Читать книгу The Precipice - Elia Wilkinson Peattie - Страница 6

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Honora Fulham, sitting in her upper room and jealously guarding the slumbers of Patience and Patricia, her tiny but already remarkable twin daughters, heard a familiar voice in the lower hallway. She dropped her book, "The Psychological Significance of the Family Group," and ran to the chamber door. A second later she was hanging over the banisters.

"Kate!" she called with a penetrating whisper. "You!"

"Yes, Honora, it's bad Kate. She's come to you--a penny nobody else wanted."

Honora Fulham sailed down the stairs with the generous bearing of a ship answering a signal of distress. The women fell into each other's arms, and in that moment of communion dismissed all those little alien half-feelings which grow up between friends when their enlarging experience has driven them along different roads. Honora led the way to her austere drawing-room, from which, with a rigorous desire to economize labor, she had excluded all that was superfluous, and there, in the bare, orderly room, the two women--their girlhood definitely behind them--faced each other. Kate noted a curious retraction in Honora, an indescribable retrenchment of her old-time self, as if her florescence had been clipped by trained hands, so that the bloom should not be too exuberant; and Honora swiftly appraised Kate's suggestion of freedom and force.

"Kate," she announced, "you look like a kind eagle."

"A wounded one, then, Honora."

"You've a story for me, I see. Sit down and tell it."

So Kate told it, compelling the history of her humiliating failure to stand out before the calm, adjudging mind of her friend.

"But oughtn't we to forgive everything to the old?" cried Honora at the conclusion of the recital.

"Oh, is father old?" responded Kate in anguish. "He doesn't seem old--only formidable. If I'd thought I'd been wrong I never would have come up here to ask you to sustain me in my obstinacy. Truly, Honora, it isn't a question of age. He's hardly beyond his prime, and he has been using all of his will, which has grown strong with having his own way, to break me down the way most of the men in Silvertree have broken their women down. I was getting to be just like the others, and to start when I heard him coming in at the door, and to hide things from him so that he wouldn't rage. I'd have been lying next."

"Kate!"

"Oh, you think it isn't decent for me to speak that way of my father! You can't think how it seems to me--how--how irreligious! But let me save my soul, Honora! Let me do that!"

The girl's pallid face, sharpened and intensified, bore the imprint of genuine misery. Honora Fulham, strong of nerve and quick of understanding, embraced her with a full sisterly glance.

"I always liked and trusted you, Kate," she said. "I was sorry when our ways parted, and I'd be happy to have them joined again. I see it's to be a hazard of new fortune for you, and David and I will stand by. I don't know, of course, precisely what that may mean, but we're yours to command."

A key turned in the front door.

"There's David now," said his wife, her voice vibrating, and she summoned him.

David Fulham entered with something almost like violence, although the violence did not lie in his gestures. It was rather in the manner in which his personality assailed those within the room. Dark, with an attractive ugliness, arrogant, with restive and fathomless eyes, he seemed to unite the East and the West in his being. Had his mother been a Jewess of pride and intellect, and his father an adventurous American of the superman type? Kate, looking at him with fresh interest, found her thoughts leaping to the surmise. She knew that he was, in a way, a great man--a man with a growing greatness. He had promulgated ideas so daring that his brother scientists were embarrassed to know where to place him. There were those who thought of him as a brilliant charlatan; but the convincing intelligence and self-control of his glance repudiated that idea. The Faust-like aspect of the man might lay him open to the suspicion of having too experimental and inquisitive a mind. But he had, it would seem, no need for charlatanism.

He came forward swiftly and grasped Kate's hand.

"I remember you quite well," he said in his deep, vibratory tones. "Are you here for graduate work?"

"No," said Kate; "I'm not so humble."

"Not so humble?" He showed his magnificent teeth in a flashing but somewhat satiric smile.

"I'm here for Life--not for study."

"Not 'in for life,' but 'out' for it," he supplemented. "That's interesting. What is Honora suggesting to you? She's sure to have a theory of what will be best. Honora knows what will be best for almost everybody, but she sometimes has trouble in making others see it the same way."

Honora seemed not to mind his chaffing.

"Yes," she agreed, "I've already thought, but I haven't had time to tell Kate. Do you remember that Mrs. Goodrich said last night at dinner that her friend Miss Addams was looking about for some one to take the place of a young woman who was married the other day? She was an officer of the Children's Protective League, you remember."

"Oh, that--" broke in Fulham. He turned toward Kate and looked her over from head to foot, till the girl felt a hot wave of indignation sweep over her. But his glance was impersonal, apparently. He paid no attention to her embarrassment. He seemed merely to be getting at her qualities by the swiftest method. "Well," he said finally, "I dare say you're right. But--" he hesitated.

"Well?" prompted his wife.

"But won't it be rather a--a waste?" he asked. And again he smiled, this time with some hidden meaning.

"Of course it won't be a waste," declared Honora. "Aren't women to serve their city as well as men? It's a practical form of patriotism, according to my mind."

Kate broke into a nervous laugh.

"I hope I'm to be of some use," she said. "Work can't come a moment too soon for me. I was beginning to think--"

She paused.

"Well?" supplied Fulham, still with that watchful regard of her.

"Oh, that I had made a mistake about myself--that I wasn't going to be anything in particular, after all."

They were interrupted. A man sprang up the outside steps and rang the doorbell imperatively.

"It's Karl Wander," announced Fulham, who had glanced through the window. "It's your cousin, Honora."

He went to the door, and Kate heard an emphatic and hearty voice making hurried greetings.

"Stopped between trains," it was saying. "Can stay ten minutes precisely--not a second longer. Came to see the babies."

Honora had arisen with a little cry and gone to the door. Now she returned, hanging on to the arm of a weather-tanned man.

"Miss Barrington," she said, "my cousin, Mr. Wander. Oh, Karl, you're not serious? You don't really mean that you can't stay--not even over night?"

The man turned his warm brown eyes on Kate and she looked at him expectantly, because he was Honora's cousin. For the time it takes to draw a breath, they gazed at each other. Oddly enough, Kate thought of Ray McCrea, who was across the water, and whose absence she had not regretted. She could not tell why her thoughts turned to him. This man was totally unlike Ray. He was, indeed, unlike any one she ever had known. There was that about him which held her. It was not quite assertion; perhaps it was competence. But it was competence that seemed to go without tyranny, and that was something new in her experience of men. He looked at her on a level, spiritually, querying as to who she might be.

The magical moment passed. Honora and David were talking. They ran away up the stairs with their guest, inviting Kate to follow.

"I'll only be in the way now," she called. "By and by I'll have the babies all to myself."

Yet after she had said this, she followed, and looked into the nursery, which was at the rear of the house. Honora had thrust the two children into her cousin's big arms and she and David stood laughing at him. Another man might have appeared ridiculous in this position; but it did not, apparently, occur to Karl Wander to be self-conscious. He was wrapped in contemplation of the babies, and when he peered over their heads at Kate, he was quite grave and at ease.

Then, before it could be realized, he was off again. He had kissed Honora and congratulated her, and he and Kate had again clasped hands.

"Sorry," he said, in his explosive way, "that we part so soon." He held her hand a second longer, gave it a sudden pressure, and was gone.

Honora shut the door behind him reluctantly.

"So like Karl!" she laughed. "It's the second time he's been in my house since I was married."

"You'd think we had the plague, the way he runs from us," said David.

"Oh," responded Honora, not at all disturbed, "Karl is forever on important business. He's probably been to New York to some directors' meeting. Now he's on his way to Denver, he says--'men waiting.' That's Karl's way. To think of his dashing up here between trains to see my babies!" The tears came to her eyes. "Don't you think he's fine, Kate?"

The truth was, there seemed to be a sort of vacuum in the air since he had left--as if he had taken the vitality of it with him.

"But where does he live?" she asked Honora.

"Address him beyond the Second Divide, and he'll be reached. Everybody knows him there. His post-office bears his own name--Wander."

"He's a miner?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh, by process of elimination. What else could he be?"

"Nothing else in all the world," agreed David Fulham. "I tell Honora he's a bit mad."

"No, no," Honora laughed; "he's not mad; he's merely Western. How startled you look, Kate--as if you had seen an apparition."

It was decided that Kate was to stay there at the Fulhams', and to use one of their several unoccupied rooms. Kate chose one that looked over the Midway, and her young strength made nothing of the two flights of stairs which she had to climb to get to it. At first the severity of the apartment repelled her, but she had no money with which to make it more to her taste, and after a few hours its very barrenness made an appeal to her. It seemed to be like her own life, in need of decoration, and she was content to let things take their course. It seemed probable that roses would bloom in their time.

No one, it transpired, ate in the house.

"I found out," explained Honora, "that I couldn't be elaborately domestic and have a career, too, so I went, with some others of similar convictions and circumstances, into a coöperative dining-room scheme."

Kate gave an involuntary shrug of her shoulders.

"You think that sounds desolate? Wait till you see us all together. This talk about 'home' is all very well, but I happen to know--and I fancy you do, too--that home can be a particularly stultifying place. When people work as hard as we do, a little contact with outsiders is stimulating. But you'll see for yourself. Mrs. Dennison, a very fine woman, a widow, looks after things for us. Dr. von Shierbrand, one of our number, got to calling the place 'The Caravansary,' and now we've all fallen into the way of it."

The Caravansary was but a few doors from the Fulhams'; an old-fashioned, hospitable affair, with high ceilings, white marble mantels, and narrow windows. Mrs. Dennison, the house-mother, suited the place well. Her widow's cap and bands seemed to go with the grave pretentiousness of the rooms, to which she had succeeded in giving almost a personal atmosphere. There was room for her goldfish and her half-dozen canary cages as well as for her "coöperators"--no one there would permit himself to be called a boarder.