The Cinder Buggy (13 page)

John’s advent on this iron grey scene produced a magical change. He was rightful heir to all the social tradition there was in New Damascus. This would have meant nothing in itself. But he liked it. He was not then nor did he ever become the kind of man who must renounce life to reach success. That is a matter partly of temperament and partly of capacity. Knowledge necessary to his ends he acquired easily, seemingly without effort, even technical knowledge. His imagination worked with the ease of fancy and knew no fatigue. Business was a game at which he played. Therefore it could not devour him. Without a moment’s notice he could turn from one kind of play to another and back again. He would dance all night and come with a crystal mind to the day’s work. Frivolity seemed to stimulate or recharge his mind.

The youth of New Damascus adored him. A group spontaneously formed around him. He kept large rooms at the inn, where he entertained. More than half his time was spent away from New Damascus, but the new social order adjusted itself to his movements. When he was at home there were parties, dances, suppers, excursions, flirtings and episodes. All this took place on the plane of Quality Street. But his liking for people neither began nor ended there. It knew no petty distinctions. There were two kinds of people in the world,—his kind and others. And his kind were all the same to him no matter where he found them. He had friends among the mill workers—big, roystering fellows with whom he often went revelling to fill out a night. One of these was Alexander Thane, the splendid puddler who had spoken to him that first night in the mill. They became fast friends.

He scandalized people without offending them. Whatever he did, that was John. He did anything he liked and it was forgiven beforehand. His errancies were extravagant and alarming, such as had been almost certain to involve a superficial nature in disaster. They were never wicked or immoral, never hurtful to others and seemed but to innocently enhance the romantic aspect of his personality. This may be true only of one whose character is superior to his follies. As his character came more and more to be realized people began to say, “Well, that’s one young man Enoch Gib won’t break.”

Enoch regarded him with wonder and misgiving. John’s impact on the business had been phenomenal.

Perhaps no one else could have done it; certainly no one else wasting so much of himself in ways for which Gib felt the utmost contempt could at the same time have attended to business at all. Yet his way with it grew steadily stronger and more remarkable, no matter what else he did.

Gradually there grew up in Gib a vague baffled sense of recurrence. As New Damascus had idolized Aaron in the old time so now it idolized John. Was that because he was Aaron’s son? For a while it had that aspect. Then it could no longer be so explained. Something that had been was taking place again. What was it? The old man came to this question again and again. It tormented him for a year of nights. Then suddenly he had the answer.

New Damascus idolized this person not because he was Aaron’s son but
because he was Aaron!

Once this wild thought had occurred to Enoch it expanded rapidly, filling his whole mind, and became an obsession. Aaron lived again! He had returned with youth and strength restored.

The physical resemblance was in fact very striking. Enoch began to study it surreptitiously. The sight tortured and fascinated him. He could not let it alone. He decided he had been mistaken about that look of Esther which at first he had seemed to see in the young man’s eyes. It was not there. Thank God for that. This youth was Aaron himself.

From the moment of perceiving this thing with hallucinated clarity Enoch hated John and arranged his thoughts to dwell against him dangerously. How should he deal with the situation? It had no tangibility. If he spoke of it people would think he was crazy. Yet there was the fact. Aaron by foul strategy had entered the business again. The circumstances of his entering it in the guise of a son were extraordinary. As the old man reviewed the incident it assumed a flagrant, preposterous aspect. Aaron had outwitted him.

Yes. Aaron had always been able to do that. But this was an outrageous act! Nothing like it had ever happened before in the world. And now it behooved him to act cautiously, think cunningly, and above all to conceal the fact that he knew. Merely again to put Aaron out of the business, as he could easily do, would be neither quittance nor justice.

T
HERE was much curiosity about Enoch’s invisible daughter. Was she really imprisoned in that gloomy mansion on the west hill? Or was she. queer, like her mother? How did she live? What was she like? The mill workers, passing the house at all hours, were said to have seen her walking in the landscape at twilight. There was also a legend that she was beautiful.

The young Quality Street set with whom John played and danced talked itself into a state of romantic feeling about her. There was competition in fanciful suggestions. One was that twenty of them should become a committee and move in a body on the mansion. What could the ogre do then? Only of course nothing so overt could really be done. Besides, that would be too serious, not mad enough, and the prisoner might turn out badly. Nobody knew what kind of person she was. Whatever they did should be something to which she assented beforehand.

The suggestion that did at length unite all silly young heads was this. They would give her a party. That was a natural thing to do. She was a New Damascus girl, wasn’t she? There was no reason in the world why they shouldn’t give her a party. It was perfectly feasible in social principle. The difficulties, as an engineer would say, were merely technical. They were awkward nevertheless. How should they ask her? And if she were unable to bring herself, as would certainly be the case, how should they get her? They appealed to John. He was responsive. It appealed to his spirit of reckless frivolity. He undertook offhand to bring Agnes Gib to a party. It might take some time. He would tell them when and where.

First he made a reconnaissance of the enemy’s position. It had its vulnerable points, one of which was an Irish gardener with a grouch on the place. Beginning with him and working in, John proceeded to corrupt the Gib menage. He learned that Agnes was confined to that part of the mansion in which her mother had been immured. She was not permitted to go out, except to walk in the grounds with a woman who was Gib’s servant, not hers, and performed the office of a gaoler.

In time he succeeded in getting a note to the prisoner. In it he said simply that she was desired to come to a party. There was no answer.

He sent a second note. The party he had mentioned before was one proposed to be held in her honor. There would be introductions, then supper and dancing, informal but all very correct and duly chaperoned. Still no answer.

He sent a third note in which for the first time he recognized deterrent circumstances. However, all difficulties should be overcome. She had only to consent.

Then a way would be found. The young set of New Damascus was very anxious to get acquainted with her, hence this friendly gesture. To this was returned a note, unsigned, as follows:

“Miss Gib thanks Mrs. Breakspeare and his friends and regrets to say she cannot come.”

That was more or less what John by this time was expecting. He was not discouraged, but he needed light on the young person’s character and it occurred to him in this need to explore Gearhard the blacksmith, her grandfather. He melted the hoary smith’s ferocity of manner, which was but a rickety defence of the heart, by taking him headlong into the plot with an air of unlimited confidence. Gearhard at first worked his bellows furiously and stirred the fire in his forge, pretending to be angrily absent. But the strokes of the sweep-pole gradually diminished, the fire fell, the bellows collapsed with a rheumatic commotion, and he stood in his characteristic attitude of contemplation, listening. When he spoke his voice was remote and gentle.

“She won’t,” he said. “That’s all there’s into it. She’s as proud as that bar of steel.”

Youth understands its own. It knows the chemistries of impulse and how to challenge them. Curiosity overcomes pride, shyness and fear; and if it be touched through the arc of vanity all else is forgiven, for the desire of youth to be liked for itself alone, in the sign of its personableness, is a glowing passion.

What followed was absurd. Youth delights in high absurdities. It has a way with them that wisdom pretends to have forgotten. Away wisdom! You spoil the cosmic sorceries.

John sent another note.

It was to this effect. At the south boundary where the boxwood grew he would be waiting Thursday evening. She would have only to come straight on fifty paces more instead of turning in her walk at that point as her habit was, and the frolic would begin.

There was no answer. He expected none. But on Thursday evening he was there. From where he stood behind the boxwood he could see all that part of the grounds in which she walked. She appeared at the usual time, attended by a powerful looking woman who disliked exercise and made heavy work of it. Their relations were apparently hostile. They never spoke. The girl was supercilious; the woman grim. After a while the woman sat on an iron bench. The girl walked to and fro. Twice she came within a stone’s throw of the boxwood and turned back. Once she stood for several minutes, looking slowly up and down the boundary line of hedge and stone, and at the sky, and all around, with a wilful blind spot in her eye. She did not for an instant look seeingly at the spot her mind was focussed on. Yet John, who watched her, knew she sensed his presence there. That was all that happened. She presently went in without notice to the woman, who saw her going toward the house and followed.

John sent another note. A second time he waited. This time she changed her walk in oblique relation to the boxwood and finished it without the slightest glance or impulse in that direction.

There was a third time. And that was different. On the first turn she came closer to the boxwood than ever before, closer still on the second turn, and then, when the gaoler woman had become inert on the bench, she came within speaking distance and sat on the grass.

“We are here,” said John.

“Who are we?” she asked.

This was parley.

“I am their deputy,” he said. “Constructively they are here. Naturally, all of us couldn’t come at one time and—” He stopped. She wasn’t the kind of girl he was expecting. She embarrassed his style.

“And hide in the hedge,” she said, finishing his sentence. “Why not? It wouldn’t be any less rude if twenty did it.”

“That isn’t fair,” he said. “We don’t mean to be rude. We only want to get you out.”

“You think I couldn’t get out by myself if I wanted to?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we thought. It’s so, isn’t it?”

She framed a reply, but withheld it, or, rather, she bit it in two and threw it away, symbolically. It was a clover stem. She sat on her feet, bent over, plucking at the grass, with an occasional glance at the woman on the bench.

“Do you think it’s nice to spy on a girl as you have been doing?” she asked.

“Very nice,” he said, to tease her.

“And is this the way you get girls for your parties?”

“May we drive up to your door and ask for you there?”

“You may.”

“Then will you come?”

“No, I won’t be home.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t. That’s why not.”

“Do you dislike parties?”

“Yes.”

“Do you hate people?”

“I hate people who feel sorry for me.”

“Do you wish me to go away?”

“Not if you like what you are doing.”

“I’m not doing this because I like doing it,” he answered. “I’m doing it because I was asked.”

“Oh,” she said.

“They felt—I mean, they had this friendly impulse to give you a party. They didn’t know how to get you and asked me to manage it. Now what shall I say to them? Shall I say you hate parties and wish them to mind their own business?”

“Tell them what you like,” she said. “I can’t talk to you any longer,” she added. “It will be noticed.”

“I won’t tell them anything,” he said. “But I’ll be here a week from tonight at this time if it doesn’t rain, and the week after that if it does, and every week for the rest of the summer until you say positively you will not come.”

“Haven’t I said that?” she asked.

“No.”

She got up, shrugged her shoulders and walked away.

Silly!... Silly!... Silly!...

That was what John kept saying to himself without subject or predicate. It was the way he felt. The situation was absurd. His part in it was ludicrous. They were all a lot of sillies,—save one. What he really minded was the sense of having come off badly with her. She was not the wistful, longing prisoner people imagined her to be. He could not make out precisely what she was. She was under restraint. Not only had she not denied this; she had treated it as a fact. But her attitude seemed to be simply that it was nobody’s business. Meddling was unwelcome. And such puerile interference as he represented had been treated as it deserved, with high disdain. Never had he met a girl with so much bite and tang. Well, however, it was not all to the bad. She might have cut him away clean. Instead, she had left it as it was.

“I think she will come,” he said to his friends.

“Have you seen her?” they asked.

“Yes. I’ve talked to her.”

“Oh, what is she like?”

“Like a grain of salt,” he said, rather absently.

At this several girls looked at him anxiously, and although they pretended to be as keen as ever for the party, even more than before, still, misgivings assailed them and secretly their enthusiasm fell. John was an unenclosed infatuation on which everyone had rights of commonage. Numbers preserved him. And here he was keeping tryst with a girl they knew nothing about. It was not his fault. But it was too romantic.

Another thing youth knows is that there are sudden, leaping, dare-me-not moments, wild moments of yes, in which the most improbable events come naturally to pass. It did not rain Thursday. John waited in the boxwood. She came slowly, in the magnetized direction, went back, returned, loitered about for some time, then sat on the grass again.