Stubble Part 6

"Down in the Rathskeller," he added.

A hot rush of confusion struck her and she made no reply, but he went on:

"I've often wondered what these people were like fifty years ago--living on top of the world, best farm land anywhere, fine old homes, lots of servants--nothing to do but enjoy life. Let it slip away from them, didn't they? Must not have known what they had." He had relaxed and was driving comfortably. And as though wrapped in a mist of his own musing he continued, his eyes fixed on the road before him, "I've often thought that if I ever got to the point where I could afford it I would get me one of those old places--lot of land--stock it up well, fix up the house. I'd like to leave something like that to my family." He chuckled. "They might not appreciate it as much as I do, however."

"They might," she replied. "They might have just as hard a time trying to keep it as--as we have. Conditions might change again in the next fifty years."

He turned and smiled at her. "Hadn't thought of that." The crow's feet were thick about his eyes. "Who was the boy?--the one you were with the other night."

Mary Louise flushed in spite of herself. "Joe--Joe Hooper. You've heard me speak of him."

"Oh, yes. Lives in Bloomfield, doesn't he?"

"He did. Works here in town now--out at Bromley's."

He made no further reply, but somehow she felt an unuttered conviction, on the part of the man there beside her, of Joe's loss of heritage. And yet a certain compunction prevented her from making any explanation--that it was not Joe's fault. There was a sort of sacred inviolability about it. A hot little wave of feeling swept over her.

She had treated Joe miserably. She had yielded to her feelings like a child. She ought to have been good sport enough to hide what she had felt. But she hadn't. She was a sn.o.b. She had hoped to conceal that she was not their sort--Joe and Mr. Mosby. In a sense, she had been going back on her own people. As if she were trying to pa.s.s them--trying to keep up with the procession. And yet that was exactly what she was doing. But to show it!

The straight level path of the boulevard came abruptly to an end and the road diverged to the left and mounted swiftly, skirting the incline of a white, chalky hill densely covered with a tangle of scrub oak, buckeye, cedar, and much underbrush. The slanting rays of the sun were shut off abruptly as by a shutter and they rolled between stretches of shade that were mistily fragrant and cool. Even the upper air currents in the s.p.a.ces above the road, up toward the sky, seemed shadowy and unharried by the fierceness of the pa.s.sing sunlight. The motor settled down to the business of climbing, and once Claybrook turned to her with a look of appreciation.

"Some park, this."

She hardly heard him, so intent was she on watching the road and the occasional glimpses, through the tangle, of declivitous stretches strewn with trunks of fallen trees and rank vegetation, down which the wind went wandering with vague whisperings. They had been suddenly transported out of the world of people into the world of hopes. The city had been left leagues behind.

They made a quick, sharp turn to the right, the road almost doubling back upon itself, and there was a steep grade for a short distance, during which time Mary Louise caught herself leaning forward and holding her breath in an instinctive impulse to help the labouring car. And then they gained the top. Before them lay a tableland of many acres thickly covered with trees. The gra.s.s, in the open s.p.a.ces between, was spa.r.s.e, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried by the sun of more than one summer; and here and there in the northern shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress.

Great streamers of wild grape-vine hung precariously from weary limbs and swayed to and fro gently in the wind that came mounting up the slope from the west and went dipping away to the eastward, leaving a soft, shuddering wake. It was as if a mellower spirit hovered about the old giant k.n.o.b resting there, watching with its head all venerably gray, though the sunlight ere it faded was elfishly splashing the shadow with golden green, and little flecks of crimson and orange came flashing through the tangle of branches as they pa.s.sed, making light mockery. And then the trees suddenly opened and they came out upon a flat bare knoll, where the road, making a loop, signified that its journey was over. Around the outside edge was a wall of loose stones from which the hill sloped steeply in all directions, and before them, stretching away for miles, lay the country through which they had pa.s.sed, till soft and green and gray in the distance. A huge smoke pall, its feathery top drifting slowly eastward, hung over a cup-shaped depression, and below it stretched a darker line, from which occasionally emerged a solitary stack, or above which a church spire, caught by an errant ray from the setting sun, would flash a momentary beacon. Slowly the mantle seemed to fade and mingle with the twilight, and even as they watched, a light flashed out, a single pin-p.r.i.c.k of a light, and then another and another, as night, gathering in its intensity, swept over the valley, until it was met by an ever-increasing challenge. It was like a myriad host of fairy fire-flies, each diamond pointed, flickering, blinking, never still.

And there settled on the under side of the smoke pall a lurid glow as of banked fires, waiting for the work of another day.

Mary Louise breathed a soft little sigh.

"It does get next to one, some way, doesn't it?" he said.

Rather to her thoughts she replied aloud: "To think of all those people living there, almost in the grasp of the hand. Think of them moving, scurrying about among those lights. It makes one feel it would be so easy to do things for them, move them about at one's will--from here. And yet----" She was silent a moment, thinking. "And yet even to be able to raise one's head above it all, to see--and be seen!

Well----"

"That's what I mean to do." He spoke almost as if she were not there, and his voice, which was as though disembodied, and jarring a bit with its resonance, brought her back to the present.

"It's a hard thing to do and I've come to think it takes sometimes a lifetime, but--it can be done." He had turned and she could feel his warm breath in her ear. There was a note of a.s.surance in his words and, as she watched, a change came over the scene before her and it all seemed like a huge graying blanket punched full of tiny, bright flat holes. Something had receded, escaped back into the darkness behind it all.

She made no reply.

"I wanted to tell you and it's about as good a time as any. You may be needing some help. It's not all so easy down there. And--well, if you need any help--make the way any easier for you--why, don't hesitate to call on me."

"That's good of you," she replied, and wondered at the lack of warmth in her own voice. "Perhaps I shall." But she could not help feeling that in some way she had seen what she had seen--alone.

They sat a little longer in silence, and then Mary Louise straightened in her seat and called to him briskly:

"We _must_ be going. Why, it must be eight o'clock. What have I been thinking of?"

"That's what I'd like to know," he laughed.

"Come, take me home, man. Maida will think--all sorts of things."

"You don't have to answer to her, do you?"

"No. But let's go."

He stooped over and switched on the lights and immediately two long, ghostly streamers went searching out across the wall and rested lightly in the tops of some ragged trees on the slopes, bringing them grotesquely into focus, while myriads of tiny motes danced down the twin circular paths off into s.p.a.ce. Directly there was a roar of the engine, with an occasional sputtering cough--for the night air was cool--and then Claybrook's voice again:

"There really isn't any great hurry. We can stop at the Gardens at the foot of the hill and get a bite to eat."

"No, not to-night. Thank you ever so much."

"But why not? We needn't hurry then. It's a pretty good place." He seemed insistent, waiting, stooped there over the steering wheel.

"No," she said again. "I must get home. Maida will be waiting for me and I've some work to do. And besides, I don't want to go anywhere looking like this. I'm a fright, I know."

He muttered something to himself as he threw the car into gear, and they went whirling around the circle of the road in reckless disregard for the menace of the rock wall. It was pitch dark as they made their way across the level top of the k.n.o.b, with occasional shadows of spectral limbs projecting their silhouettes against the sky, and once the jagged edge of a trailing creeper swished close to her head as they whirled along. Above the noise of the motor there was not a sound. Claybrook suddenly laughed:

"Some of the n.i.g.g.e.rs down at the mill say this old hill is haunted."

She clung to the hand-grip of her seat, her mind filled with a tangle of impressions, with a shrinking from the sepulchral depths below them, and an effort to recall in detail that vision of the city.

"I have to shake it off before I can be any more good. It's like being moon-struck." He took another sharp curve at reckless speed, the tires grinding on the gravel, the brakes screeching.

Mary Louise held her breath for a moment and waited. And then she touched him lightly on the elbow. "Oh, please!"

He laughed and for a short time was more careful, slowing down at the curves which came every hundred yards or so. "Feels like they're coming after me. Like to get down to the level road again." He made a quick swerve to avoid a pointed rock. "Must have been great, driving to the top of this with a horse and buggy. Not for me."

And they were off again as swiftly as before. Twice they grazed the projecting roots of trees on the outside edge of the road by the scantiest of margins and once a board in a culvert snapped ominously as they swept across it, and Claybrook laughed aloud. And Mary Louise, wide-eyed, sat in a frenzy of preparedness, her gaze glued to the winding, ever-dipping road in fascination.

Suddenly a shadow seemed to leap out upon them, out of the darkness--the shadow of a man. There was a moment's hideous clamour of the brakes, a sickening swerve of the machine, a man's shout, a sudden instant's flash of gleaming trunks brought sharply into focus, and then a slow, gradual letting down of her side of the car, inch by inch. She grasped the arm beside her to keep from falling, and then all was still.

A moment later she could see that they were balanced on the edge of a culvert; to her right was the darkness; up ahead, the lights were glaring impotently off into s.p.a.ce. And then she realized that an arm was encircling her waist in an iron grip and that the motor was still thrumming and that someone was running around in front of the car and then peering off down the slope where they tipped so perilously. These things came to her in just that order. And directly she was on the road, trembling just a little and feeling very helpless, and Claybrook's voice somewhere over in the darkness was giving directions, sharp, irritated. To her knowledge he had not uttered a word during it all. She could hear them somewhere over there crashing about in the underbrush, an occasional word, an occasional suppressed shout. Very unreal it was, with the stars shining faintly overhead, the black shadows all around, and those two shafts of light poking out into nowhere. She walked back to the inside edge of the road and sat down, and bye-and-bye she felt quieter. It had been such a childishly foolish thing to do and so useless. The minutes pa.s.sed and she began to wonder what time it was getting to be. And then she felt a growing irritation and suddenly she was hungry. All she could hear was the threshing about of the brush and the sound of heavy dragging. Once she went around the rear of the car and peered down. She could dimly see that the rear wheel had pa.s.sed completely over the brink, and below it lay a pile of sticks and brush. A little more and they might have rolled over, down into the darkness. She returned to her seat by the side of the road.

Just like a little boy he was, she thought--reckless, irresponsible, "full of the fullness of living." And his tone, when she had spoken of the dead-level of life in the city below them and the problem of raising one's head--"That's what I mean to do"--had seemed so like the confident tones of a child on the threshold of life. Were we all like that, after all--lifted up for a moment so that we could see; blundering forward the next, blindly, into pitfalls of our own making?

His very offer of help, there on the hilltop, had been nave, and yet she was troubled by it. Why was he thrusting his stick into the still waters of her life? And yet she had felt very much alone and in need of the realization of another presence.

And then suddenly she realized why and how it was she liked him. She liked to think of him as standing by, liked the realization of his strength, his confidence. He was big, he was good-looking, and there was a tonic freshness about him. He was good as a friend. And he needed watching over, needed guiding, himself. That made it all the better. And then she felt hungry again. But she was no longer irritated.

The roar of the motor roused her from her musings. There was a ripping, grinding noise and she could see the outline of the car move, sink back, and then lurch forward again. There was another whirring and grinding and then Claybrook's triumphant shout. She rose to her feet and walked over to him. They had succeeded. The car was standing, all four wheels on the hard, level surface, the engine racing like mad.

"Hop in," Claybrook called to her a bit shortly.

She complied and he reached forward to throw in the gear, when the man walked around in front of the car and held up a restraining hand. She saw then, for the first time, that he was a park policeman.

"Let's have your name before you go, friend," he said.