paper. He opened it, in a momentary revival of interest, of life. It was a tall ledger, bound in crumbling calf, with stained and wrinkled leaves. Howat had not seen it for twenty years, but he recalled immediately that it was a forge book kept in Gilbert Penny's day; then Myrtle Forge had been new, that other Howat alive. He opened it carefully, powdered his knees with leather dust, and studied the faded entries; what flourishing, pale violet initials, what rubicund lines and endings!

There were two handwritings, listing commonplace transactions now invested by time with an accumulated, poignant significance, one smooth and clerkly, the other abrupt, with heavy, impatient strokes. Youth, probably, held at an unwelcome task; and, more than likely, Howat ... October, in seventeen fifty. Years of virility, of struggle and conquest, of iron--iron, James Polder had shown him, still uncorrupted, better than the metal of to-day--and iron-like men. The ledger slipped to the floor, tearing the spongy leather and crumbling the sere leaves. He recovered it, dismayed at the damage wrought. A sheet apparently had come loose, and he bent forward with difficulty, a swimming head. Howat made an attempt to find its place, when he discovered that it was not a part of the volume. It was, he saw, a note, obliterated by creases but with some lines still legible, hurriedly scrawled, by a woman:

"You must be more careful ... Your mother. So hot-headed, Howat. I can't do what you ask. I have a headache now thinking about Felix and you and myself. No one must find out." What followed was lost, then came a signature that, with the aid of a reading glass, he barely deciphered--"Ludowika."

That was the name of the woman, a widow, Gilbert's son had married. Her first husband, Felix Winscombe, had died at Myrtle Forge during a diplomatic mission from England.... An old man with a young wife! His confusion, slowly resolving into a comprehension of what the note implied, filled him with an increasing revolt. The earlier Howat, too, like Jasper, in the tangle of an intrigue--not a public scandal and shame, as had been the later, but no less offensive. In a flare of anger Howat Penny crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire. There it instantly blackened, burst into flame and wavered, a shuddering cinder, up the chimney. He put the ledger, loosely wrapped in its covering, on the table, and sat breathing rapidly, curiously disturbed. The old fault, projected so unexpectedly out of the faithless burial of the past, struck at him with the weight of a personal affront.

The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red to pulsating, and finally dead, ash. Lost in the bitterness of his thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire.

He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such scarring records as his own. Were there everywhere, back of each heart, puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public view? And now--Mariana! Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly as these others. Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little different. Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain words, her challenging courage forbade them. Here was more than could be arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment. Or perhaps this was only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth.

The first Howat and Jasper, striking contemptuously across the barriers of social morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in illegitimate circumstance, and in himself--an old man without family, without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely dragging at his bandanna.

But he discovered that his hand was numb with cold. The fire lay black and dead. The shrilling wind, ladened with snow, wrenched at the shutters. The room was bitter. He must get up to bed ... warm blankets. A chill touched him with an icy breath. It overtook him midway on the stair, and he clung to the railing, appalled at its violence in his fragile being. He got, finally, to his room, to the edge of his bed, where he sat waiting for the assault to subside. He wanted Rudolph, but the effort to move to the door, call, appeared insuperable. The chill left him; and blundering, hideously delayed, he wrapped himself in the bed covering.

Not all the wool in the world, he thought, would be sufficient to drive the cold from his body. He fell into a temporary exhaustion of sleep; but was waked later by sharp and oppressive pains in his chest, deepening when he breathed. The suffering must be mastered, and he lay with gripping hands, striving by force of will to overcome what he thought of as the brutal play of small, sharp knives. He conquered, it seemed; the pain grew less; but it had left an increasing difficulty in his breathing; it was a labour to absorb sufficient air even for his small, aged demands. Sleep deserted him; and he waited through seeming years for the delayed appearance of dawn. He had hoped that the new day would be sunny, warm; it was overcast, he could see the snow drifted in the lower window panes.

Rudolph usually knocked at the door at half past eight; but, apparently, to-day he had forgot. Howat Penny's watch lay on the table, at his hand, yet it was far distant; he couldn't face the heavy effort of its inspection. At last the man came in with his even morning greeting. Howat was so exhausted that he could make no reply; and Rudolph moved silently to the bedside. His expression, for an instant, was deeply concerned. "I have a cold, or something of the sort," the other said. He raised his head, but sank back, with a thin, audible inspiration. "It would be best, sir, to have the doctor from Jaffa," the servant suggested. Howat, in the midst of protest, closed his eyes; the pain had returned. When he had again defeated it Rudolph was gone.

The room blurred, lost its walls, became formless space; out of which, to his pleasurable surprise, he saw the carefully garbed figure of Colonel Mapleson walking toward him. He never forgot that tea rose! Confound him--probably another benefit for one of his indigent song birds. As Howat was about to speak the Colonel disappeared. It was Scalchi, in street dress, a yellow fur about her throat, warm, seductive. He had sent the divine Page the bouquet in paper lace. But she too vanished. He heard the strains of an orchestra; lingering he had missed the overture, and it might be the first duet--with Geister in superb voice. He was waiting for Mariana, that was it ... always late. Then her hand was under his arm. But it was the doctor from Jaffa.

Rudolph was at the foot of the bed, and the two men moved aside, conversed impolitely in hushed tones. I'm sick, he thought lucidly. One word reached him--oxygen. It all melted away again, into a black lake with ghostly swans, a painted mouth and showering confetti; one of the supreme waltzes that Johann Strauss alone could compose. Later a woman in a folded linen cap was seated beside him, a chimera. But she laid cool fingers on his Wrist, held a brownish, distasteful mixture to his lips. A draught of egg nog was better, although it wasn't as persuasive as some he had had: Bundy Provost's, for example.

Bundy was a galliard youth, but he was clear as ice underneath. He wouldn't have let them put that thing over his, Howat's, face. He tried to turn aside, but a cap of darkness descended upon him. Afterward his breathing was easier. A blue iron tank was standing nearby, and the nurse was removing a rubber mask attached to a flexible tube. The latter led from a glass bottle, with a crystal pipe into the tank; the bottle held water; and the water was troubled with subsiding, clear bubbles. More of the dark, unpleasant mixture, more egg nog. Why did they trouble and trouble him--already he was late getting to Irving Place.

The opera, as he had feared, had commenced; and it was at once strange and familiar. The chorus and orchestra were singing in a deep ground tone; the stage was set with a row of great, seething furnaces; glaring white bars of light cut through vaporous, yellow gases and showered steel sparks where coppery figures were labouring obscurely in a flaming heat that rolled out over the audience. There was a shrilling of violins, and then a deafening blare of brass, an appalling volume of sound pouring out like boiling metal.... But here was Rudolph; the performance was at an end; it was time to go home.

"I took the liberty of searching for--for Miss Jannan's address," the other told him. Well, and why not! "Mr. Provost and Mrs. Jannan are away for a week." Howat hoped that Kingsfrere would not turn up with his flat face. He was conscious of smiling at a memory the exact shape of which escaped him--something humorous that had happened to the pasty youth. A refreshing air came in at the open windows, and he struggled for a full, satisfying breath. The relief of what he dimly recognized as oxygen followed. The nurse moved to the door and Mariana entered.

"Howat," she exclaimed, sitting beside him, "how silly of you! A cold now with winter done. The snow is running away. And these soda-watery tanks." He felt a warmth communicated by her actual presence. "It's just my breathing," he told her; "it gets stopped up. A damned nuisance! Did Honduras meet you?"

She assured him that she had been correctly received, and vanished to remove her hat. Mariana must not sit in here, with the windows open, he told the nurse; but then, he added, it was no good giving Mariana advice. She wouldn't listen to it, except to do the opposite. She came back, in one of her eternal knitted things, this one like a ripe banana, and sat in the nurse's place. There was a great deal he wanted to know, in a few minutes, when he felt less oppressed. The night came swiftly, lit by his familiar lamps; Rudolph moved about in the orderly disposition of fresh white laundry. A coat needed pressing. It would do to-morrow. The doctor hurt him with a little scraping stab at the bottom of his ear.

"Mariana," he at last made the effort of speech, questioning: "I have been bothered about your--your temporary arrangement. That Harriet, you know ... make trouble."

"Why, Howat," she replied, admirably detached; "you don't read the important sheets of the papers! Harriet has made a tremendous success with what was supposed to be a small part. A New York manager has engaged her in letters of fire, for an unthinkable amount. James and I sent her our obscure compliments, but we were virtuously rebuked by a legal gentleman. Harriet, it seems, is going to cast us off."

Of all that she had said only the word obscure remained in his mind; and it roused in him an echo of his old, dogmatic pride. "Mariana," he demanded, "didn't the reorganization come about; isn't James Polder superintendent?"

She hesitated, then replied in a low, steady voice. "Yes, Howat, it did; but they didn't move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was chosen." It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy; the cursed young fool. "You must come away, Mariana," he continued more faintly; "fair trial, failure--something to yourself, our family."

"Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!" she replied in an abstracted impatience. Then, "I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you understand, Howat," she leaned softly over him; "I need Jim as badly as he needs me; perhaps more. If I had any superior illusions they have all gone. I can't tell us apart. Of course, I'd like him to get on, but principally for himself. Jim, every bit of him, the drinking and tempers, and tenderness you would never suspect, is my--oxygen. I can see that you want to know if I am happy; but I can't tell you, Howat. Perhaps that's the answer, and I am--I have a feeling of being a part of something outside personal happiness, something that has tied Jim and me together and gone on about a larger affair. You see, Howat, I wasn't consulted," she added in a more familiar impudence; "whether I was pleased or not didn't appear to matter. In a position like that it's silly to talk about happiness as if it were like the thrill at your first ball."

He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him. An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar, veiled shape. He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny. It was at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper. All three unremarkably merged into one. And the acts of the first, a dark young man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of vigorous scorn, accumulated in a later figure, hardly less upright, slender, but touched with grey--a man in the middle of life. He paid with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a passion that had burned out all vitality.

Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled past and present. But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of spirit and flesh that had been denied to him. That was life, he thought, that was happiness. In the absence of such consummation he had come to nothing. In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the two had warred.

Life took the spirit to itself, mysteriously; wove the gold thread into its design of scarlet and earth and green, or else ... a hearth soon cold, the walls of a Furnace crumbled and broken, a ruin covered from memory by growing leafage and grass throbbing with the song of robins, the shrilling of frogs in the meadow.

The doctor and nurse, Rudolph and Mariana, moved about him in a far, low stir. At times they approached on a lighter flood of oxygen. Mariana wiped his lips--an immaterial red stain. But what was that confounded opera the name of which he had forgot? It would be in his albums; in the first, probably. Downstairs. He had a sudden view of Mariana's face as she returned with the volume. An expression of piercing concern overwhelmed the reassuring smile she had for him.

Howat understood at last, he was dying. An instinctive shuddering seized him; not in fear of the obliterating fact; but from a physical revulsion bred by his long years of delicate habit.