# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 40/Number 6/A Touch of Eternity

pp. 67-71, 124, 126, 128, 130-133. Accompanying illustrations by Frederic R. Gruger may be omitted.
A Touch of Eternity
By
Wallace Irwin
A fragrant and illuminating story of two interesting young people who acquired love and who promised each other to guard it well, as their elders had not—by the eminent author of “Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy,” “The Blooming Angel,” “Seed of the Sun” and other works that have had well-deserved popularity.
THAT no material thing ever perishes from the earth is a truth oft expressed by those interpreters of the obvious, poets and philosophers. The crumbling heart of Cæsar gives nourishment to the rose from which the bee draws honey for the Roman table. Nature wastes in order to economize. Nothing dies. And if these never-ending incarnations apply to material things, why not to immaterial things? What of ideas, of traits of character, of tendencies? Do not the abstractions like Beauty and Hunger live in a million shapes, ever changing, ever mingling in the composition of our souls?
S. W. Peebles, wholesale dealer in empires, oceans, mineral deposits and international harvests, lived palatially at Radio, Connecticut, in the year 1921. Where he got his taste for art, God only knows; but by the time of life when man gains in weight what he loses in hair, Mr. Peebles had indulged a stubborn tendency in a roundabout way: he had fostered his son’s taste in painting and followed the work with a pride out of proportion, perhaps, to the boy’s ability.
One afternoon in September—Mrs. Peebles being elsewhere, at bridge—the lord of Radio slunk into the new wing of his house. A temptation had entered the busy brain under the hairless skull; wherefore he turned the key behind him as he came into his unfinished billiard-room. The place smelled of fresh plaster. Boldly outlined under the cornice, he could see the object of his adoration, the historical fresco over which his son Lansing had labored spasmodically for many weeks. English archers were speeding their gray goose quills above the window-cap. Vaguely sketched figures stalked along the wall.
The sight of it struck a rusty chord in old Peebles’ heart. He wondered if Lansing would go far in this atmosphere.
Standing dwarfed in the big room, his fat face turned up toward the problem, S. W. Peebles again felt the temptation. He glanced guiltily around, then slyly, slowly mounted the ladder until he stood within touching distance of the English bowmen. A color-box lay on the scaffolding; scarcely knowing what he did, he reached out for a brush, squeezed colors from a tube, dabbled in a pool of neutral gray. Then gingerly he raised the brush to a patch of shadow under the elbow of the nearest archer.
His strokes became bolder. His fingers betrayed a certain skill, suggesting a musician who fumbles with forgotten notes. The room was still as death for a time. Then in an instant’s roving of the eye, Mr. Peebles received as rude a shock as though the scaffolding had fallen.
Somebody was staring at him through the window!
The guilty poacher struggled to maintain his balance as his spy threw up a sash and came scrambling over the sill. He was young, dusty and radiant in a faded sweater and stained khaki breeches. Tramp he might have been, but his lean, tanned face was neither brutalized nor discontented.
“How you comin’ with my fresco, Pop?” he roared, and tossed a battered felt hat halfway across the room.
It was the first time, possibly, that mortal had ever seen a blush upon the time-worn countenance of S. W. Peebles.
“Now, Lance, my boy,” he pleaded, and there was genuine pathos in his look, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t come into the house by the door like the rest of us.”
“And have ’em all ask a lot of fool questions I can’t answer?” was Lansing’s evasion.
“Great Scott!” Mr. Peebles called upon the soul of the eminent author, not for the love of authorship, but because of what he saw through the window which his son had just entered. A brindle skeleton of a horse, hitched to a disabled carriage of the surrey type, was grazing calmly on the very expensive Peebles lawn.
“Whose horse is that?” snapped the outraged father.
“Yours, Pop,” explained Lance. “I stole him out of the north pasture when I went out to be a gypsy.”
“Gypsy!” snarled the elder man. “Your mother’s been worried sick about you. What got into your head, going off like that, leaving a crazy note about being a gypsy?”
“I was all right,” Lansing defended himself.
“You had an awful cold.”
“I had colds in France.”
“How’d you ever get home alive? Thought at least they’d teach you obedience.”
BOTH were embarrassed. Mr. Peebles had come down from his ladder, and both stood looking up at the group of bowmen.
“I believe you’ve improved it,” said Lance by way of a salve.
“Don’t make fun of me,” pleaded the father.
“Say, boss—” Lance laid an impulsive hand on the round, fat shoulder. “Sorry I ran away like that. But honest, I had to go somewhere—”
“Girls?” asked S. W. Peebles suddenly, a gleam in his little gray eyes.
“I’m a marked man,” blurted the young artist. “I like to work, but what does that get me? Mother’s always trying to hook me up to a skirt. Don’t blame her. Good old Mom’s so sly and tactful. But the flappers around Radio make me tired. Tired! Chickens chasing a worm. I’m the worm.”
“Gosh, I didn’t know you were that conceited—”
“I’m not. You know and I know that the dollar-sign’s out and they’re all on the make.”
“I might will my property to an insane asylum,” suggested the father. Then, laughing queerly: “Or I might go broke.”
“Who’s joking now?” grinned Lance.
“How’d you find the gypsy trail?” asked Peebles père.
“I’ve been in another world, Pop. You see, I wanted to find out if I could make my way, selling my stuff from door to door, living on the country. Well, I made ten dollars drawing crayon sketches, and walked into Arcadia near Stockington, Connecticut.”
“Was it really fun?” Peebles’ voice had dulled.
“I’m foolish about it, Pop.”
Old Peebles strode across the room and stood gazing out of the window. His attitude was reflective, melancholy.
“Pop,” Lance broke the silence, “didn’t you want to be a painter once?”
“Who the devil’s been talking to you?” Old Peebles turned and snorted.
“I just had a sneaking idea—”
“Had a sneaking idea, did you? Give me a cigarette.”
They seated themselves oh a box at the foot of the scaffolding. At that instant father and son looked as near alike as youth can look like middle age.
“Where’d you get your taste for art?” persisted Lansing. “Who taught you to buy American paintings?”
“You can buy anything if you’ve got the money.”
“Not the right things. And you’ve bought fine canvases when the market was low. Look at your collection of Mayfields.”
Peebles looked pleased for an instant; then his little eyes resumed their melancholy.
“I buy pictures because I can’t help feeling that I ought to be painting ’em,” he said.
“I’d rather paint bad pictures than none,” confessed Lance.
“You inherit that.”
“So you wanted to be an artist,” suggested Lance, seeing his advantage.
“When I was a little younger than you are now, I’d have given everything—” For a moment he looked like a troubled baby; then he steeled himself to another train of thought. “Don’t let ’em tell you money’s vulgar. It’s a fine thing. It gives you time to know the best there is in the world, to know treasure from trash. Money’s the foundation of all aristocracy, say what you will.
“But there’s one thing it isn’t. It’s not happiness. That’s a bromide, but most bromides are true. It’s a bad thing to let money own you, but it’s a man’s duty to keep what he’s got. You wont catch me letting go easy—” His mouth hardened.
“I’ll tell you something, Lance. When I was a lad, I loved color; I was crazy to draw. It was just a tendency, perhaps, like the habit of biting your nails. When I went to college, I used to read the stuff of a lot of popular poets who called themselves Vagabonds. Vagabond got into my system, and in my sophomore vacation I packed my kit and started out to be a hobo—art hobo, understand?”
“Thought so,” mused Lance.
“Thought what?” snapped his father, bilious eyes rolling.
“Oh, go on, Pop,” begged the son.
“Well, one day I walked up on a consumptive lad who was sitting by a pond slapping mosquitoes with one hand and painting with the other. Funny how we hit it off. His name was Moses—I always associated him with the Promised Land. So we hooked up and went rolling along, fishing, painting, stealing chickens like a pair of gypsies.
“Mo had saved a little, working as a car-conductor in Hartford, and he was going to Paris to study. He taught me the first principles of water-color—Whistler never had more of a pull toward art than I had that summer. I don’t suppose I had any talent.”
Lance looked up at the gray spot on his unfinished fresco.
“That was a midsummer’s dream, all right,” resumed his father. “When I came out of the wilderness that fall, I’d made up my mind to follow Mo to Paris. The first thing I found was a letter saying that my father had died in Detroit. My work was cut out for me after that.”
S. W. Peebles smiled fatly over his own epitaph. Lansing reflected that smile.
“You’re getting morbid, Pop,” said the boy. “How’s your golf-score? You need air. Now, if you’d got behind that lame horse and gone with me—”
“Fine chance you gave a fellow! And how’d you suppose I’d explain that to your mother—”
Always his mother! The thought flashed through Lance’s mind—how successful had his father been with his life, or his mother with hers?
“Pop,” he announced, “I’ve commissioned an artist to do your portrait and Mom’s.”
“Not buying pictures now,” grumbled his sire.
“This is on me. Birthday present to you.”
“Hm!” Old Peebles’ look softened. “Suppose it would be vulgar to ask the price.”
“A thousand dollars.”
“Nothing in that class. Anything between a hundred dollars and ten thousand’s bound to be mediocre.”
“You’ll change your mind, I think. He can help a lot with my fresco. I thought you might ask his wife along and—and his little girl.”
“Aha!” bawled S. W. Peebles. “Little girl, eh! See now why you want to help the old artist. How old’s the little girl?”
“Eight years,” replied Lance.
This was unanswerable, but old Peebles came back with a fresh objection.
“What do I know about this fellow’s work?”
“Just you look here a minute—”
Lance had run across the room and picked up a roll of paper which he had dropped when he entered by the window.
“He gave me this when I was leaving Stockington.”
S. W. Peebles unrolled the drawing while his son stood aside to study his face. The little eyes, at first indifferent, grew larger and obtruded toward the page while the tufts of eyebrow went scampering up the hairless forehead like startled mice.
“Did he make that signature?” he rasped accusingly as though he were confronted with a forged check.
“With his own skinny hand.”
“My Lord, boy! My Lord!” he sputtered. “That’s Moses Findley. Mo! The very Bohemian lad I’ve been talking about.”
“I sort of thought so,” drawled Lance. “And that’s why I showed you the drawing.”
LANCE PEEBLES told his father a little more than I have set down about Moses Findley; but what he didn’t tell is important and concerns his week as an amateur vagabond in the Connecticut hills.
He had pilgrimaged something like three days when he came at last upon him whom he called King of Arcadia—more properly its Grand Lama. One heavenly afternoon Jasper, his wind-broken horse, showed more than usual signs of debility, heaved, stumbled and stopped. The driver looked around and beheld a gentle knoll which rolled weedily just outside a pretty Colonial town. As good a stop as any, thought Lance, and so he brought out his portfolio and took his way toward a little shingled cottage beyond the elms.
   [Illustration: She said her portrait was going wretchedly. Art, in her opinion, consisted in painting a lady's hands smaller than Nature made them.]
At the weather-beaten gate he stopped to admire. Sun-browned and gentle, the cottage nestled among flowers like some ripely wise wayside philosopher. There was no pretense of fussy neatness. Goldenrod and ironweed flared purple against yellow among the rubble under a wandering fence. Beneath the elms, spreading like giant lyres, a clean-swept path meandered toward a little white door. A woman’s voice sang a song as sweet and aimless as Samoa. Bees were droning.
Everything seemed to vibrate with contentment, and even as the stranger plied the brass knocker, he felt the spell of it. The song stopped. A moment later a deep-bosomed woman in a bungalow apron regarded him with kind brown eyes which seemed to have borrowed color from her auburn hair—a pretty woman of forty-five.
“Good morning,” he began, experience having taught him the value of rapid speech. “I’m a peddler, madam—”
“You’re not a very good one,” she dimpled, “or you wouldn’t begin by telling me you’re a peddler. You ought to begin by saying that Mrs. Simon Doolittle has sent you with an opportunity I can’t afford to miss.”
“I try to be honest,” declared Lance, delighted.
“I should say so! Really, young man, you mustn’t waste your time on me ”
“Please don’t worry about that,” he begged. “Time is about the only thing I have plenty of. I have it to throw to the birds. And if you’ll let me talk to you a little while,—choose your own subject if you wish,—I’ll agree to go away and not even mention business, which doesn’t interest me very much.”
“Wont you come in?” she asked, and as soon as he had seated him self in the charming little parlor, full of cottage mahogany, gay chintz and nicely toned rugs, she aimed the direct question:
“Now, what is it you peddle?”
“Myself,” he replied, returning smile for smile.
“No!” Her auburn eyes sparkled to a searching look. “You’re not one of those wage-slaves they sell on the auction block?”
“Worse,” he replied. “I’m an artist.”
Her face became pitiful.
“And how do you go at it to sell yourself?”
“Oh, just pay my way as I go. I jog from house to house, peddling my wares. Charcoal portraits, five dollars, likeness guaranteed. Water-color, fifteen—of course I put in all the colors in the rainbow for that price.”
“And you want to sell pictures to us?” asked the auburn lady, still smiling.
“Well, of course—”
“I must tell my husband that!” she cried blissfully, and bounded out of the room. At the foot of the steep, white- spindled staircase, he could see her pause to call up: “Oh, Byjo!”
“Um-m-m!” came a basso growl, suggestive of a busy man with a pipe in his mouth.
“Byjo, there’s an artist down here who wants to sell us a picture.”
The reply was incoherent, but it sounded remarkably like, “Quite naturally.” It had the effect of sending the plump lady scuttling upstairs. Alone in the pleasant parlor, Lance had the feeling that he had stepped into the bole of a tree and encountered a family of leprechauns, those jaunty Irish fairies who build them selves living-quarters under the roots of trees.
These particular leprechauns had excellent taste. There were two beautiful Utamaros and several good landscapes against the walls. A full-length portrait hung above the fireplace: It held the artist’s attention—a little girl of eight was roller-skating, coming at him so recklessly that she seemed about to leap from the frame. Plaid skirts were blowing about her coltish legs; a strawberry-colored tam-o’-shanter was thrown back to show a gypsy face, brown as a berry, red lips parted in a laugh, black eyes snapping.
“Like it?” asked a deep, pleasant voice at the door.
Lance turned to see a tall, delicately built man wearing duck trousers and soiled canvas shoes. His large gray mane matched his small gray beard; merry black eyes flanked a prominent nose with a humorous twist.
“It’s charming,” decided Lance.
“Don’t let’s be polite,” suggested Byjo. “But you might sit down if you’re tired.”
“Thanks.” Lance took a seat.
“Smoke?” Byjo offered papers and a limp sack.
“I have my own.”
“My name’s Findley,” declared Byjo.
“Mine’s Peebles.”
“Of course it isn’t,” said Byjo. “But it’ll do. Kiku—that’s Mrs. Findley—says you’re peddling art the way they sell silver polish. The idea’s either original or aboriginal. Michelangelo never thought of that. Nor Matisse, either.”
“Why not sell art from producer to consumer?” insisted Lance.
“Comes fresher that way,” agreed Byjo. “And saves the price of a middleman.”
He inhaled a third of his cigarette at one prolonged intake, blew smoke through his bristles and asked:
“What luck?”
“Ten dollars in three days.”
“Portraits?”
“Sort of. Maiden lady near Winsted gave me five dollars to do her little dog. I liked that job. His was the only interesting face in the family. Farmer’s wife near Canaan thought I was a house-painter. I explained, and she asked me to paint something pretty over a crack in her parlor mirror. I did a portrait of a maiden with golden hair and cornflower eyes. It resembled Gauguin at his worst.”
“You’ve proved something,” said Byjo in his beard, but what it was he failed to say. Instead he remarked with a wise squint: “Some pretty queer things have come down the road in my time.”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” grinned Lance.
“Hm!” Byjo reached a clever hand toward the portfolio. “Any objection to showing—”
“Samples? None whatever. Only a few sketches—”
The quick Japanesque eyes studied the sheets.
“Let’s make a bargain,” said Byjo at last. “You’ve come to the wrong house if you’re looking for five dollars. But I’ll commission you to do a water-color of Kiku and me; Baby’s away with her little cousins, or I’d include her.” He gestured toward the roller-skating child in the picture. “But you’ve got to sell on my terms.”
“What are your terms?” asked Lance experimentally.
“I’ll pay in merchandise.”
“Merchandise?” Would he offer bees or homemade beer? “What sort of merchandise?” insisted the young artist.
“Pictures.”
“Holy Moses!” Lance came to his feet. “I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t know you were a dealer—”
“No such luck,” objected Byjo deep in his beard. “I paint the darned things.”
Illumination! In a flash, Lance saw the meaning of this jolly gnome cottage with its meritorious paintings. Findley. Who was Findley?
“I’m afraid, Mr. Findley,” came the humble confession, “that we can’t trade on equal terms. I’d have to work a lifetime—”
“Why don’t you?” invited Byjo, his beard bristling with earthly contentment. “Anything better to do?”
“Well, I am devoting my life—”
“Then don’t look so solemn about it. You aren’t entering a monastery. It’s a gorgeous palace—glory unending. I’ve been at it ever since I was eighteen. Never knew anything about money and never wanted to. Don’t know what I get for my pictures—ask Kiku; she’s my business man. Doesn’t look starved, does she?”
Lance laughed.
“Look at Baby there in the picture,”—with a gesture toward the mantel,—“does she look like an Armenian refugee?”
Lance laughed again.
“We’ve got enough. Any more would be too much. Little have, little want—that’s what Arcadia means. What does a man gain by being all cluttered up with material property when the only thing that’s really precious lies right here?”
His long forefinger touched his shapely forehead.
“Coohoo! Oh, Byjo!” This from upstairs.
The tall man rushed out of the room. Lance sighed and feasted his eyes upon the blissful child, roller-skating out of her frame. Somehow at that instant he thought of his father, wearing out his life in his complicated, pompous environment. These simple people, thought the young artist, had little, wanted little. What they had they enjoyed. They had touched the hem of life.
And that was all there was to settling Lance among the Findleys. Three days in Arcadia, three days of plain living and high thinking! Perhaps it was just another case of your jaded courtier playing at shepherd; but here in this little Stockington house the seven domestic graces ruled harmonious. It was as far from Bohemia as pole from pole.
   [Illustration: “I’ve been practicing Cleopatra. Might have poisoned one of my slaves, too, just to be jolly. But it was my whim to play tennis.”]
He had tasted Bohemia during student days in Paris, when he had enjoyed a studio de luxe with his mother living round the corner. That life had never seemed very real to him.
The Findleys sat for him a part of each day, and their attention flattered him because they were indeed a busy family—Byjo at his easel, Kiku singing in the kitchen or bending over her strident sewing-machine. Then in the evening they would break forth in quaint carnival. Byjo had claret hidden somewhere under his leprechaun tree; Kiku could play the guitar to accompany Byjo when he dug the end of a clarionet into his beard and produced rapturous strains of “Pagliacci.” They often wished that Baby was with them. She played the fiddle rather well, said Kiku, for a child of her age.
It was the night before Lance's departure for Radio that Byjo, inquiring into the family name, identified the young artist as the son of his fellow-vagabond in those mosquito-bitten days, thirty years ago. Lance was just whipping the reins across his unwilling steed next morning when the temperamental Findley tossed a rolled drawing on the seat beside him. Out on the open road Lance opened it, to find a pencil-sketch done with all the tender sweetness of a Boucher. It showed a little girl on roller skates.
SO this is how the Findleys, man, woman and child, came for a somewhat protracted stay at the stately home of Mr. and Mrs. S. W. Peebles, Radio, Connecticut.
S. W. Peebles had been for it from the hour when he learned the identity of the Stockington genius. But in the Peebles household the things S. W. Peebles was for were of secondary consideration. Never once abandoning her disguise as clinging vine and yielding clay, Mrs. S. W. Peebles had a way of planning her own life right under the nose of the gentleman who, for very good reasons, thought of himself as a cloud-compeller of finance. Being as intolerant as a yielding woman can be, she was quite unable to entertain more than one idea at a time. Her idea at that crucial hour was Lance’s matrimonial future.
Of all the things she didn’t want,—and the list was infinite,—Bohemian portrait-painters was among the most important.
And those awful Findleys had elected to bring their little girl along! Eight years old! That age, Mrs. Peebles mildly pointed out, was a particularly difficult age for children—disregarding the fact that all ages are difficult for children. S. W. Peebles accomplished little by blustering and bullying. It required Lance’s superior powers of persuasion to bring his mother to time. He even went so far as to promise to amuse the child in case she proved a nuisance around the house.
Late one afternoon toward the close of September the Findleys arrived. Lance was at work in the new billiard-room, painting grimly. He should have gone down to the station to meet them—for surely it was he of all the family who had invited them to come. But a queer self-consciousness held him back. He developed a sudden passion for his art, and was rewarded by a feeling that the fresco was beginning to show signs of life.
A little before six o’clock he saw through a plaster-stained window that one of his father’s inclosed cars was purring up the drive. Even then he made no move to meet his guests. He made his untidy studio costume an excuse. His mother would be shocked at his sudden coming forth, he told himself.
Curiosity conquered at last, however, and he stole to the front of the house and peered through a half-open door. Everything in the big hall was silent, orderly, uncommunicative. He came upon Torrence, the butler, and inquired:
“Where are Mr. and Mrs. Findley?”
Torrence shadowed Mrs. Peebles’ look of disapproval.
“They are in their room, Mr. Lansing, dressing.”
“Dressing?” Lance had visions of stiff shirts.
“Not exactly dressing, sir. Brushing.”
Lance passed his mother in the corridor, and she swept him with one of her gentle commendations: “Put on anything. It wont make any difference.”
Then he got to his room to find gray flannels laid out for him,—Mrs. Peebles’ orders, no doubt,—and when he had got into these and knotted a blue tie at his throat, he smoked until his desk watch, frugally saving daylight, had pointed a quarter of eight. Then he went down to meet the Findleys.
He had reached the first landing of the great double staircase which swept down to the hall in two marble curves. From his altitude he gained a picture of brocaded hangings and Italian furniture in the wide space below. The hall centered in human interest. Byjo, clad decently in blue, leaned against the big table and made animated conversation with Mrs. Peebles, who had the bright air of one engaged by the hour to talk to inmates of the zoo. Mrs. Findley, in a lavender gown which managed to betray its village origin, surveyed each detail of the Peebles’ magnificence in shy side-glances.
On the curved staircase opposite where Lance took in the picture, S. W. Peebles was coming down. The group by the table stood self-absorbed until the host had eased his large body down the lower stair and taken one step across the rug.
“Well, I’ll be a Mexican!” he roared.
“Can’t do it, Samson. You’re too fat,” came back the incomparable Byjo in his rough bass.
Immediately afterward two gentlemen, obviously past the age of capering, fell to and capered. Locked in mutual embrace, they competed in back-pounding. The ladies at the center-table exchanged alarmed glances, but Mrs. Findley’s was less alarmed than Mrs. Peebles’.
“For God’s sake, Moses, what have you been doing to your face?” asked S. W., after they had come apart.
Byjo touched his beard tenderly. “Prophets, you know, always wear ’em. I wouldn’t be Moses, would I—”
Lance came downstairs just in time to referee another back-slapping match.
“Thirty-two years!” raged old Peebles, and his son had never seen him so excited. “Do you remember the time the farmer’s pig walked right through your color-box and you tried to collect damages? Golly, those were the days. And just to think, you and I have been living right across the county line from each other.”
He caught his wife’s cool glance and explained: “You remember, Sally? I was telling you how Mr. Findley and I sketched together one summer—”
“You were classmates at Yale?” inquired the great lady, determined not to understand.
“Classmates, all right!” howled S. W. Peebles. “Guess it was a hoboes’ college, if anything. Vagabonds we called it— Moses, weren’t we two of a kind!”
“How small the world is!” marveled Lance’s mother with the air of a lady Columbus.
That was just what Mrs. Peebles would say. The remark and her misunderstanding, troubled look, caused Lance to come to her side and to press her fingers furtively. And then—his attention was diverted by an orchid-colored vision floating toward him down the stairs.
Lance Peebles stood gaping like a yokel. Was he seeing ghosts in the early lamplight? Possibly he had worked too long over his fresco, and his tired eyes had carried away with them pleasing colors and shapes of female loveliness. If so, it was a pleasant affliction, this optical madness, for the girl on the stairway was tall and slender, with splendid gypsy eyes that seemed never to be still. …
Lance was awakened from his dream to know that she had come down to the earth plane and was standing a little apart, being neither bold nor shy, awaiting Mrs. Findley’s attention.
“Nevis, darling, you’re late as usual,” commented Kiku. “Come here and meet Mr. Peebles.”
It was the elder Peebles who got the first greeting, and when he had finished his somewhat elaborate speech to the effect that Moses was the only artist who could take his masterpiece along with him, the son of the house was presented.
“You didn’t meet my daughter when you were visiting us,” suggested the artless Kiku.
“Only in the picture,” admitted Lance.
But when he took her in to dinner, he found voice to say:
“So you’re Baby!”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she challenged, setting her ambrosial head a little to one side.
“I dare you,” he took her up.
“You’re disappointed because I didn’t come downstairs on roller skates.”
IF Mrs. S. W. Peebles had made up her mind not to like Nevis Findley, the country-club set of Radio failed to share her prejudice. Nevis brought effulgence to the countryside. She had no great variety of clothes, but in defiance of social philosophers, she proved that clothes do not make the woman—not when the woman who wears them has the youth and beauty that dares laugh at dressmakers.
Nevis was no mere country lass. She had danced at college proms and golfed on the nine-hole course at Stockington. She could draw young men to her, even as the lodestone mountain pulled the nails out of Sindbad’s ship. Then there was her fiddle. She played it gypsy fashion, dancing as she plied the bow, and as she danced she could sing in a sweet, teasing, uncultivated voice, songs that suggested wood-folk mocking from the tree-tops.
Oh, yes, agreed Radio, the Findley girl would last for a little while in the Peebles house. Her father was painting the whole family, at a huge price, they hinted, and Nevis was making the best of her opportunity to steal away the apple of Mrs. Peebles’ vigilant eye.
Meanwhile Lance’s mother was doing nothing, masterfully. She bided her time for the great eviction, and if the days moved slowly for her, she made no sign.
And so it went for an unreckoned month, with Lance a little deeper in love every day, and the two elderly tramps of yesteryear pranking like boys around the estate. Mrs. Peebles reserved her complaints for bedtime confidences with her husband. She fought gently like a dove at bay. Her portrait was going wretchedly, she said, and she had been tricked into sitting for a nobody who knew nothing about art, which, in her opinion, consisted in painting a lady’s hands smaller than Nature made them and giving a properly expensive sheen to silken draperies.
Some invisible trouble came at last to darken Mr. Peebles’ vacation mood. He smoked more and pranked less. One morning he stalked out of his study, a telegram buried in his palm, and when he had shown it to Lance in the privacy of the billiard-room, he listened placidly to his son’s suggestions as to trains to New York. On ten minutes’ notice they had packed their bags and were racing toward the station.
They were gone a day and two nights. Shortly after luncheon of the third day, they came back together, and as these two men of stranger generations followed their luggage into the house, their looks aroused curiosity on the part of several servants concerned in their arrival.
The elder man’s face was yellow, and there were blue pouches under his eyes. He was walking terribly erect, and smiling the dead smile of a defeated champion who leaves the ring afraid of pity. Lance was a little pale, but his pallor was that of youth, emotional and momentary. As he left his father in the big hall, he patted him affectionately on his broad back, the rough caress of man to man. Then Lance went to find Nevis.
“Miss Findley is in the garden, Mr. Lansing,” replied Torrence, upon inquiry.
He saw her curled up on a stone bench, bathed in the golden kindness of Indian summer. A scattering of leaves, red, orange, russet, pink and yellow, gave her a fantastic background, as if she had been enthroned on rich carpets of Cashmere.
“Lance!” she cried, allowing her book to clatter among the leaves. “What a day for you to come back! Yesterday it rained—ugh! One of those days when the skies seem to be shedding mud. And this morning when I woke up, everything was on parade. The partridges are holding a college reunion up on the hill.”
“And you’ve been sitting all day in one spot, I’ll bet, charming the rabbits,” he said, laughing gruffly.
“I haven’t,” she disagreed. “I’ve been practicing Cleopatra—hours and hours in that wonderful Roman bath—scented waters, willing slaves with Turkish towels. All I needed to turn me into a complete Sybarite was music as I bathed.”
“You could have had a phonograph, if you’d asked,” he suggested. “Or we could move the automatic pipe-organ up from the music-room.”
“I never thought of that,” she confessed solemnly. “I might have poisoned one of my slaves, too, just to be jolly. But it was my royal whim to play three sets of tennis before lunch.”
Then some experimental imp prompted him to ask: “You like it?”
“The Roman bath and the slaves and everything?” Her black eyes enchanted him again. He nodded, and her answer came deep and serious:
“I adore it.”
Impulsively he seized one of her hands and laid it against his cheek. At first she made no attempt to resist; then she pulled it away and asked:
“What’s happened, Lance?”
“To me?”
“You look as if you’d been strained through a sieve.”
“Hard work,” he jeered, but his smile was wry.
“And I suppose you’ve chosen this perfect day to lock yourself up in that horrid, beautiful old billiard-room and paint some more pictures of Queen Elizabeth—”
“See here, Nev.” He stood square before her. “Let’s go crazy.”
“Oh, Lance!” she cried, springing up, magically equipped with spiritual roller skates.
“There’s an awful old horse out in the pasture—that is, if the crows haven’t got him. His name’s Jasper. He’s a bewitched horse and goes perfectly grand with a magic surrey.”
“The very one you drove when you visited us at Stockington! ” She clapped her hands.
“Just leave him alone, and he’ll take you to Arcadia every time. But today I’ve got business at Great Barrington—regular whopping business—”
“And I’m going too.”
“Better put on something warm. Never can tell how the weather’s going to turn. I’ll rope Jasper and meet you in the road—right over there beyond the poplars.”
MRS. PEEBLES, who had enjoyed a miserable sitting with Mr. Findley that morning, gazed dully across the landscape to see a skeleton horse jogging down the lane, two familiar figures on the seat behind him. She rushed into the corridor and met her husband for the first time since his return. Her manner was no longer dovelike, for she had endured much during his absence.
“Dearest,” she began mildly enough, but her voice rose rapidly, “have you seen—that?”
“Seen what, darling?” He had intended to kiss her, but he changed his mind.
“Lansing and—that girl. They’re driving the most awful-looking horse. Right out on the State road. They look like—like peddlers.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she was there first.
“How much longer are these people going to stay here? He can’t paint. He splashes. It doesn’t look the least like me—” She calmed with a visible effort. “Of course, I’d do anything for you, dearest, if it’s required of me. He can’t even paint a likeness. He makes silk look like calico. And you should see my hands—like a dishwasher’s—he smears—”
At last poor S. W. edged in a word.
“Don't let’s talk art now, Sally. I’ll send him away if you want. I wish everything could be as simple as that.”
Her eyes widened, because now she saw the settled pallor in his face. Tremblingly she laid a hand on his coat.
“What have you done, dearest? What are you keeping from me?”
“I’ve got to settle several things. Suppose you meet me—”
“Meet you?” New wrinkles showed around her mouth. “What is it you can't say now?”
BUT he was hurrying downstairs, and when she had finished arraying herself for the afternoon, she found him seated calmly enough among the wicker furniture on the east veranda. The undesirable Findleys occupied chairs on either side of him. Kiku’s eyes were all vivacity; Byjo wore that quelled look which had grown on him since he began painting Mrs. Peebles.
“Of course, living in our small way,” Kiku was saying, “we have to adjust ourselves to our circumstances. When you’re your own cook and butler, you must do everything possible to save steps. It’s lovely to have Lance say such nice things about our house. Nevis adores pretty things. She inherits it from Byjo. If we can’t afford lace doilies, we can at least have pretty stenciled mats, she says—”
“Mrs. Findley,” broke in the master of Radio, and his voice came solemnly like the tolling of a bell, “I’ve known your husband a long time; I’ve watched you all—your wonderful, happy family—ever since you came here. And my dear friends, I believe you've touched it.”
Byjo turned suddenly, his black eyes round with interest as he drawled: “Touched what?”
“Eternity. Let me explain,” he added, for Byjo had opened his mouth to speak. “I believe there’s a current running through the world—we don’t see it, any more than we see our souls. But it’s there to grasp, if you only know how. But you’ve got to be fine and simple and wise to know how. I touched it once when I was a young man.”
Byjo cleared his throat and asked: “You mean that summer?”
“Mo,” insisted Mr. Peebles unheedingly, “I believe that you and your wife, the way you live and think, are about as happy as people can be on this earth.”
“Aren’t we!” chimed Kiku. Just the suggestion of an eye-slant toward Byjo weakened her case.
Old S. W. turned bashfully to his wife and explained: “Mrs. Findley has been telling me how she grows bees and cows and flowers and girls all on three thousand a year.”
Mrs. Peebles moved her stiffened lips.
“And Mo,” he continued, that strange look still in his face, “I’ve been putting a lot of study on life lately. We’ve got over that nonsense called youth, and we can look things in the face. It’s all very well to get the Napoleon complex and think you own the earth. But what’s the earth when you own it? No sir. I’m be ginning to see where you’re right and I’m wrong.”
“Happiness—” began Byjo rather feebly, then looked at Kiku and was still.
“A man can’t eat or drink or wear more than a certain amount during a lifetime. There’s nothing eternal about clothes and food and houses. Nobody but a Chinaman thinks he can take his property with him into the next world. Lucky you can’t, I say. Enough’s enough. Just look at the way you’ve raised your daughter. Give a woman more than she needs, and she begins to be either a paranoiac or a flapper. Nevis is a lily. It would be a crime to gild her.”
Mrs. Findley stirred a little, flattered, nervous. Mrs. Peebles sat like a ramrod. They were silent while the great man bit the end from a cigar.
“That’s what Lance sees in her—something this crazy world has let alone, allowed to grow beautiful.” He seemed to measure his words before he said: “And that’s why I think he couldn’t do better than to marry her.”
His audience breathed three deep-drawn, reviving breaths. Mrs. Peebles’ came with a throaty click.
“Oh!” Mrs. Findley was stunned momentarily, but she came to with a rush. Her dimples played; her eyes shone as she said inadequately enough: “Your son has such a wonderful nature—and simple tastes like Nevis’.”
Her eyes were yearning toward a hope newborn and crying to be fed.
“I’m glad you think so. It’s fortunate,” he said dispassionately, crossing his fat knees. “Simplicity will be the keynote of Lansing’s life from now on.”
Something in the way he said it caused his wife to crane sharply around. But it had no further effect upon Mrs. Findley than to cause the fluttering comment:
“I don’t think Nevis would ever be extravagant, no matter how much money she had.”
“She’ll have little enough if she marries Lance,” said S. W. Peebles.
HIS wife came from her seat as if propelled by springs..
“What are you talking about?” she shrilled. Her dove-note had sharpened to the cry of a wounded hawk.
“Just that,” replied her husband with terrible calm. “I’m calling the families together to settle this particular point. Your daughter and my son are practically engaged—Lance as good as admitted it. And I want to feel he’s chosen the right sort of girl to help him make his way in the world he’s got to face.”
“It isn’t as bad as that!” Mrs. Peebles’ hands had come together—her useless, gouty hands, flashing with jewels. Inside her sleekly modeled costume she seemed to shrivel to an old woman.
“I’m wiped out,” he replied with his first show of weakness.
“My dear!” Her hands trembled so that their redundant jewels shook like dew.
“It’ll all be in the papers tomorrow morning.” he promised recklessly. “I can’t explain the mechanics of bankruptcy—take too long. Results are all that concern us now.”
He made a clumsy attempt to stop her, but Sally had rushed by him into the house.
“She’ll get over it,” he said rather huskily, and resumed his seat. “After all, we don't matter so much. We’ve lived our lives and tasted a little glory. About all you ever get out of material things is the taste. What we want to settle now is your daughter’s happiness and my son’s. Fortunately he’s chosen the life and the girl that don’t need much money to set them off. Money would hinder.”
MRS. FINDLEY sat like a stone, her hands folded in her lap.
“Now, the thing to do,” S. W. pursued, “is to get this wedding over as soon as possible—quiet wedding—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Peebles.”
The plump, pretty woman’s eyes were a little resentful as she gazed across at him.
“Don’t be sorry for me—if that’s what you mean,” he protested, misunderstanding.
“Not that. But Nevus couldn’t think of marrying your son.”
“Kiku!” protested Byjo in a cracked tone.
“Mr. Peebles, you’re a man of the world,” she went on, regardless of her enfeebled consort. “You must know that those young love-affairs don’t amount to much. Other things are a lot more important.”
“Hm!” muttered the new-made bankrupt. “Arcadia is singing a different tune, isn’t it?”
“Arcadia!” she snapped, and her eyes snapped too. “You don’t think we live the way we do because we like it!”
“Kiku, for heaven’s sake—”
Byjo started in valiantly enough, but she brushed away his restraining hand with the injunction: “Go somewhere and let me alone.”
“Hell’s loose now,” complained the elderly artist as he clutched at his thatch of gray and rushed from the horrid scene. But the lioness aroused would not be stilled.
“Arcadia! Drudgery: that’s what it is. Scrubbing, skimping drudgery. It’s all right for a man, living up in the clouds with no thought where the money’s coming from. Oh, it looked rosy enough when I was a girl—love in a cottage. Driveling idiocy! I liked nice clothes and soft beds. Good Lord, I haven’t touched such beds as yours for nearly thirty years. I’ve got used to a lumpy mattress just the way I’ve got used to emptying slops and quarreling with the grocer over bills we can’t pay. But I’m not thinking about that, either. I’m thinking about Nevis.”
“She deserves a background,” admitted S. W. Peebles sadly, gazing over terraces and fountains soon to pass into stranger hands.
“The day she was born,” clattered the fighting mother, “I vowed she’d have a different life from mine. I swore she’d never marry an artist. Byjo, with his head in the clouds, would have been contented with the backwoods, living in a tent. But I made him move to Stockington, because I knew there were people there—well, young people Nevis might get to know. When your son came—”
“An artist with a difference,” broke in Peebles.
“Byjo didn’t think of him in connection with Nevis. He never thinks of anything.”
“But you,” suggested S. W. dryly, “changed your mind about marrying into art-circles.”
“I didn’t object when I found that he was rich enough to pay for his fads. Byjo says he has a gift, and that would have made him all the more congenial to Nevis. But—”
She paused for words. Her reddish eyes still held the look of a lioness fighting for her cubs.
“I don’t think you realize, Mr. Peebles, what it’s been for her here. I’d dreamed ever since she was born of seeing her in a house like this—”
“Arcadia has its fairy tales.”
“A girl as beautiful as Nevis is thrown away on anything less than this. She wasn’t made to wash dishes or break her back over a sewing-machine. I don’t intend that she shall be punished because her father hasn’t the gumption to make a living for her. She’s going to have what’s hers by right. I could have cried for joy to see her here with a maid to brush her lovely hair and help her put on her poor little clothes—to see her in the evening among high pillars and velvets and tapestries. Probably you think I’m cold-blooded, Mr. Peebles—”
“I suppose your daughter understood the arrangement,” he suggested.
“She’s no fool, if that’s what you mean,” replied Kiku rudely, flushing with the temper of the red-haired.
He walked away without apology, disgust curdling his blood as if he had touched something that writhed under his hand.
His worldly fortune, tumbled hugger-mugger about him, caused less heartburning than the thought of this betrayal. So his careless, happy Arcadians had insinuated themselves into his house on a fortune-hunting scheme far slyer than any he had heretofore discovered against his heir! Nevis needed a background, and she had found Lance. Well, after all, Kiku had been more than honest in her confession. He found himself pitying her almost as much as he pitied his own wife.
Poor world, poor life—poor eternity!
IT was in the dusk of the evening that Jasper, his pace accelerated to something between a trot and a stagger as he dashed for his oat-box, brought the young people back from Great Barrington. They were rolling between the high willows, less than a quarter-mile out of Radio, when Lance, who held the reins rather slack, asked her again if she was cold—whereupon she drew a little closer, possibly with no other thought than to protect her tender person from the bite of autumn.
“What are we going to do about them?” she asked, eyes half closed, her frost-fogged breath against his shoulder.
“They’ve reached the age now,” he said, “when life’s past the acute stage. It’s got sort of chronic. There’s no cure for that.”
“Your mother and father—so like mine!” she mused.
“You couldn’t make ’em believe that.”
“No. But aren’t they, though? They grow together so as the years go by—Siamese twins, always trying to pull apart. Mine have never been happy together.”
“Nevis! What a shock to me! When I found your family, I thought it would be a model for mine—they seemed to have found the formula for happiness.”
“Mother’s always blaming it on poverty.”
“Pop says it’s because we’re so rotten rich.”
“They’re both wrong, aren’t they, Lance?”
“Wrong is right.”
“The whole secret lies here!” she exclaimed with the sagacity of a child, touching her white forehead.
“Funny,” he laughed; “that’s what your father told me the first day we met.”
“He thinks he's worked it all out, poor dear,” she said. “But the trouble’s here just the same.”
Again she touched her forehead. On an impulse, Lance laid his hand reverently over her warm little heart.
“And here,” he whispered. Then he kissed her soft mouth.
They jogged on through the dusk until Jasper had turned unguided through the pompous Peebles gate with its guardian lions.
“Do you think they forgot to fall in love?” asked Lance at last.
“Oh, no. I think they fell in love—some time away back in history—but they didn’t take care of it. Love has got to be taken care of, Lance—like any other precious thing.”
So they came home.
THE house was curiously still when Nevis entered the big hall. She asked Torrence about her mother, and Torrence managed to be portentous in his simple reply that Mrs. Findley was in her room. News travels fast down the back stairs.
Up in the quarters where she had luxuriated those golden weeks sat Mrs. Findley, dressed as for a journey.
“The train leaves at six-eighteen,” she explained. “And their car will take us to the station—if they still have a car.”
“We’re not going?” faltered Nevis.
“I don’t think you realize, Baby. Mr. Peebles is in serious trouble—financial trouble. He’s been gambling or something, and lost every cent.”
“I know.” replied Nevis casually. “Lance told me on the way to Great Barrington.”
“They’ve practically asked us to go. You see, we’ve no business here any longer. I wish we’d never come. Your father wont get a cent for all that work. Now, hurry—”
But Nevis stood perfectly still
“I’m not going, Mother,” she explained.
“Not going, Nevis? Are you crazy?”
“I’d be queer if I went now.” The girl’s look was distant as the stars.
“Queer?” Mrs. Findley came to her feet and tried to shake Nevis back into the present. “How can you stay? You’re not wanted. The house will be sold over your head.”
Nevis removed her hat—a gesture of decision. She laid it on a table before explaining quietly: “It isn’t cricket to walk out and quit your man cold.”
Her back was half turned when she said this; then suddenly she wheeled about, her eyes brilliant with tears.
“Because—” Then the announcement came in a rush: “Oh, Mamma, please be glad. Please! Can’t you see? Lance and I were married this afternoon.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 64 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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