lansing threw the end of strefford's expensive cigar into thelake, and bent over his wife. poor child! she had fallenasleep .... he leaned back and stared up again at thesilver-flooded sky. how queer--how inexpressibly queer--it wasto think that that light was shed by his honey-moon! a yearago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an adventure, hewould have replied by asking to be locked up at the firstsymptoms ....
there was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was amad one. it was all very well for susy to remind him twentytimes a day that they had pulled it off--and so why should heworry? even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and ofhis own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear theexamination of sober thought. and as he sat there in the summermoonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to recapitulatethe successive steps that had landed them on streffy'slake-front.
on lansing's side, no doubt, it dated back to his leavingharvard with the large resolve not to miss anything. therestood the evergreen tree of life, the four rivers flowing fromits foot; and on every one of the four currents he meant tolaunch his little skiff. on two of them he had not gone veryfar, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the fourthhad carried him to the very heart of wonder. it was the streamof his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest inevery form of beauty and strangeness and folly. on this stream,sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, hisinsignificance and his independence, he had made some notablevoyages .... and so, when susy branch, whom he had sought outthrough a new york season as the prettiest and most amusing girlin sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation ofher modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard ofgood faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on onemore cruise into the unknown.
it was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one briefvisit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and nottried to see her again. even if her straightforwardness had notroused his emulation, his understanding of her difficultieswould have moved his pity. he knew on how frail a thread thepopularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl likesusy was the sport of other people's moods and whims. it was apart of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they likedthey so often had to do what they disliked. but the keeping ofhis promise was a greater bore than he had expected. susybranch had become a delightful habit in a life where most of thefixed things were dull, and her disappearance had made itsuddenly clear to him that his resources were growing more andmore limited. much that had once amused him hugely now amusedhim less, or not at all: a good part of his world of wonder hadshrunk to a village peep-show. and the things which had kepttheir stimulating power--distant journeys, the enjoyment of art,the contact with new scenes and strange societies--were becomingless and less attainable. lansing had never had more than apittance; he had spent rather too much of it in his first plungeinto life, and the best he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugalholidays. he knew that he was more intelligent than theaverage, but he had long since concluded that his talents werenot marketable. of the thin volume of sonnets which a friendlypublisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had beensold; and though his essay on "chinese influences in greek art"had created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversialcorrespondence and dinner invitations rather than in moresubstantial benefits. there seemed, in short, no prospect ofhis ever earning money, and his restricted future made himattach an increasing value to the kind of friendship that susybranch had given him. apart from the pleasure of looking at herand listening to her--of enjoying in her what others lessdiscriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense,between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocioustolerance and irony. they had both, in early youth, taken themeasure of the world they happened to live in: they knew justwhat it was worth to them and for what reasons, and thecommunity of these reasons lent to their intimacy its lastexquisite touch. and now, because of some jealous whim of adissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no moreto blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners bygood manners, he was to be deprived of the one completecompanionship he had ever known ....
his thoughts travelled on. he recalled the long dull spring innew york after his break with susy, the weary grind on his lastarticles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and leastboring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luckof going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a sundaywith the poor nat fulmers, in the wilds of new hampshire, and offinding susy there--susy, whom he had never even suspected ofknowing anybody in the fulmers' set!
she had behaved perfectly--and so had he--but they wereobviously much too glad to see each other. and then it wasunsettling to be with her in such a house as the fulmers', awayfrom the large setting of luxury they were both used to, in thecramped cottage where their host had his studio in the verandah,their hostess practiced her violin in the dining-room, and fiveubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew trumpets andput tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was twohours late-and proportionately bad--because the italian cookwas posing for fulmer.
lansing's first thought had been that meeting susy in suchcircumstances would be the quickest way to cure them both oftheir regrets. the case of the fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young people who lost their heads;poor nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had gone to seed soterribly-and grace, at twenty-nine, would never again beanything but the woman of whom people say, "i can remember herwhen she was lovely."but the devil of it was that nat had never been such goodcompany, or grace so free from care and so full of music; andthat, in spite of their disorder and dishevelment, and the badfood and general crazy discomfort, there was more amusement tobe got out of their society than out of the most opulentlystaged house-party through which susy and lansing had everyawned their way.
it was almost a relief to tile young man when, on the secondafternoon, miss branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: "ireally can't stand the combination of grace's violin and littlenat's motor-horn any longer. do let us slip out till the duetis over.""how do they stand it, i wonder?" he basely echoed, as hefollowed her up the wooded path behind the house.
"it might be worth finding out," she rejoined with a musingsmile.
but he remained resolutely skeptical. "oh, give them a year ortwo more and they'll collapse--! his pictures will never sell,you know. he'll never even get them into a show.""i suppose not. and she'll never have time to do anything worthwhile with her music."they had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which thehouse was perched. all about them stretched an empty landscapeof endless featureless wooded hills. "think of sticking hereall the year round!" lansing groaned.
"i know. but then think of wandering over the world with somepeople!""oh, lord, yes. for instance, my trip to india with themortimer hickses. but it was my only chance and what the deuceis one to do?""i wish i knew!" she sighed, thinking of the bockheimers; andhe turned and looked at her.
"knew what?""the answer to your question. what is one to do--when one seesboth sides of the problem? or every possible side of it,indeed?"they had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines,but lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir ofthe brown lashes on her cheek.
"you mean: nat and grace may after all be having the best ofit?""how can i say, when i've told you i see all the sides? ofcourse," susy added hastily, " i couldn't live as they do for aweek. but it's wonderful how little it's dimmed them.""certainly nat was never more coruscating. and she keeps it upeven better." he reflected. "we do them good, i daresay.""yes--or they us. i wonder which?"after that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long timesilent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburstagainst the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptlyfollowed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn'talter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at factsas they were, they wouldn't be utter fools not to take theirchance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, tothis challenge he did not recall susy's making any definiteanswer; but after another interval, in which all the worldseemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herselfin a brooding tone: "i don't suppose it's ever been triedbefore; but we might--." and then and there she had laid beforehim the very experiment they had since hazarded.
she would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began bydeclaring; and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucidimpartiality. in the first place, she should have to marry someday, and when she made the bargain she meant it to be an honestone; and secondly, in the matter of love, she would never giveherself to anyone she did not really care for, and if suchhappiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of half itsbrightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.
"i've seen too much of that kind of thing. half the women iknow who've had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking andlying about it; but the other half have been miserable. and ishould be miserable."it was at this point that she unfolded her plan. why shouldn'tthey marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if forever so short a time, and with the definite understanding thatwhenever either of them got the chance to do better he or sheshould be immediately released? the law of their countryfacilitated such exchanges, and society was beginning to viewthem as indulgently as the law. as susy talked, she warmed toher theme and began to develop its endless possibilities.
"we should really, in a way, help more than we should hampereach other," she ardently explained. "we both know the ropes sowell; what one of us didn't see the other might--in the way ofopportunities, i mean. and then we should be a novelty asmarried people. we're both rather unusually popular--why not befrank!--and it's such a blessing for dinner-givers to be able tocount on a couple of whom neither one is a blank. yes, i reallybelieve we should be more than twice the success we are now; atleast," she added with a smile, "if there's that amount of roomfor improvement. i don't know how you feel; a man's popularityis so much less precarious than a girl's--but i know it wouldfurbish me up tremendously to reappear as a married woman." sheglanced away from him down the long valley at their feet, andadded in a lower tone: "and i should like, just for a littlewhile, to feel i had something in life of my very own--somethingthat nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or a motor or anopera cloak."the suggestion, at first, had seemed to lansing as mad as it wasenchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. but susy'sarguments were irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. hadhe ever thought it all out? she asked. no. well, she had; andwould he kindly not interrupt? in the first place, there wouldbe all the wedding-presents. jewels, and a motor, and a silverdinner service, did she mean? not a bit of it! she could seehe'd never given the question proper thought. cheques, my dear,nothing but cheques--she undertook to manage that on her side:
she really thought she could count on about fifty, and shesupposed he could rake up a few more? well, all that wouldsimply represent pocket-money! for they would have plenty ofhouses to live in: he'd see. people were always glad to lendtheir house to a newly-married couple. it was such fun to popdown and see them: it made one feel romantic and jolly. allthey need do was to accept the houses in turn: go on honey-mooning for a year! what was he afraid of? didn't he thinkthey'd be happy enough to want to keep it up? and why not atleast try--get engaged, and then see what would happen? even ifshe was all wrong, and her plan failed, wouldn't it have beenrather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy they were goingto be happy? "i've often fancied it all by myself," sheconcluded; "but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfullydifferent ...."that was how it began: and this lakeside dream was what it hadled up to. fantastically improbable as they had seemed, all herprevisions had come true. if there were certain links in thechain that lansing had never been able to put his hand on,certain arrangements and contrivances that still needed furtherelucidation, why, he was lazily resolved to clear them up withher some day; and meanwhile it was worth all the past might havecost, and every penalty the future might exact of him, just tobe sitting here in the silence and sweetness, her sleeping headon his knee, clasped in his joy as the hushed world was claspedin moonlight.
he stooped down and kissed her. "wake up," he whispered, "it'sbed-time."
