XXVI
She was mistaken about Martha, who never had the definite hope Lena’s imagination attributed to her. Martha was steadfast because she could not help it, having been born with this endowment evidently; and her tenderness for the boy she had loved so heartily was imperishable; but the Dan Oliphant of the middle years did not seem to her to be that boy. What she felt for the big middle-aged man, she felt only because he had long ago been the beloved youth; she was not in love with him, nor with anybody. This was the explanation she still found it necessary to make to his brother about once a year—usually on New Year’s Day; for it was Harlan’s habit to select that hopeful anniversary as a good time to dwell a little upon his patience.
“You call it your patience, but it became only your habit long ago,” she told him. “It would really unsettle you badly if I ever said I’d marry you, Harlan; and it would unsettle you even more if I not only said I would, but went ahead and did it. You’d find you’d never forgive me for upsetting your routine. If we were married, where in the world would you ever go? You haven’t been anywhere for so long, except to see me, that you’d be left without the destination you’ve been accustomed to. It’s gallant of you to still mention your willingness, every now and then, and I own up that I rather expect it and should miss it if you didn’t; but if you want to marry, you ought to look about for—well, say a pretty widow of twenty-nine, Harlan. She’d be better for you than one of the ‘buds,’ though you could have whichever you chose;—they’d jump at the chance! The trouble with me is that I’m too old—and I’m horribly afraid I look my age.”
The fear was warranted, though it need not have been a fear. She had escaped the portliness that seemed to threaten her at thirty, and had escaped too far, perhaps; but her thinness was not angular; and if she looked her age, then that age was no more than a pleasantly responsible age, as Harlan told her, and neither a careworn nor a gray-haired age. In fact, it must be the perfect age, he said—and he wondered if it mightn’t be as kind as it looked, and be the perfect age for him.
At that, she became more serious. “I’m surprised at myself every year I grow older,” she said. “I’m so much more romantic than I was at twenty, and it seems I keep growing more so. At twenty how I’d have laughed if I’d heard of a woman of forty who said she couldn’t marry because she was in love with no one! I suppose what would have struck me as funniest would have been the idea of a woman of forty talking about marrying at all.”
She was “in love with no one,” but she could still be Harlan’s brother’s champion, if need arose; and after George McMillan took up his residence in the town, and began his mild rivalry, she had this amiable bachelor to second her. Moreover, it is to be admitted for her that she, who in the bloom of youth had never known how to display the faintest symptoms of coquetry, now sometimes enjoyed tokens of disturbance unwillingly exhibited by Harlan when the rival appeared to win an advantage. McMillan, dark and growing a little bald, counterbalanced what was lacking above by a decoration below already rare in the land, but not yet a curiosity, a Van Dyke beard, well suited to his face. In manner, too, he was equal to the flavour of a fine old portrait, and he had spoken from his childhood in the accent Harlan had carefully acquired. Thus the latter was sometimes but too well encountered on his own ground.
He met one of these defeats in an early April twilight when he had expected to find Martha alone, as he knew a meeting of the board of directors of the Ornaby Four had been called for that evening, and George McMillan was a member of the board. The air was warm with one of the misplacements of this season, when sometimes a midsummer day wanders from its proper moorings and irrationally ascends almost to the chilly headwaters of spring. Martha was upon the veranda, occupied with a fan and the conversation of Mr. McMillan when Harlan arrived; and the newcomer was so maladroit as to make his disappointed expectations plain.
“I thought you had a directors’ meeting,” he said, almost with his greeting and before he had seated himself in one of the wicker chairs brought out upon the veranda by the unseasonable warmth. “I thought there was—”
George assented placidly. “There was, but it couldn’t be held. Our president had to go to another one that he’s president of—the Broadwood Interurban. It’s in difficulties, I’m afraid, because of too high wages and too much competition by motorcycles and small cars. I hope Dan can straighten it out.”
“I hope so,” Harlan said. “That is, strictly as his brother I hope so. As a human being still trying to exist in what was once a comfortable house, I might take another attitude. I live deep in the downtown district now, for my worst sins, and those long Broadwood cars screech every hour, night and day, on a curve not a hundred yards from my library.” He sighed. “But why should I waste my breath, still complaining? It all grows steadily worse and worse, year after year, and if one happens to like living in a city in his own native land, there’s nowhere to escape to. I suppose National Avenue—poor thing, look at the wreck of it!—I say I suppose it couldn’t have hoped to escape the fate of Fifth Avenue; for the same miserable ruction is going on all over the country. My illustrious brother and his kind have ruined everything that was peaceful and everything that was clean—they began by murdering the English language, and now they’ve murdered all whiteness. Beauty is dead.”
“Isn’t that only a question of your definition?” McMillan inquired.
“Why is it?”
“For one reason, because everything’s a question of definitions.”
“No, it isn’t,” Harlan returned somewhat brusquely; and Martha sat in silence, amused to perceive that her two callers had straightway resumed a tilting not infrequent when they met. A lady’s part was only to preside at the joust. “There’s only one definition of beauty,” Harlan added to his contradiction.
“What is it?”
“The one Athens believed in.”
“It won’t do for that brother of yours,” his antagonist returned. “The Greeks are dead, and you can’t tie Dan and his sort down to a dead definition. The growth isn’t beautiful to you, but it is to them, or else they wouldn’t make it. Of course you’re sure you’re right about your own definition, but they’re so busy making what they’re sure is beautiful they don’t even know that anybody disagrees with them. It won’t do you the slightest good to disagree with them, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve got everything in their hands,” George McMillan replied cheerfully;—“and they’re too busy to listen to anyone who isn’t making something besides criticisms.”
“And for that reason,” Harlan began, “all of us who care for what’s quiet and cool and charming in life are to hold our peace and let—”
He was interrupted, unable to make himself heard because of a shattering uproar that came from beyond the iron fence to the south. A long and narrow motor car, enamelled Chinese red, stood in the Oliphants’ driveway, and an undersized boy of sixteen had just run out of the house and jumped into the driver’s seat. Dusk had not fallen darkly; he saw the group upon the neighbouring veranda well enough, but either thought it too much effort to salute Martha and his uncles, or was preoccupied with the starting of his car;—he gave no sign of being aware of them. Evidently the unmuffled machine-gun firing of his exhaust was delightful to his young ears, for he increased its violence to the utmost, although the noise was unlawful, and continued it as he shot the car down the drive, out of the gates and down the street at a speed also unlawful.
“There, at least,” Harlan said, “is something of which criticism might possibly be listened to with good effect—even by my busy brother.”
But George laughed and shook his head. “No. That’s the very last thing he’d allow you to criticize. He’d only tell you that Henry is ‘the finest young man God ever made!’ In fact, that’s what he told me yesterday evening when I dined there; and I had more than a suspicion I’d caught a whiff of something suggesting a cocktail from our mutual nephew, as he came in for a hurried dinner between speedings. But that isn’t Dan’s fault.”
“Yes, it is,” Harlan said. “Giving a sixteen-year-old boy a car like that!”
“No, the fault is my sister’s. What’s a boy to do when his mother keeps him hanging around Paris so long in the autumn that it’s too late for him to make up his classwork, and he has only a tutor to cajole? I don’t blame Henry much. In fact, the older I grow the less I blame anything.”
“No?” Harlan said. “I’m afraid the world won’t get anywhere very fast unless there are some people to point out its mistakes.”
But the other bachelor jouster was not at all disconcerted by this reproof, nor by the tone of it, which was incautiously superior. “By George, Oliphant, I always have believed you were really a true Westerner under that surface of yours! The way you said ‘the world won’t get anywhere very fast’ was precisely in the right tone. You’re reverting to type, and if the reversion doesn’t stop I shan’t be surprised to hear of your breathing deep of the smoke and calling it ‘Prosperity’ with the best of them!”
Harlan was displeased. “I suppose the smoke comes under your definition of beauty, too, doesn’t it?”
“It isn’t my definition,” George explained. “I was groping for Dan’s. Yes, I think the smoke’s beautiful to him because he believes it means growth and power, and he thinks they’re beautiful.”
“I dare say. Would you consider it a rational view for any even half-educated man to hold—that soft-coal smoke is beautiful? Do you think so, Martha, when it makes pneumonia epidemic, ruins everything white that you have in your house and everything white that you wear? Do you?”
“It’s pretty trying,” she answered, as a conscientious housewife, but added hopefully: “We’ll get rid of it some day, though. So many people are complaining of it I’m sure they’ll do something about it before long.”
Harlan laughed dryly, for he had hoped she would say that. “I’ve been rereading John Evelyn’s diary,” he said. “Evelyn declared the London smoke was getting so dreadful that a stop would have to be put to it somehow. The king told him to devise a plan for getting rid of it, and Evelyn set about it quite hopefully. That was in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Evelyn is dead, but the smoke’s still there.”
“And yet,” George McMillan said coolly, “I’m told they’ve made quite a place of London, in spite of that!”
Martha laughed aloud, and Harlan was so unfortunate as to be annoyed. “It seems rather a childish argument in view of the fact that we sit here in the atmosphere of what might well be a freight yard,” he said; and, turning to Martha he spoke in a lowered voice, audible to his opponent, yet carrying the implication that McMillan was excluded from the conference. “My committee have at last got the symphony organization completed,” he said. “The orchestra knows it can depend on a reliable support now, and the first concert will be two weeks from tonight. I hope you won’t mind going with me.”
“No; I won’t mind,” she said, and hospitably explained to McMillan: “We’ve been trying for years to expand our week of the ‘April Festival’ into something more permanent. Mr. Oliphant has done most of the work, and it’s really a public service. It will be good news for your sister;—I understand she’s always felt we were a lost people, in music particularly.”
“We’ll have a start at any rate,” Harlan said, as he rose to go. “That is, if the smoke doesn’t throttle our singers. Venable is back from South America and there ought to be some interest to hear him.”
“Venable?” George repeated. “Did you say Venable?”
“Yes; the baritone. He’s still just in his prime; at least so his agent says. Have you ever heard him?”
“Long ago,” the other returned. “I—” He stopped abruptly.
“Did you know him?” Martha asked.
“No. That is, I had a short interview with him once, but—no, I shouldn’t say I know him.” He rose, in courtesy to the departing Harlan, and extended his hand. “You mustn’t wait behind the next corner and leap out on me with a bowie-knife, Oliphant,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be such a disagreeable arguer.”
“Not at all,” Harlan returned, somewhat coldly, though he added an effect of geniality to his departure by a murmur of laughter, and got away without any further emphasis upon his disappointment at finding his rival in possession. The latter gentleman, however, made little use of the field left open to him. Not long after Harlan had gone Martha noticed that her remaining guest seemed to be rather absentminded, and she rallied him upon it.
“I’m afraid you thrive upon conflict, Mr. McMillan.”
“Why?”
“Peace doesn’t seem to stimulate you—or else I don’t! You’ve hardly spoken since Mr. Oliphant left. I’m afraid you’re—”
“You’re afraid I’m what?” he said, as she paused; and although the dusk had fallen now, it was not too dark for her to see that his preoccupation was serious.
“Are you troubled about anything?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I thought you looked—”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s nothing. Perhaps I am a little bothered,” he admitted. “But it’s only about business.”
“Not about the Ornaby Four?” she said, surprised. “I thought it was established as a tremendous success.”
“Oh, it is,” he assured her promptly. “It is. It’s an extraordinary little car and nothing can stop it—except temporarily. It’s bound to climb over any little temporary difficulties. We may have made mistakes, but they won’t amount to anything in the long run.”
“You say you have made mistakes?”
“Not until this year, and even then nothing we can’t remedy. You see Dan’s a great fellow for believing in almost anything that’s new, and an inventor came along last summer with a new type of friction clutch; and we put it in our car. Then I’m afraid we built a fairly enormous number of Fours during the winter, but you see we were justified in that, because we knew there’d be a demand for them.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Oh, yes; there was. But—” he paused; then went on: “Well, the people haven’t seemed to like the new clutch, and that gives us rather a black eye for the time being. Of course we’re going to do our best to straighten things out; we’ll put our old clutch back on all the new cars, but—”
He paused uncomfortably again, and she inquired: “But won’t that make everything all right again?”
“Oh, yes—after a time. The trouble is, I’m afraid it’s stopped our sales rather flat—for the time being, that is. You see, there’s a lot of money we expected would be pouring in on us about now—and it doesn’t pour. I’m not really worried, but I’m a little afraid Dan might need it, because his inter-urban ventures appear to have been—well, rather hazardous. You told me once that his brother’s description of him was ‘dancing on the tightrope’ and in a way that’s not so far wrong. Of course he’ll pull through.” George suddenly struck the stone railing beside him a light blow with his open hand, and jumped up. “Good gracious! What am I doing but talking business to a lady on a spring evening? I knew I was in my dotage!” And he went to the steps.
“Wait,” Martha said hurriedly. “You don’t really think—”
“That Dan Oliphant’s affairs are in any real danger? No; of course not;—I don’t know what made me run on like that. Men go through these little disturbances every day; it’s a part of the game they play, and they don’t think anything about it. You can be sure he isn’t worrying. Did you ever know him to let such things stop him? He’s been through a thousand of ’em and walked over ’em. He’s absolutely all right.”
“You’re sure?” she said, as he went down the steps.
“He’s absolutely all right, and I’d take my oath to it,” George said; but he added: “That is, he is if the banks don’t call him.”
“If the banks don’t what?”
He laughed reassuringly. “If the banks don’t do something they have no reason to do and certainly won’t do. Good night. I’m going to stop in next door and see my sister a little while before she goes to bed.”
His figure grew dimmer as he went toward the gate, and Martha, staring after him, began to be haunted by that mysterious phrase of his, “if the banks don’t call him.”