Pierre Coalfleet

“ Dare’s army of workmen were fighting against time to complete the exteriors of the new house and outbuildings before winter. Miriam drew rein as her horse reached the top of the hill from which she had obtained her first glimpse of the lake more than a year ago. The sun was not yet up, but the world was expecting it. The lake which only yesterday had been an emerald was now a long, flat pearl encircled in a narrow, faintly amethystine mist which like a scarf of gauze broke the perpendicular lines of the farthermost shore. ”

“ Katie was passing along the road with the perambulator, and Keble went out of his way to greet the monkey. His high boots were splashed with mud. His belted raincoat emphasized the litheness of his body. The face that bent over the carriage glowed from sharp riding against the damp air. The monkey was trying to pull off the peak of his father’s cap, and Keble was pretending to be an ogre. Katie looked on indulgently.
“Even Katie,” thought Miriam, “puts more into life than I do.” A few months before, Miriam would have thought, “gets more out of it.” ”

“ The unspoken corollary was that Walter was also more acutely conscious than Keble of certain shades of herself, and in that moment a ray of light penetrated to an obscure recess of Louise’s mind, a recess that had refused to admit certain unlovely truths and heterodoxies,—a recess that had declined, for instance, to put credence in the change of heart of so many women in books and plays: Nora Helmer, Mélisande, Guinevere; and for the first time in her life she understood how there could be a psychology of infidelity. ”

“ Bruneau lifted the ban.
Clad in fresh garments, Louise and Dare made a bonfire of the clothing and bedding and books from the cabin. “There go all the outlived parts of us,” Dare commented as the flames leaped up into the frosty blue-grey morning air. “We’ll be phoenixes. . . . I shall never be able to express my gratitude to you; a man has nothing to say to the person who has saved his life, any more than he has to say to the forces that originally gave life to him. He can only accept, marvel, venerate, and use!” ”

“ Dare sympathized.
Louise flicked her switch rebelliously. “If they say evening, they can’t expect me to know they mean afternoon. There’s no reconciling that discrepancy whether you call time qualitative multiplicity or plain duration. And they’ll just have to wait.” She smiled maliciously. “I hope they’ll look blank at each other and say, ‘Just as I thought’.”
“Why? So you can fool them all by being excessively correct?”
She was delighted. “How did you guess?”
“The clue to you is always the same. You’re a born actress.” ”

“ The doctor turned on him with a suddenness that surprised Miriam no less than Keble. “You don’t understand Louise,” he said. “She would take as much pains to cure a wounded dog as she would to cure the Governor-General. She would do as much for the stable boy as she would do for you; under certain circumstances, more. For she gives her strength to the helpless. Dare was helpless, body and soul. If you had watched him tossing and heard him moaning your eyes would have opened to many things. He was not only physically lost, he was lost in spirit. An ordinary nurse would have tended his body. ”

“ CHAPTER III IN Keble’s new car, purchased with a recent birthday cheque from the family, Louise was driving swiftly over the lumpy road that wound its way down the hill, beside the river, across sage plains, around fields of alfalfa, toward the distant Valley. There was an autumn crispness in the air, and the rising sun made the world bigger and bigger every minute. She rejoiced in the freshness of the earth; and the fun of goading a powerful motor over deserted, treacherous roads made her chuckle. ”

“ She had moments of futile compunction as she saw Louise growing haggard. Twice a day Miriam appeared at the boat-slip, but quite often Louise had seized those moments for a short nap, and there was nothing to do but leave the packets and messages on the jetty and return, or go for a walk with Grendel. She found in herself a dearth of inspiration when it was a question of making the day less tedious for her friend. Louise with her resourcefulness would have thought out endless ways of diverting her, had she been Dare’s nurse. Miriam had pleaded to be allowed to assist. ”

“ A cloud of feeling that had been growing heavier for weeks burst and deluged Keble with the sense of what his wife meant to him. He saw what a jabber all social intercourse might become should she withhold her interpretative affection from him or expend it elsewhere. He had long been restive under her continued use of the weapon of polite negativity with which he had originally defended himself against her impulsiveness. Now he longed to recapture the sources of the old impulsiveness, to defend them as his rarest possession, and his longing was redoubled by a fear that it was too late. ”

“ The lake below, seen through a clump of black pines, was grey and glazed. The Hillside crane, on his evening grub-call, flew over their heads towards his favorite island. As they watched his landing Louise noticed two white crescent-shaped objects on the dark floor of the lake near the stream which came down in steps from the canyon. It was as though some giant seated on an overhanging ledge had been paring his nails.
“They’re on the water already!” she cried.
“Fishing. Quite true to type,” Dare commented. “The minute rich old men get away from home they have an uncontrollable desire to kill.” ”

“ Denise burns expensive candles for her drôle of a husband, that rusé Mareuil who marched his socialists up the hill to give him a fine showing, then, unlike the King of France, stayed on the hill and let them march down by themselves when they had served his ambition, and got himself assassinated for his treachery. And his devout widow, after fumbling her beads in the parlor, goes into the pantry to count the gingersnaps for fear the hired girl has taken some home to her family. Denise is too spiritual to be a good human clock, and too full of wheels to be of any use to eternity. ”

“ Louise laughed. “Did you think I was a boy?”
“By Jove, you know, you might have fooled me if it had been a shade darker. But if you had, I should have been uncommonly disappointed. Keble, I take it, makes you disguise yourself in boys’ clothes to protect you from irresponsible lassos?”
“Oh dear no, he hates my breeches. Besides, I can protect myself quite extraordinarily well. The fact is, I’m at a disadvantage in these.” She was pulling sidewise at “them”. “For when you’re got up as a man you’re always giving yourself away: your hairpins fall out or you blush. ”

“ Louise has tended his spirit. By a thousand suggestions she has restored his faith in himself, created him. For you that spells nothing but the service of a clever woman for a friend. What do you know about service? What do you know about friendship? What do you know about the sick man? What do you know about life? What do you know about Louise? Precious little, my boy!”
The doctor disappeared in a state of exaltation, leaving Keble bewildered. “There’s a blind spot in me somewhere, Miriam,” he said. ”

“ While the outer world stood transfixed with cold, its lakes and streams frozen and its heart stifled under the snow, the people indoors went about their tasks and diversions with an orderliness that recalled old times to Louise and Keble and tended to persuade Miriam that her doubts about herself had been exaggerated. ”

“ That was where Dare had shown to advantage. Even though Dare had kept his tongue in his cheek, his real superiority had been manifest to Louise. Compared to Mr. Windrom, a renowned old Tory, Dare was a comet shooting past a fixed star. Mr. Windrom had undoubtedly swum, but only in the direction of the political current in which his fathers had immersed him. Dare, like herself, had swum against the current. Like herself and her father and Aunt Denise and misguided Uncle Mornay-Mareuil, Dare had emerged from obscurity and poverty. ”

“ For an hour not one human being crossed her path. The only sign of habitation had been the villainous dog and three or four horses of a not too prosperous homestead owned by one of Keble’s horse wranglers. All along the road she had been preoccupied by the tone of her parting talk with Keble, vaguely chagrined that her husband seemed to deprecate her identifying herself too closely with the life of the natives. ”

“ Keble was vexed and bitterly unhappy. “What are you going to do with a woman like that!” he cried. “I don’t mind her having her own way; but damn it all, I object to her doing things that half kill her. That’s stupid.”
One of the most difficult lessons Miriam had learnt in her long discipleship under Louise was how and when to be generous. She saw an opportunity and breathed more freely. “I think it’s cruel of you to call her sacrifice stupid. If she breaks down it is not that she has undertaken too much; but that other people undertake so little. ”

“ Louise promptly replied. “Measure off ten yards, Keble. Anybody else?”
“Come, Girlie,” said Mrs. Windrom. “Any handicap for old age, Louise?”
“Fifteen yards for any one over thirty-five. Come on Mr. Leamington. Beat Mr. Dare. He wins everything I go in for . . . Grandfather, you be starter,—you’re to say one, two, three, go. Miriam dear, you can’t be in it, for you have to show Grandmother the easy path up. I showed her down, but one of the many delicious things she told me on the way was that she forgets things and has to have her elbow nudged.” Louise shot a bright glance at Lady Eveley. ”

“ Picture the perils of taking your best girl for a Sunday drive from Witney to the Valley, with the horse getting mired and the off wheel starting an avalanche down the side of the Witney canyon and your best girl rolling down the hill to kingdom come; then suddenly turn serious and describe what decent roads would do for everybody, including yourself. Don’t be afraid to make the farmers see that you yourself have something to gain. ”

“ Dare drew up at her side. He was more handsome, more authoritative than ever, also more tender and humble than she would ever have guessed him capable of being. Yet also a little annoying. Men could be so insultingly sure of themselves. Here was a man who by all the signs ought to have been the man. She had assumed as much and behaved accordingly. But instead of bringing about the miracle, the duet for the sake of which she had been willing to risk Keble’s dignity, he had merely achieved the old solo, with her as instrument. “Why can’t they understand? Why don’t they learn?” ”

“ The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn’t make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God’s evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. ”

“ The visit of Keble’s family had proved a negative hint as to the nature of her goal, for clearly her direction was not to be one that led into a bog of kind, complacent social superiorishness. Whatever errors she might make she would not end by being gently futile, like her mother-in-law; she would not turn into a wet blanket like Girlie, nor a noisy, nosy Christmas-cracker like Mrs. Windrom. Alice Eveley had been the most satisfactory woman of the four, yet Louise particularly hoped she would not land in Alice’s bog; for Alice, while intelligent, had turned none of her intelligence to account ”

“ In the end Keble found himself, along with Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise’s radicalism the stock counter arguments of his class.
This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional society. ”