Joseph Hergesheimer

“ He dreamed for a long while; the sunlight vanished from the slope below him, from the darkling trees, touched only the farthest hills with a rosy glow. As the sun sank an errant air whispered in the wheat, and scattered the pungent aroma of the wild strawberries. A voice called thinly from the swales, and cows gathered indistinctly about a gate. Anthony rose. The world was one vast harmony in which he struck the highest, happiest note. Beyond the near hills the lilac glitter of the Ellerton lights sprang palely up on the blue dusk. ”

“ Anthony rose, and flung away a cold, stale cigarette; the world was just like that—stale and cold. He proceeded toward the house, when he heard footfalls on the pavement; in the obscurity he barely made out a man and woman, walking so closely as to be hardly distinguishably separate. They stopped by the fence, only a few feet from where he stood concealed in the shadows, and the man took the woman's hands in his own, bending over her. Then, suddenly, clasping her in his arms, he covered her upturned face with passionate kisses. ”

“ Anthony's resolution wavered; it was early; it pleased him that so fine a creature should desire his presence; an unhappy note in her voice moved him to pity. She was lonely, and he was alone—here; why should they not support each other? He leaned, close to her, upon the sloping roof. She talked little; she laughed once, a low, silvery peal whose echo ran up and down his spine.
They heard a servant closing the shutters, the doors, below them, and the sound linked Anthony to Mrs. Dallam in a feeling of pervading intimacy. ”

“ It spread like a balm over Anthony: Hartmann, Mrs. Dallam, the weeping face of Mrs. Kuhn, were like painted figures in a distasteful act upon which he had turned his back, from which he had gone forth into the supreme spectacle of the spheres, the presence of Eliza Dreen. Every atom thrilled with the thought of her. “Oh, my very dear,” he whispered to the sleeping birds, the dead, white disk of the moon: “I will come back to you... good.” ”

“ Anthony placed his hand gently upon the biologist's shoulder, but the latter wrenched himself free. Suddenly with a choked cry and arms swinging like flails he launched himself upon the orderly plants. Before he could be stopped row upon row splintered on the floor; he fought, struggled with them as though they were animate opponents, cursed them in a high, raving voice. Anthony quickly lifted him, pinning his arms to his sides. Annot had turned away, her shoulders shaking with sobs.
Rufus Hardinge's struggling unexpectedly ceased, his countenance regained completely its habitual quietude. ”

“ She smiled, in his arms, and he bent down and kissed her. She clung to him with a deep sigh, and met his lips steadily with her own. The mist slipped like a veil over Eliza's head and drops of moisture shone in her hair. Anthony turned and unfastened the canoe; and, suddenly conscious of the length of their delay, he urged it with long sweeps over the stream. Beyond the lilacs, distilling their potent sweetness in the dark, Eliza was motionless, silent, a flicker of white in the gloom. ”

“ He was surprised to discover Tom Meredith the same foxy-faced boy he had left in Doctor Allhop's drugstore... it seemed to Anthony that an incalculable time had passed since the breaking of the bottles of perfume; he felt himself to be infinitely changed, older, and the other his junior by decades of experience and a vast accumulation of worldly knowledge, contact with men, women, and events. Tom's raiment did not seem so princely as it had aforetime; the ruby reputed to be the gift of a married woman, was obviously meretricious, the gold timepiece merely commonplace. ”

“ Then, in his mechanical and dispassionate voice, he cursed Alfred Lukes with the utmost foulness. One heated word, the slightest elevation of his even tones, would have made the performance human, intelligent, but the deadly monotony, the impersonal accents, were as harrowing as though a mummy had ground out of its shrunken and embalmed interior a recital of prehistoric hatred and wrong; it resembled a phonograph record of incalculable depravity. He stood beyond the bridge, resting upon his stick, with his unmoved face turned toward Anthony. ”

“ It was the first time that he had acknowledged Anthony to possess the discretion of maturity, and he raised the stein to his lips with the feeling that it was a sacrament of his manhood, an earnest and pledge of his success.
The midnight train emerged from the gloom of the station, passed through the outskirts of Ellerton, detached rows of dark dwellings, by the grounds of the Baseball Association, its fence still plastered with the gaudy circus posters, into the dim fields and shining streams. ”

“ I don't mind your—your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. ”

“ He took up his way once more over the soft folds of the road; now, accustomed to the dark, he could distinguish the smooth pebbles by the way, separate, grey blades of grass. He walked buoyantly, tirelessly, weaving on the loom of the dim miles mingled visions of future and past, dominated by the serene presence of Eliza.
He felt in a pocket the wallet containing his ticket to California and the generous sum added by his father. There must be no more delay in arriving at his western destination! His excursion with Hartmann had been a grave error ”

“ The perspiration dripped from Anthony's countenance, wet the clenched palms of his hands. He walked on and on, through streets brilliantly lighted and streets dark; streets crowded with men in evening clothes, loafing with cigarettes by illuminated playbills, streets empty, silent save for the echo of his hurried, shambling footsteps. Eliza was lost, out there somewhere in the night; he must find her, bring her back: but he couldn't find her, nor bring her back—she was dead. ”

“ She straightened up, his hand still held in hers, and a shadow fell upon her vivid countenance. “If his reasoning is wrong, this experiment... like all the others, it will kill him. They must be white, it would be too cruel, too senseless not. I am afraid,” she said simply; “nature is so terrible, a Juggernaut, crushing everything to dust beneath its wheeling centuries. I am glad that you are here, Anthony.” She drew closer to him; her breast swelled in a sharp, tempestuous breath. ”

“ He halted, and surveyed Anthony with a lowered, searching curiosity, clenching with a strained and surprising force the knob of a black stick. Anthony met his scrutiny with the salutation of youth and the road; but the other made no reply; his countenance was as blank as though no word had been spoken. Then a sudden flicker of hot light burned in the dull depths of his gaze, his worn face quivered with a swift malignancy, an energy of suspicion, of hatred, that touched Anthony's heart with a cold finger of fear. ”

“ Anthony delayed over the arrangement of his craft until Eliza and himself were last in the floating procession. Dense shadows, drooping from the trees, filled the banks; overhead the sky was clear green. They swept silently forward with the current, a rare dip of the paddle. Eliza's countenance was just palely visible. The lilacs lay in a pallid heap at their feet. On either hand the world floated back darkly like an immaterial void through which an ebon stream bore them beyond the stars. ”

“ Instances might be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward.
And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle, that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group gathered at the back of the drugstore. ”

“ The crowd grew less, dwindling to a few aimless couples, solitary pedestrians. He soon stopped, before his home. Opposite the gaunt skeleton of a building operation rose blackly against the pale stars. The aged lindens above him, lushly leaved, cast an intenser gloom, filled with the warm, musty odor of the sluiced pavement, about the white marble steps. The hall, open before him, was a cavern of coolness; beyond, from the garden shut from the street by an intricate, rusting iron fence, he heard the deliberate tones of his sister Ellie. ”

“ He dressed hurriedly, and had opened his door, when he heard his name called from below. It was Annot, he knew, but her voice was strange, terrified—a helpless cry new to her accustomed poise. “Anthony! Anthony!” she called from the conservatory.
Rufus Hardinge, who, it was evident from his clothes had not been in bed, was standing rigidly before the row of plants upon whose flowering they had so intently waited. And, in a rapid glance, Anthony saw that they had blossomed in delicate, parti-colored petals—some pale lavender, others deep purple, still others reddish white. ”

“ Their progress for the day ended at a small hotel maintained upon the roof of a ridge of hills. As the dusk deepened the valley beyond swam with warm, scattered lights, while above, in illimitable space, gleamed stars near, only a few millions of miles away, and stars far, millions upon millions of miles distant.
The ground floor of the hotel was divided by a passage, on one side the bar, and the other a dining and lounging room, lit with kerosene lamps swung below tin reflectors. When Anthony was ready for supper the others had disappeared above. ”

“ He thought, too, of people as plants, as roses—Oh, Eliza!—as nettles, rank weeds, crimson lilies. And, vaguely, this hurt him; something valuable, something sustaining, vanished from his unformulated, instinctive conception of life; the world of men, their aims, their courage, ideals, lost their peculiar beauty, their importance; the past, rising from the mold through those green tubes and vanishing into a future of dissolving gases, shrunk, stripped of its glamor, to an affair of little moment. ”

“ The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking—teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic. ”

“ When the biologist left the piazza Annot turned with a glad gesture to her companion. “He hasn't seemed so well—not for years; his little, gay fun again... it's too good to be true. I should like to celebrate—something entirely irresponsible. I have worried, oh, dreadfully.” The night was still, moonless; the stars burned like opals in the intense purple deeps of the sky. The air, freighted with the rich fruitage of full summer, hung close and heavy. “It's hot as a blotter,” Annot declared. “I think, yes—I'm sure, I should like to go out in the car.” She rose. ”

“ Eliza is a dear.” Anthony lit a cigarette, and flipped the match in a minute gold arc, extinguished in the night.
“I am decidedly uneasy about Eliza though,” she continued to Ellie; “to tell the truth, I am not sure how she will take over here. She is a serious child; I would say temperamental, but that's such an impossible word. She is absolutely and transparently honest and outspoken—it's ghastly at times. The most unworldly person alive; with her thought and action are one, and often as not her thoughts are appalling. All that, you know, doesn't spell wisdom for a girl.” ”

“ A sea of misery swept over him in which he struggled like a spent swimmer—Eliza was the far, silver shore toward which he fought. It wasn't fair—a sob almost mastered him—to ask him to go away now, when he had but found her.
“It's not Siberia,” he heard his father say, “nor a life sentence; if this—this 'girl' is serious, you will be closer working for her in California than idle in Ellerton.”
“I don't want to go away from her,” he whispered; “the world's such a hell of a big, empty place... things happen.” ”

“ III BAY STREET was thronged; the shops displayed broad, lighted windows filled with their various merchandise; in front of a produce store a row of chickens hung bare, bright blue and yellow, head down; from within came the grinding of a coffee machine, the acrid voices of women bargaining. The glass doors to the fire-engine house stood open, the machines glimmering behind a wide demilune of chairs holding a motley assemblage of men. ”

“ As the market became crowded, in the stress of competition, bargaining, the vendor forgot Anthony's presence; and with a deep breath of determination, he started in search of employment; he again faced the West.
He had no difficulty in discovering the section of the city given over to the automobile industry, a broad, asphalt way with glittering show windows, serried ranks of cars, by either curb. There was, however, no work to be obtained here; a single offer would scarcely pay for his maintenance; in its potentialities California was the merest blur upon the future. ”

“ Later he drove Hartmann, now accompanied by Kuhn, out of town, through a district of suburban villas, smooth, white roads and green lawns, into the farmland and pasturage beyond. They finally stopped at an inn of weathered grey stone set behind a row of ancient elms. A woman was sitting on the portico, and she rose and came forward sinuously as the men descended from the motor car. Anthony saw that she had a full, voluptuous figure, lustreless, yellow hair, and sleepy eyes. ”