The Brimming Cup Part 27

He foresaw that it was going to be too much for his patience to listen to them. He would get too hot under the collar and be snappish, afterwards. Luckily he was in the library. There were better voices to listen to. He got up, ran his forefinger along a shelf, and took down a volume of Trevelyan, "Garbaldi and the Thousand." The well-worn volume opened of itself at a familiar pa.s.sage, the description of the battle of Calatafimi. His eye lighted in antic.i.p.ation. There was a man's book, he thought. But his pipe was out. He laid the book down to light it before he began to read. In spite of himself he listened to hear what they were saying now in the next room. Eugenia was talking and he didn't like what she was saying about those recurrent dreams of Marise's, because he knew it was making poor Marise squirm. She had such a queer, Elly-like shyness about that notion of hers, Marise had. It evidently meant more to her than she had ever been able to make him understand. He couldn't see why she cared so much about it, hated to have it talked about casually. But he wasn't Eugenia. If Marise didn't want it talked about casually, by George he wasn't the one who would mention it. They'd hardly ever spoken of them, those dreams, even to each other. People had a right to moral privacy, if they wanted it, he supposed, even married women. There was nothing so ruthless anyhow as an old childhood friend, to whom you had made foolish youthful confidences and who brought them out any time he felt like it.

"You ought to have those dreams of yours psycho-a.n.a.lyzed, Marisette,"

Eugenia was saying. To Marsh she went on in explanation, "Mrs.

Crittenden has always had a queer kind of dream. I remember her telling me about them, years ago, when we were girls together, and n.o.body guessed there was anything in dreams. She dreams she is in some tremendous rapid motion, a leaf on a great river-current, or a bird blown by a great wind, or foam driven along by storm-waves, isn't that it, Marisonne?"

Neale did not need the sound of Marise's voice to know how she hated this. She said, rather shortly for her, as though she didn't want to say a word about it, and yet couldn't leave it uncorrected, "Not exactly. I don't dream I'm the leaf on the current. I dream I _am_ the current myself, part of it. I'm the wind, not the bird blown by it; the wave itself; it's too hard to explain."

"Do you still have those dreams once in a while, Marisette, and do you still love them as much?"

"Oh yes, sometimes."

"And have you ever had the same sensation in your waking moments? I remember so well you used to say that was what you longed for, some experience in real life that would make you have that glorious sense of irresistible forward movement. We used to think," said Eugenia, "that perhaps falling in love would give it to you."

"No," said Marise. "I've never felt it, out of my dreams."

Neale was sorry he had elected to stay in the study. If he were out there now, he could change the conversation, come to her rescue.

Couldn't Eugenia see that she was bothering Marise!

"What do you suppose Freud would make out of such dreams?" asked Eugenia, evidently of Marsh.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me," said Marsh, and Neale was obliged to hand it to him that the very sound of his voice had a living, real, genuine accent that was a relief after Eugenia. He didn't talk half-chewed and wholly undigested nonsense, the way Eugenia did. Neale had heard enough of his ideas to know that he didn't agree with a word the man said, but at least it was a vital and intelligent personality talking.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me. Americans have fadded the thing into imbecility, so that the very phrase has become such a bromide one hates to p.r.o.nounce it. But of course the commonplace that all dreams are expressions of suppressed desires is true. And it's very apparent that Mrs. Crittenden's desire is a very fine one for freedom and power and momentum. She's evidently not a back-water personality. Though one would hardly need psycho-a.n.a.lysis to guess that!" He changed the subject as masterfully as Neale could have done. "See here, Mrs. Crittenden, that Tschaikowsky whetted my appet.i.te for more. Don't you feel like playing again?"

The idea came over Neale, and in spite of his uneasy irritation, it tickled his fancy, that possibly Marsh found Eugenia just as deadly as he did.

Marise jumped at the chance to turn the talk, for in an instant the piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of the new people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of battle.

Some time after this, he was pulled back from those critical and glorious hours by the consciousness, gradually forcing itself on him on two discomforts; his pipe had gone out and Eugenia was at it again. He scratched a match and listened in spite of himself to that smooth liquid voice. She was still harping on psycho-a.n.a.lysis. Wasn't she just the kind of woman for whom that would have an irresistible fascination! He gathered that Marise was objecting to it, just as sweepingly as Eugenia was approving. How women did hate half-tones and reasonable qualifications!

"I'm a gardener," Marise was saying, "and I know a thing or two about natural processes. The thing to do with a manure pile is not to paw it over and over, but to put it safely away in the dark, underground, and never bother your head about it again except to watch the beauty and vitality of the flowers and grains that spring from the earth it has fertilized."

Neale as he held the lifted match over his pipe, shook his head. That was all very well, put picturesquely as Marise always put things; but you couldn't knock an idea on the head just with an apt metaphor. There was a great deal more to be said about it, even if fool half-baked faddists like Eugenia did make it ridiculous. In the first place it was nothing so new. Everybody who had ever encountered a crisis in his life and conquered it, had ... why, he himself ...

He felt his heart beat faster, and before he knew what was coming, he felt a great, heart-quickening gust of fresh salt air blow over him, and felt himself far from the book-tainted stagnant air of that indoor room. He forgot to light his pipe and sat motionless, holding the burning match till it flared up at the end and scorched his fingers.

Then he dropped it with a startled oath, and looked quickly around him.

In that instant he had lived over again the moment in Nova Scotia when he had gone down to the harbor just as the battered little tramp steamer was pulling out, bound for China.

Good G.o.d! What an astonishing onslaught that had been! How from some great, fierce, unguessed appet.i.te, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom had burst up! Marise, the children, their safe, snug middle-cla.s.s life, how they had seemed only so many drag-anchors to cut himself loose from and make out to the open sea! If the steamer had been still close enough to the dock so that he could have jumped aboard, how he would have leaped! He might have been one of those men who disappeared mysteriously, from out a prosperous and happy life, and are never heard of again. But it hadn't been close enough. The green oily water widened between them; and he had gone back with a burning heart to that deadly little country hotel.

Well, had he buried it and forced himself to think no more about it? No.

Not on your life he hadn't. He'd stood up to himself. He'd asked himself what the h.e.l.l was the matter, and he'd gone after it, as any grown man would. It hadn't been fun. He remembered that the sweat had run down his face as though he'd been handling planks in the lumber-yard in midsummer.

And what had he found? He'd found that he'd never got over the jolt it had given him, there on that aimless youthful trip through Italy, with China and the Eastern seas before him, to fall in love and have all those plans for wandering cut off by the need for a safe, stable life.

Then he'd gone on. He'd asked himself, if that's so, _then_ what? He hadn't pulled any of the moralizing stern-duty stuff; he knew Marise would rather die than have him doing for her something he hated, out of stern duty. It was an insult, anyhow, unless it was a positively helpless cripple in question, to do things for people out of duty only.

And to mix what folks called "duty" up with love, that was the devil. So he hadn't.

That was the sort of thing Marise had meant, so long ago, when they were first engaged, that was the sort of thing she had asked him never to do.

He'd promised he never would, and this wasn't the first time the promise had held him straight to what was, after all, the only decent course with a woman like Marise, as strong as she was fine. Anything else would be treating her like a child, or a dependent, as he'd hate to have her treat him, or anybody treat him.

So this time he'd asked himself right out, what he really wanted and needed in life, and he'd been ready, honestly ready, to take any answer he got, and dree his weird accordingly, as the best thing for everybody concerned, as the only honest thing, as the only thing that would put any bed-rock under him, as what Marise would want him to do. If it meant tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers. Something could be managed for Marise and the children.

This was what he had asked. And what answer had he got? Why, of course, he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the tramp-steamer stood for. He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less.

But he wanted Marise and the children a d.a.m.n sight more. And not only Marise and the children. He hadn't let himself lay it all on their backs, and play the martyr's role of the forcibly domesticated wild male. No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world, the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the natural resources of the world without exploiting either the natural resources or the men; he wanted the sense of deserved power over other human beings. That was what he really wanted most of all. You could call it smug and safe and bourgeois if you liked. But the plain fact remained that it had more of what really counted for him than any other life he could see possible. And when he looked at it, hard, with his eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little subst.i.tute for a real life she would have been to him.

He'd have liked to have that too, of course. You'd _like_ to have everything! But you can't. And it is only immature boys who whimper because you can't have your cake and eat it too. That was all there was to that.

What he had dug for was to find his deepest and most permanent desires, and when he had found them, he'd come home with a happy heart.

It even seemed to him that he had been happier and quieter than before.

Well, maybe Marise's metaphor had something in it, for all it was so flowery and high-falutin. Maybe she would say that what he had done was exactly what she'd described, to dig it under the ground and let it fertilize and enrich his life.

Oh Lord! how a figure of speech always wound you up in knots if you tried to use it to say anything definite!

He relighted his pipe, this time with a steady hand, and a cool eye; and turned to Trevelyan and Garibaldi again. He'd take that other side of himself out in books, he guessed.

He had now arrived at the crucial moment of the battle, and lifted his head and his heart in antic.i.p.ation of the way Garibaldi met that moment.

He read, "To experienced eyes the battle seemed lost. Bixio said to Garibaldi, 'General, I fear we ought to retreat.' Garibaldi looked up as though a serpent had stung him. '_Here we make Italy or die!_' he said."

"That's the talk!" cried Neale, to himself. The brave words resounded in the air about him, and drowned out the voices from the next room.

CHAPTER XIII

ALONG THE EAGLE ROCK BROOK

July 1.

Paul was very much pleased that Mr. Welles agreed with him so perfectly about the hour and place for lunch. But then Mr. Welles was awfully nice about agreeing. He said, now, "Yes, I believe this would be the best place. Here by the pool, on that big rock, as you say. We'll be drier there. Yesterday's rain has made everything in the woods pretty wet.

That's a good idea of yours, to build our fire on the rock, with water all around. The fire couldn't possibly spread." Paul looked proudly at the rain-soaked trees and wet soggy leaves which his forethought had saved from destruction and strode across the brook in his rubber boots, with the first installment of dry pine branches.

"Aren't you tired?" he said protectingly to his companion. "Whyn't you sit down over there and undo the lunch-basket? I'll make camp. Father showed me how to make a campfire with only one match."

"All right," said Mr. Welles. "I do feel a little leg-weary. I'm not so used to these mountain scrambles as you are."

"I'll clean the fish, too," said Paul; "maybe you don't like to. Elly can't abide it." He did not say that he did not like it very well himself, having always to get over the sick feeling it gave him.

"I never did it in my life," confessed Mr. Welles. "You see I always lived in towns till now."

Paul felt very sorry for Mr. Welles, and shook his head pityingly as he went off for more firewood.