CHAPTER XXI
For Boone the approaching summer was no longer a period of zestful anticipation. During that whole term he had looked eagerly ahead to those coming months back in the hills, when with the guidance of his wise friend he should plunge into the wholesome excitement of canvassing his district.
Now McCalloway was gone. And just before commencement a letter from Anne brought news that made his heart sink.
"Father is going home to England for the summer," she said, "and that means that I won't get to the hills. I'm heartbroken over it, and it isn't just that 'I always miss the hills,' either. I do miss them. Every dogwood that I see blooming alone in somebody's front yard, every violet in the grass, makes me homesick for the places where beauty isn't only sampled but runs riot – but there's a more personal note than that."
"You must climb old Slag-face for me, Boone, and write me all about it. If a single tree has blown down, don't fail to tell me, dear."
There was also another thing which would cloud his return to Marlin County. He could, in decency, no longer defer a painful confession to Happy. So far, chance had fended it off, but now she was back from the settlement school for good, and he was through college. In justice to her further silence could not be maintained.
Then May brought the Battle of the Yalu.
First there were only meagre newspaper reports – all that Boone saw before commencement – and later when the filtration of time brought the fuller discussions in the magazines, and the world had discovered General Kuroki, he was in the hills where magazines rarely came.
Upon the wall of General Prince's law office hung a map of the Manchurian terrain, and each day that devotee of military affairs took it down, and, with black ink and red ink, marked and remarked its surface.
On one occasion, when Colonel Wallifarro found him so employed, the two leaned over, with their heads close, in study of the situation.
"This Kuroki seems to be a man of mystery, General," began Wallifarro. "And it has set me to speculating. The correspondents hint that he's not a native Japanese. They tell us that he towers in physical as well as mental stature above his colleagues."
"I can guess your thought, Tom," smiled General Prince. "And the same idea occurred to me. You are thinking of the two Japanese agents who came to the hills – and of McCalloway's sudden departure on a secret journey. But it's only a romantic assumption. I followed the Chinese-Japanese War with a close fidelity of detail – and Kuroki, though less conspicuous than nowadays, was even then prominent."
Tom Wallifarro bit the end from a cigar and lighted it.
"It is none the less to be assumed that McCalloway is over there," he observed. "Emperors don't send personal messengers half way round the world to call unimportant men to the colours."
"My own guess is this, Tom," admitted the cavalryman. "McCalloway is on Kuroki's staff. Presumably he learned all he knew under Dinwiddie – and this campaign shows the earmarks of a similar scheme of generalship. Kuropatkin sought to delay the issue of combat, until over the restricted artery of the Siberian Railway he could augment his numbers and assume the offensive with a superior force."
"And at the Yalu, Kuroki struck and forced the fight."
"Precisely. He had three divisions lying about Wiju. It was necessary to cross the Yalu under the guns of Makau, and there we see the first manifestation of such an audacious stroke as Dinwiddie himself might have attempted."
Prince was pacing the floor now, talking rapidly, as he had done that night when, with McCalloway, he discussed Dinwiddie, his military idol.
"Kuroki – I say Kuroki, whether he was the actual impulse or the figurehead using the genius of a subordinate – threw the Twelfth Division forward a day in advance of his full force. The feint of a mock attack was aimed at Antung – and the enemy rose to the bait. One week in advance the command was given that at daybreak on the first of May the attack should develop. At many points, shifting currents had altered the channel and wiped out former possible fords. Pontoons and bridges had to be built on the spot – anchors even must be forged from scrap-iron – yet at the precise moment designated in the orders, the Mikado's forces struck their blow. But wait just a moment, Tom."
General Prince opened a drawer and took out a magazine.
"Let me read you what one correspondent writes: 'At ten-thirty on the morning of April thirtieth, the duel of the opposing heights began, with roaring skies and smoking hills. The slopes north of Chinlien-Cheng were generously timbered that morning. Night found them shrapnel-torn and naked of verdure.
"'To visualize the field, one must picture a tawny river, island-dotted and sweeping through a broken country which lifts gradually to the Manchurian ridges. Behind Tiger Hill and Conical Hill, quiet and chill in the morning mists, lay the Czar's Third Army.
"'Then were the judgments loosened.' The attack is on now, and the thin brown lines are moving forward – slowly at first, as they approach the shallows of the river beyond the bridges and the islands. Those wreaths of smoke are Zassolich's welcome – from studiously emplaced pieces raking the challengers – but the challengers are closing their gaps and gaining momentum – carrying their wounded with them, as they wade forward. There are those, of course, whom it is impossible to assist – those who stumble in the shallow water to be snuffed out, candle-fashion.'"
The General paused to readjust his glasses, and Colonel Wallifarro mused with eyes fixed on the violet spirals of smoke twisting up from his cigar end. "Our friend would seem to be playing a man's game, after his long hermitage."
Prince took up the magazine again.
"'The farther shore is reached under a withering fire. Annihilation threatens the yellow men – they waver – then comes the order to charge. For an instant the brown lines shiver and hang hesitant under the sting of the death-hail – but after that moment they leap forward and sweep upward. Their momentum gathers to an irresistible onrush, and under it the defence breaks down. The noises that have raved from earth to heaven, from horizon to horizon, are dropping from crescendo to diminuendo. The field pieces of the Czar are being choked into the muffled growl of despair. Doggedly the Russian is giving back.'"
"Do you suppose, General," inquired Colonel Wallifarro suddenly, "that McCalloway confided the purpose of his journey to the boy?"
Prince shook his head positively. "I am quite sure that he has confided it to no one – but I am equally sure that Boone has guessed it by now."
"In that event I think it would tremendously interest him to read that article."
In the log house, where he had now no companionship, Boone received the narrative.
The place was very empty. Twilight had come on with its dispiriting shadows, and Boone lighted a lamp, and since the night was cool he had also kindled a few logs on the hearth.
For a long while he sat there after reading and rereading the description of the fight along the Manchurian River. His hands rested on his knees, and his fingers held the clipping.
On the table a forgotten law book lay open at a chapter on torts, but the young man's eyes were fixed on the blaze, in whose fitful leapings he was picturing, "the thunders through the foothills; tufts of fleecy shrapnel spread along the empty plain" – and in the picture he always saw one face, dominated by a pair of eyes that could be granite-stern or soft as mossy waters.
Finally he rose and unlocked a closet from which he reverently took out a scabbarded sword. Dinwiddie had entrusted that blade to McCalloway, and McCalloway had in turn entrusted it to him. Out there he was using a less ornate sabre!
The young mountaineer slipped the blade out of the sheath and once more read the engraved inscription.
Something rose in his throat, and he gulped it down. He spoke aloud, and his words sounded unnatural in the empty room.
"The Emperor of China sent for him – and he wouldn't go," said the boy. "The Emperor of Japan sent for him – and he couldn't refuse. That's the character of gentleman that's spent years trying to make a man of me."
Suddenly Boone laid the sword on the table and dropped on his knees beside it, with his hands clasped over the hilt.
"Almighty God," he prayed, "give me the strength to make good – and not disappoint him."
It was a heavy hearted young man who presented himself the next night at the house of Cyrus Spradling, and one who went as a penitent to the confessional.
Once more the father sat on the porch alone with his twilight pipe, and once more the skies behind the ridges were high curtains of pale amber.
"Ye're a sight fer sore eyes, boy," declared the old mountaineer heartily. "An' folks 'lows thet ye aims ter run fer office, too. Wa'al, I reckon betwixt me an' you, we kin contrive ter make shore of yore gettin' two votes anyhow. I pledges ye mine fer sartain."
Boone laughed though tears would better have fitted his mood, and the old fellow chuckled at his own pleasantry.
"I reckon my gal will be out presently," Cyrus went on. "I've done concluded thet ye war p'int-blank right in arguing that schoolin' wouldn't harm her none."
But when the girl came out, the man went in and left them, as he always did, and though the plucking of banjos within told of the family full gathered, none of the other members interrupted the presumed courtship which was so cordially approved.
Happy stood for a moment in the doorway against a lamplit background, and Boone acknowledged to himself that she had an undeniable beauty and that she carried herself with the simple grace of a slender poplar. She was, he told himself with unsparing self-accusation, in every way worthier than he, for she had fought her battles without aid, and now she stood there smiling on him confidently out of dark eyes that made no effort to render their welcome coy with provocative concealment.
"Howdy, Boone," she said in a voice of soft and musical cadences. "It's been a long time since I've seen you."
"Yes," he answered with a painful sort of slowness, "but now that we're both through school and back home to stay, I reckon we'll see each other oftener. Are you glad to come back, Happy?"
For a few moments the girl looked at him in the faint glow that came through the door, without response. It was as though her answer must depend on what she read in his face, and there was not light enough for its reading.
"I don't quite know, myself, Boone," she said hesitantly at last. "I've sort of been studying over it. How about you?"
When she had settled into a chair, he took a seat at her feet with his back against one of the posts of the porch, and replied with an assumption of certainty that he did not feel, "A feller's bound to be glad to get back to his own folks."
"After I'd been down there the first time and came back here again, I wasn't glad," was her candid rejoinder. "I felt like I just couldn't bear it. Over there things were all clean, and folks paid some attention to qualities – only they didn't call 'em that. They say 'manners' at the school. Here it seemed like I'd come home to a human pig-sty – and I was plumb ashamed of my own folks. When I looked ahead and saw a lifetime of that – it seemed to me that I'd rather kill myself than go on with it."
"You say" – Boone made the inquiry gravely – "that you felt like that at first. How do you feel now?"
"Later on I got to feelin' ashamed of myself, instead of my people," she replied. "I got to seein' that I was faultin' them for not having had the chance they were slavin' to give me."
Boone bent attentively forward but he said nothing, and she went on.
"You know as well as I do that, so far, there aren't many people here that have much use for changes, but there are some few. The ground that the school sets on was given by an old man that didn't have much else to give. I remember right well what he said in the letter he wrote. It's printed in their catalogue: 'I don't look after wealth for them, but I want all young-uns taught to live right. I have heart and cravin' that our people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands.' I reckon that's the right spirit, Boone."
CHAPTER XXII
Still the boy sat silent, with his chin in his hand, as sits the self-torturing figure of Rodin's bronze "Penseur" – the attitude of thought which kills peace. Boone understood that unless Happy found a man who shared with her that idea of keeping the torch lit in the midst of darkness, her life might benefit others, but for herself it would be a distressing failure.
Happy had fancied him, that he realized, but he had thought of it as a phase through which she would pass with only such a scar as ephemeral affairs leave – one of quick healing.
Now the fuller significance was clear. He knew that she faced a life which her very efforts at betterment would make unspeakably bleak, unless she found companionship. He saw that to him she looked for release from that wretched alternative – and he had come to tell her that, beyond a deep and sincere friendship, he had nothing to offer her. Such an announcement, though truthfulness requires it, is harder for being deferred.
Words seemed elusive and unmanageable as he made his beginning. "I'm right glad that we are neighbours again, Happy," he told her. "I'm not much to brag on – but I set a value on the same things you do – and I reckon that means a good deal to – " He paused a moment, and added clumsily, "to friendships."
Perhaps it was the word itself, or perhaps, and that is likelier, it was the light and unconscious stress with which Boone spoke it that told her without fuller explanation what he had come to confess. Two syllables brought her face to face with revelation, and all else he might say would be only redundancy. Already she had feared it at times when she lay wakeful in her bed.
From that day when he had called her "Rebekkah at the Well," she had been in love with him. She had not awakened to any hot ambition until she had been fired with the incentive of paralleling his own educational course. Now if he were not to be in her life she had only developed herself out of her natural setting into a doom of miserable discontent.
It had always seemed as rational an assumption that their futures should merge as that the only pair of falcons in a forest full of jack-daws should mate.
Now he spoke of friendships!
Yet the girl, though stunned with bitter disappointment, was not wholly astonished.
Topics of gossip are rare enough to be made much of in the hills, and the neighbours had not failed to intimate in her hearing that when she was away her "beau" had been sitting devotedly at other feet; but Happy had smiled tranquilly upon her informants. "Boone would be right apt to be charitable to a stranger," she had said, giving them none of the satisfaction of seeing the thorn rankle, which is not to say that she did not feel the sting. She had found false security in the thought that Boone, even if he felt Anne's allurement, would be too sensible to raise his eyes to her as a possibility since their worlds were not only different but veritable antipodes of circumstance. What she had failed to consider was that the Romeos and Juliets of the world have never taken thought of what the houses of Montague and Capulet might say.
For a while now she sat very silent, her hands in her lap tightly clasped and unmoving, but when she spoke her voice was even and soft.
"Thank you, Boone," she said; then after a moment, "Boone, is there anything you'd like to tell me?"
The young man looked suddenly up at her, and his reply was a question, too – an awkward and startled one: "What about, Happy – what do you mean?"
"The best thing friends can do – is to listen to what interests – each other. Sometimes there are things we keep right silent about – in general, I mean – and yet we get lonesome – for somebody to talk to – about those things."
There was a pause, and then as Happy explained, the seeming serenity of her manner was a supreme test of self-effacement which deserved an accolade for bravery.
"I'd heard it hinted – that you thought a heap of a girl – down below – I thought maybe you'd like to tell me about her."
How should he know that words so simply spoken in the timbre of calm naturalness came from a heart that was agonized?
How could he guess that the quiet figure sitting in the low chair was suffering inexpressible pain, or that the eyes that looked out through half-closed lids seemed to see a world of rocking hills, black under clouds of an unrelieved hopelessness?
One who has come braced for an ordeal and finds that he has reared for himself a fictitious trouble, can realize in the moment of reaction only the vast elation of relief.
Had her acting been less perfect, he might have caught a shadowing forth of the truth – but, as it was, he only felt that shackles had been knocked from him, and that he stood a free man.
So he made a clean breast of how Anne had become his ideal; how he had fought that discovery as an absurdly impossible love, and how for that reason he had never before spoken of his feelings. But he did not, of course, intimate that it had been Anne herself who had finally given him a right to hope.
Happy listened in sympathetic silence, and when he was through she said, still softly:
"Boone, I reckon you've got a right hopeful life-span stretching out ahead of you – but are you sure you aren't fixing to break your heart, boy? Don't those folks down there – hold themselves mighty high? Don't they – sort of – look down on us mountain people?"
It was a fair question, yet one which he could not answer without betraying Anne's stout assertion of reciprocated feeling. He could only nod his head and declare, "A feller must take his chances, I reckon."
From the dark forests the whippoorwills called in those plaintive notes that reach the heart. Down by the creek the frogs boomed out, and platinum mists lay dreamily between their soft emphases of shadow. Boone was thinking of the girl whose star hung there in the sky. His heart was singing in elation, "She loves me and, thank God, Happy understands, too. My way lies clear!" He was not reflecting just then that princesses have often spoken as boldly as Anne had done, at sixteen, and have been forced to submit to other destinies at twenty. The girl was thinking – but that was her secret, and if she was bravely masking a tortured heart it should be left inviolate in its secrecy.
The young man in his abstraction did not mark how long the silence held, and when at last Happy rose he came out of his revery with a start.
"Boone, I'm mighty glad you felt that you could talk to me this way," she said. "I want to be a real friend. But I've been working hard today – and if it won't hurt your feelings, I wish you'd go home now. I'm dog-tired, and I'd like to go to bed."
He had started away, but the evening had brought such surprises – and such a lifting of heavy anxiety – that he wanted to mull matters over out there in the soothing moonlight and the clean sweetness of the air.
So he sat down on a boulder where the shadow blotted him into the night, and when he had been there for a while he looked up in a fresh astonishment. Happy had not gone to bed. She was coming now across the stile, with movements like those of a sleep-walker. Outside on the road she stood for a while, pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight, looking in the direction she supposed he had taken, while her fingers plucked at her dress with distressed little gestures. Then with unsteady steps she went on to the edge of the highway and leaned against the boll of a tall poplar. He could see that her eyes were wide and her lips moving. Then she wheeled and threw her hands, with outspread fingers, against the cool bark above her head, leaning there as a child might lean on a mother's bosom, and the sobs that shook her slender body came to him across the short interval of distance.
Boone went over to her with hurried strides, and when she felt his hands on her shoulders she wheeled. Then only did her brave disguise fail her, and she demanded almost angrily, forgetting her school-taught diction, "Why didn't ye go home like I told ye? Why does ye hev ter dog me this fashion, atter I'd done sent ye away?"
"What's the matter, Happy?" he demanded; but he knew now, well enough, and he was too honest to dissimulate. "I didn't know, Happy," he pleaded. "I thought you meant it all."
"I did mean hit all – I means thet I wants thet ye should be happy – only – " Her voice broke there as she added, " – only I've done always thought of myself as yore gal."
She broke away from him with those words and fled back into the house, and most of that night Boone tramped the woods.
On the morning after Happy had fled from him, under the spurring of her discovered secret, she had not been able with all her bravery of effort to hide from the family about the daybreak breakfast table the traces of a sleepless and tearful night. To Happy, this morning the murky room which was both kitchen and dining hall seemed the epitome of sordidness, with its newspaper-plastered walls and creaking puncheon floor. Yesterday each depressing detail had been alleviated by the thought that the future held a promise of release. Contemplating delivery, one can laugh gaily in a cell, but now the dungeon doors seemed to have been permanently closed and the key thrown away.
"Happy's done been cryin'," shrilled one of the youngest of the brother and sister brood – for that was a typical mountain family to which, for years, each spring had brought its fresh item of humanity. As Cyrus pithily expressed it, "Thar hain't but only fo'teen of us settin' down ter eat when everybody's home."
Old Cyrus put a stern quietus on the chorus of questioning elicited by the proclaiming of his daughter's grief.
"Ef she's been cryin', thet's her own business," he announced. "I reckon she don't need ter name what hit's erbout every time she laughs or weeps."
And, such is the value of the patriarchal edict, the tumult was promptly stilled.
Yet the head of the house, himself, could not so readily dismiss a realization of the unwonted pallor on cheeks normally soft and rosily colourful. The eyes were undeniably wretched and deeply ringed. To himself Cyrus said, "They've jest only done had a lovers' quarrel. Young folks is bound ter foller fallin' out as well as fallin' in, I reckon."
Neither that day nor the next, however, did the girl "live right up to her name," and on the following night Boone did not come over to sue for peace, as a lover should, under such April conditions of sun and storm.
"What does ye reckon's done come over 'em, Maw?" the father eventually inquired, and the mother shook her perplexed head.
The two of them were alone on the porch just then, save for one of the youngest children, who was deeply absorbed with the feeding of a small and crippled lamb from a nursing bottle improvised out of a whiskey flask.
Slowly the old man's face clouded, until it wore so forebodingly sombre a look as the wife had not seen upon it since years before when life had run black. Then, despite all his efforts to "consort peaceful with mankind," he had been drawn into an enmity with a fatal termination. Cyrus had on that occasion been warned that he was to be "lay-wayed" and, as he had taken down his rifle from the wall, his eyes had held just the same hard and obdurate glint that lingered in them now. The woman, remembering that time long gone, when her husband had refused to turn a step aside from his contemplated journey, shuddered a little. She could not forget how he had been shot out of his saddle and how he had, while lying wounded in the creek-bed road, punished his assailant with death. He was wounded now, though not with a bullet this time, and his scowl said that he would hit back.
"What air hit, Paw?" she demanded, and his reply came in slow but implacable evenness:
"I've done set a heap of store by Boone Wellver. I've done thought of him like a son of my own – but ef he's broke my gal's heart – an's she's got ther look of hit in her eyes – him an' me kain't both go on dwellin' along ther same creek." He paused a moment there, and in his final words sounded an even more inflexible ring: "We kain't both go on livin' hyar – an' I don't aim ter move."
"Paw" – the plea came solicitously from a fear-burdened heart – "we've just got ter wait an' see."
"I don't aim ter be over-hasty," he reassured her, with a rude sort of gentleness, "but nuther does I aim ter endure hit – ef so be hit's true."
But that evening at twilight when Boone crossed the stile, if the nod which greeted him was less cordial than custom had led him to expect, at least Cyrus spoke no hostile word. The old man was "biding his time," and as he rose and knocked the nub of ash out of his pipe-bowl, he announced curtly, "I'll tell Happy ye're hyar."