O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 46

"'Oh dear, no!' said I. 'You are much too respectable. You are from Boston.'

"'And you from Virginia,' said he. 'I hear that a certain Stewart once unjustifiably claimed kins.h.i.+p with your branch of the family and has since been known as the Pretender.'

"'That is quite true,' said I. 'And I hear that once when the Ark ran aground a little voice was heard piping: 'Save me! save me! I am a Fowler of Boston!'

"That was the silly way we began. Isn't it incredible?"

"He could be silly--that was one of the lovable things," Hugh mused.

"And he could say the most nakedly natural things. But he generally used the mandarin dialect. He thought in it, I suppose."

"No," the stranger corrected him. "He thought in thoughts. Brilliant people always do. The words just wait like a--a--"

"Layette," said Hugh. "What else did he say?"

"The next I remember we were leaning together, all but touching. And he was telling me about the little green gate."

Hugh's hand shut. "He always called it that. Was he thinking of it even then?"

"Oh yes!"

"He never was like a person of this world," said Hugh, under his breath.

"The loneliest creature I ever knew."

They fell silent, like two old friends whose sorrow is the same.

"He believed," Hugh went on, after a moment, "that when life became intolerable you had a perfect right to take the shortest way out. And he thought of it as a little green gate, swinging with its shadow in the twilight so that a touch would let you into the sweetest, dimmest old garden."

"But he loved life."

"Sometimes. The colour of it and the unexpectedness. He believed the word didn't have any definite plan, but just wandered along the road and picked up adventures. And he loved that. He said G.o.d made a new earth every day and he rather fancied a new heaven oftener. But he got so dead tired at the end, homesick for the underground.... I wonder ..."

The little woman was looking past him, straight into an evocation of a vanished presence that was so real, so nearly tangible, that Hugh was forced to lay violent hands upon his absurd impulse to glance over his shoulder "I wouldn't let him," she said, in a tone the young man had never heard before.

"You mean ..."

"I couldn't bear it. I made him promise me that he wouldn't. I can't tell you that. We talked for a long time and the night was full of doom.

He was tired then, but that wasn't all. He felt what was coming--the Shadow ... and he was in terror. What he dreaded most was that it might change him in some way, make him something beastly and devilish--he who had always loved whatever was lovely and merciful and of good report."

Hugh got up with a shudder. "Hus.h.!.+" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly.

Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were pert crocus-buds in the window-boxes. The place was full of foolhardy little dare-devils who trusted their fate and might never find it out.

After all, that was the way to live--as long as one was allowed. He turned suddenly with his whimsical smile. "I look out o' window quite a bit," he explained, "well, because of my aunt Maria." When he sat down again in the Sheraton chair Mrs. s.h.i.+rley s.h.i.+fted her story to the plane of the smile.

"I don't know how late it was when Madame Normand popped her head out of the balcony door."

"'Who was then surprised? It was the lady,' as dear old Brantome says?"

"It was everybody. The company had gone and Melanie the _bonne_ was putting out the candles.

"'Miss Stewart and I have just discovered that we are very nearly related,' said he.

"'But how delightful,' said Madame, thoroughly annoyed."

"And the other time," Hugh hinted. What he wanted to say was, "So you prevented it, you kept him here, G.o.d bless you!" His natural resilience had a.s.serted itself. Vistas were opening. The Hugh who accepted life for what it was worth was again in the ascendant, but he found a second to call up the other Hugh, whose legal residence was somewhere near the threshold of consciousness, to take notice. He had always known that there must have been something in Uncle Hugh's girl.

"That was a few days later, the afternoon before I left Paris. I went quite suddenly. Somebody was sick at home, and I had the chance to travel with some friends who were going. He had sent me flowers--no, not roses."

"Narcissus?"

"Yes. Old Monsieur Normand was scandalized; it seems one doesn't send yellow flowers to a _jeune fille_. To me it was the most incredibly thoughtful and original thing. All the other girls had gone with Madame to a very special piano recital, in spite of a drizzling rain. It had turned cool, too, I remember, because there was a wood fire in the little sitting-room--not the _salon_, but the girls' room. Being an American, Madame was almost lavish about fires. And it was a most un-French room, the most careless little place, where the second-best piano lived, and the lilacs, when they were taken in out of the cold.

There were sweet old curtains, and a long sofa in front of the fireplace instead of the traditional armchairs. Anybody's books and bibelots lay about. I was playing."

"What?" This was important.

"What would a girl play, over twenty years ago, in Paris? In the _crepuscule_, with the lilacs that _embaument_, as they say there, and with a sort of panic in her mind? Because, after all, the man to whom one is engaged is a man whom one knows very slightly."

"Absolutely," said Hugh.

"And I didn't want to leave Paris.... Of course I was playing Chopin bits, with an ache in my heart to match, that I couldn't bear and was enjoying to the utmost. What do girls play now? Then all of us had attacks of Chopin. Madame used to laugh and say, 'I hear the harbour bar still moaning,' and order that particular girl's favourite dessert. She spoiled us. And Monsieur would say something about _si jeunesse savait_.

He was a nice old man, not very successful; his colleagues patronized him. Oh yes he was obvious!

"And then Melanie opened the door and announced, '_Monsieur, le cousin de Mademoiselle_.' I don't know what made her do it except a general wish to be kind. She remembered from the other night, and, besides, she hated to attempt English names; she made salmi of them."

Hugh had ceased to hold her eyes long ago. They looked into the window's square of light. He had no wish to intrude his presence. She was finding it natural to tell him, just as he had acknowledged her right to explore the intimate places of his soul. Things simply happened that way sometimes, and one was humbly thankful.

"'Go on,' he said. 'Don't stop.' He sat in a corner of the sofa, and for a while the impetus of my start carried me on. Then the bottom dropped out of Chopin. I went over and sat in the other corner. It was a long sofa; it felt as long as the world.

"Do you remember that heart-breakingly beautiful voice of his that could make you feel anything he was feeling? It was like magic. He said at last:

"'So you are going home to be married?'

"I nodded.

"'Betty,' he said, 'are you happy, quite happy, about--everything?'

"'Oh yes!' I said. 'Oh yes, Professor Fowler!' The curious thing about it was that I spoke the truth when I considered it seriously.

"He said, 'Then that's all right.' Then he laughed a little and said, 'Do you always call me Professor Fowler, even when you shut your door on the world at night and are all alone with G.o.d and the silence?'

"'And Claudia Jones,' I added, stupidly.

"He considered that seriously and said, 'I didn't know about Claudia Jones; she may inhibit even the silence and the other ingredient. I suppose you call me Teacher.'

"I cried out at that. 'I might call you _cher maitre_, as they do her.'

"He said, 'That may do for the present.'

"'We looked into the fire and the lilacs filled the pause as adequately as Chopin could have done. All at once he got up and came over to me--it seemed the most natural thing in the world--across that wilderness of sofa.