CHAPTER IX

AFTER BREAKFAST

For their honeymoon, Martin had loaned them his camp up in northern

Wisconsin--uncut forest mostly, with a river and a lot of little lakes

in it. There were still deer and bear to be shot there, there was

wonderful fishing, and, more to the point in the present instance, as

fine a brand of solitude as civilization can ask to lay its hands on. It

was modified, and mitigated too, by a backwoods family--a man and his

wife, a daughter or two, and half a dozen sons, who lived there the year

round, of course; so that by telegraphing two or three days in advance,

you could be met by a buckboard at the nearest railroad station for the

twenty-five-mile drive over to the camp. You could find the house itself

(a huge affair, decorously built of logs, as far as its exterior

manifestations went, but amply supplied on the interior with bathrooms,

real beds and so forth) opened and warmed and flavored with the odor of

fried venison steak. Also, there was always a boy to paddle a canoe for

you, or saddle a horse, if you didn't feel like doing it for yourself.

Rodney and Rose spent a night in this establishment, then rigged up an

outfit for camping of a less symbolistic sort, and repaired to an island

out in the lake, where for two weeks they lived gorgeously, like the

savages they both, to a very considerable extent, really were.

But, at the end of this fortnight, a whipping north wind, with a fine

penetrating rain in its teeth, settled down for a three-days' visit, and

drove them back to adequate shelter. One rainy day in an outdoor camp is

a good thing; a second requires fortitude; a third carries the

conviction that it has been raining from the first day of Creation and

will keep on till the Last Judgment, and if you have anywhere to go to

get dry, you do.

Of course the storm blew itself away when it had accomplished its

purpose of driving them from their island paradise, but they didn't go

back to it. Two weeks of camp-fires, hemlock boughs and blankets, had

given them an appreciation for sleeping between smooth sheets, and

coming down to a breakfast that was prepared for them. And one morning

Rose came into the big living-room to find Rodney lounging there, in

front of the fire, with a book.

It wasn't the first time he had done that. But always before, on seeing

her come in, he had chucked the book away and come to meet her. This

time, he went on reading.

She moved over toward him, meaning to sit down on the arm of his chair,

cuddle her arm around his neck, and at the same time, discover what it

was that so absorbed him. But half-way across the room, she changed her

mind. He hadn't even reached out an unconscious hand toward her. He went

on reading as if, actually, he were alone in the room. Evidently, too,

it was a book he'd brought with him--a formidable-looking volume printed

in German--she got near enough to see that. So she picked up an old

magazine from the table, and found a chair of her own, smiling a little

in anticipation of the effect this maneuver would have.

She opened the magazine at random, and, presently, for the sake of

verisimilitude, turned a page. Rodney was turning pages as regularly as

clockwork. It was a silly magazine! She wished she'd found something

that really could interest her. It was getting harder and harder to sit

still. He couldn't be angry about anything, could he? No, that was

absurd. There hadn't been the slightest trace of a disagreement between

them. She wouldn't go on pretending to read, anyhow, and she tossed the

magazine away.

She had meant it to fall back on the table. But she put more nervous

force than she realized into the toss, so that it skittered across the

table and fell on the floor with a slap.

That roused him. He closed his book--on his finger, though--looked

around at her, stretched his arms and smiled. "Isn't this great?" he

said.

It wasn't a sentiment she could echo quite whole-heartedly just then,

so she asked him what he meant--wasn't what great.

"Oh, this," he told her. "Being like this."

"Sitting half a mile apart this way," she asked, "each of us reading our

own book?"

She didn't realize how completely provocative her meaning was, until, to

her incredulous bewilderment, he said enthusiastically, "Yes! exactly!"

He wasn't looking at her now, but into the fire, and he rummaged for a

match and relighted his pipe before he said anything more. "Being

permanent, you know," he explained, "and--well, our real selves again."

She tried hard to keep her voice even when she asked, "But--but what

have we been?"

And at that he laughed out. "Good heavens, what haven't we been! A

couple of transfigured lunatics. Why, Rose, I haven't been able to see

straight, or think straight, for the last six weeks. And I don't believe

you have either. My ideas have just been running in circles around you.

How I ever got through those last two cases in the Appellate Court, I

don't see. When I made an argument before the bench, I was--talking to

you. When I wrote my briefs, I was writing you love-letters. And if I'd

had sense enough to realize my condition, I'd have been frightened to

death. But now--well, we've been sitting here reading away for an hour,

without having an idea of each other in our heads."

By a miracle of self-command, she managed to keep control of her voice.

"Yes," she said. "That--that other's all over, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that," he demurred around a comfortable

yawn. "I expect it will catch us again every now and then. But, in the

main, we're sane people, ready to go on with our own business. What was

it you were reading?"

"I don't believe I'll read any more just now," she said. "I think I'll

go out for a walk." And she managed to get outside the room without his

discovering that anything was wrong.

It was, indeed, her first preoccupation, to make sure he shouldn't

discover the effect his words had had on her--to get far enough away

before the storm broke so that she could have it out by herself. The

crowning humiliation would be if he came blundering in on her and asked

her what was the matter.

She fled down the trail to the little lake, ran out a canoe, caught up a

paddle and bent a feverish energy to the task of getting safely around

into the shelter of a fir-grown point before she let herself stop, as

she would have said, to think. It wasn't really to think, of course.

Not, that is, to interpret out to the end of all its logical

implications, the admission he had so unconsciously made to her that

morning.

She had never seriously been hurt or frightened, Portia had said weeks

ago. And when she said it, it was true. She was both hurt and frightened

now, and the instinct that had urged her to fly was as simple and

primitive as that which urges a wounded animal to hide.

Indeed, if you could have seen her after she had swung her paddle

inboard, sitting there, gripping the gunwales with both hands, panting,

her wide eyes dry, you might easily have thought of some defenseless

wild thing cowering in a momentary shelter, listening for the baying of

pursuing hounds.

He didn't love her any more, that was what he had said. For what was the

thing he had so cheerfully described himself as cured of, what were the

symptoms he had enumerated as if he had been talking about a

disease--the obsession with her, the inability to get her further away

than the middle ground of his thoughts, and then only temporarily; the

necessity of saying everything he said and doing everything he did, with

reference to her; the fact that his mind could focus itself sharply on

nothing in the world but just herself?--What was all that but the

veritable description, though in hostile terms, of the love he had

promised to feel for her till death should--part them; of the very love

she felt for him, this moment stronger than ever?

Recurrent waves of the panic broke over her, during which she would

catch up her paddle again and drive ahead, blindly, without any

conscious knowledge of where she was going. And in the intervals, she

drifted.

The relief of tears didn't come to her until she saw, just ahead, the

island where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their

camp. Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little

natural shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while,

for three hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to

lather. The heap of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was

still there.

At the end of half an hour, she observed with a sort of apathetic

satisfaction, that the weather conditions of their former visit were

going to be repeated now--a sudden darkness, a shriek of wind, a wild

squall flashing across the surface of the little lake, and a driving

rain so thick that small as the lake was, it veiled the shore of it.

She watched it for an hour before it occurred to her to wonder what

Rodney would be doing--whether he'd have discovered her absence from the

house and begun to worry about her. She told herself that he

wouldn't--that he'd sit there until he finished his book, or until they

called him for lunch, without, as he himself had boasted that morning, a

thought of her entering his mind.

She wept again over this notion, luxuriating rather, it must be

confessed, in the pathos of it, until she caught herself in the act and,

disgustedly, dried her eyes. Of course he'd worry about her. Only there

was nothing either of them could do about it until the storm should be

over; then she'd paddle back to the house as fast as she could and set

his mind at rest.

Suddenly she sat erect, looked, rubbed her eyes, looked again, then

sprang to her feet and went out into the driving rain. A spot of white,

a larger one of black, two moving pin-points of light, was what she saw.

The white was Rodney's shirt, the black the canoe, the pin-points the

reflection from the two-bladed paddle as, recklessly, he forced his way

with it into the teeth of the storm. He wanted her, after all.

So, with a racing heart and flushed cheeks, she watched him. It was not

until he had come much nearer that she went white with the realization

of his danger--not until she could see how desperately it needed all his

strength and skill to keep his little cockle-shell from broaching to

and being swamped.

[Illustration: "Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"]

She went as far to meet him as she could--out to the end of the point,

and then actually into the water to help him with the half-filled boat.

They emptied it and hauled it up on the beach. Then, looking up at him a

little tremulously, between a smile and tears, she saw how white he was,

caught him in her arms and felt how he was trembling.

"I thought you were gone," he said, but couldn't manage any more than

that because of a great shuddering sob that stopped him.

"Don't!" she cried. "Don't.--Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"

Presently, back in the shelter again, she drew his head down on her

breast and held him tight.

Logically, of course, the situation wasn't essentially changed. It

couldn't be a part of their daily married routine that he should think

he'd lost her and come through perils to the rescue. When the storm had

blown over and they'd come back to the house--still more, when after

another few weeks they'd gone back to town, he'd still have a world of

his own to withdraw into, a business of his own to absorb him, and she,

with no world at all except the one he was the principal inhabitant of,

would be left outside. But you couldn't have expected her to think of

that while she held him, quivering, in her arms.

BOOK TWO

Love and the World