The Firing Line

She paled a trifle under the red.

"Are you losing your reason, Louis?"

"No, but I've contrived to lose everything else. It was a losing game from the beginning—for both of us."

"Are you going to be coward enough to drop your cards and quit the game?"

"Call it that. But the cards are marked and the game crooked—as crooked as Herby's." He began to laugh. "The world's dice are loaded; I've got enough."

"Yet you beat Bertie in spite of—"

"For Portlaw's sake. I wouldn't fight with marked cards for my own sake. Faugh! the world plays a game too rotten to suit me. I'll drop my hand and—take a stroll for a little fresh air—out yonder—" He waved his arm toward the rising sun. "Just a step into the fresh air, Helen."

"Are you not afraid?" She managed to form the words with stiffened lips.

"Afraid?" He stared at her. "No; neither are you. You'll do it, too, some day. If you don't want to now, you will later; if you have any doubts left they won't last. We have no choice; it's in us. We don't belong here, Helen; we're different. We didn't know until we'd tried to live like other people, and everything went wrong." A glint of humour came into his eyes. "I've made up my mind that we're extra-terrestrial—something external and foreign to this particular star. I think it's time to ask for a transfer and take the star ahead."

Not a muscle moved in her expressionless face; he shrugged and drew out his watch.

"I'm sorry, Helen—"

"Is it time to go?"

"Yes.... Why do you stick to that little cockney pup?"

"I don't know."

"You ruined a decent man to pick him out of the gutter. Why don't you drop him back?"

"I don't know."

"Do you—ah—care for him?"

"No."

"Then why—"

She shook her head.

"Quite right," said Malcourt, rising; "you're in the wrong planet, too. And the sooner you realise it the sooner we'll meet again. Good-bye."

She turned horribly pale, stammering something about his coming with her, resisting a little as he drew her out, down the stairs, and aided her to enter the depot-wagon. There he kissed her; and she caught him around the neck, holding him convulsively.

"Nonsense," he whispered. "I've talked it all over with father; he and I'll talk it over some day with you. Then you'll understand." And backing away he called to the coachman: "Drive on!" ignoring his brother-in-law, who sat huddled in a corner, glassy eyes focused on him.

Portlaw almost capered with surprise and relief when at breakfast he learned that the Tressilvains had departed.

"Oh, everything is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily—"like the last chapter of a bally novel—the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two. It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his villains! It's never done in decent literature—never done anywhere except in real life."

He swallowed his coffee and, lighting a cigarette, tipped back his chair, balancing himself with one hand on the table.

"The use of the gun," he said lazily, "is obsolete in the modern novel; the theme now is, how to be passionate though pure. Personally, being neither one nor the other, I remain uninterested in the modern novel."

"Real life," said Portlaw, spearing a fish-ball, "is damn monotonous. The only gun-play is in the morning papers."

"Sure," nodded Malcourt, "and there's too many shooting items in 'em every day to make gun-play available for a novel.... Once, when I thought I could write—just after I left college—they took me aboard a morning newspaper on the strength of a chance I had to discover a missing woman.

"She was in hiding; her name had been horribly spattered in a divorce, and the poor thing was in hiding—had changed her name, crept off to a little town in Delaware.

"Our enlightened press was hunting for her; to find her was termed a 'scoop,' I believe.... Well—boys pull legs off grasshoppers and do other damnable things without thinking.... I found her.... So as I knocked at her door—in the mean little farmhouse down there in Delaware—she opened it, smiling—she was quite pretty—and blew her brains out in my very face."

"Wh-what!" bawled Portlaw, dropping knife and fork.

"I—I want to see that girl again—some time," said Malcourt thoughtfully. "I would like to tell her that I didn't mean it—case of boy and grasshopper, you know.... Well, as you say, gun-play has no place in real novels. There wouldn't be room, anyway, with all the literature and illustrations and purpose and purple preciousness; as anachronismatically superfluous as sleigh-bells in hell."

Portlaw resumed his egg; Malcourt considered him ironically.

"Sporty Porty, are you going to wed the Pretty Lady of Pride's Hall at Pride's Fall some blooming day in June?"

"None of your infernal business!"

"Quite so. I only wanted to see how the novel was coming out before somebody takes the book away from me."

"You talk like a pint of shoe-strings," growled Portlaw; "you'd better find out whose horse has been denting the lawn all over and tearing off several yards of sod."

"I know already," said Malcourt.

"Well, who had the nerve to—"

"None of your bally business, dear friend. Are you riding over to Pride's to-day?"

"Yes, I am."

"I think I'll go, too."

"You're not expected."

"That's the charm of it, old fellow. I didn't expect to go; they don't expect me; they don't want me; I want to go! All the elements of a delightful surprise, do you notice?"

Portlaw said, irritably: "They asked Mrs. Malcourt and me. Nothing was said about you."

"Something will be said if I go," observed Malcourt cheerfully.

Portlaw was exasperated. "There's a girl there you behaved badly to. You'd better stay away."

Malcourt looked innocently surprised.

"Now, who could that be! I have, it is true, at times, misbehaved, but I can't ever remember behaving badly—"

Portlaw, too mad to speak, strode wrathfully away toward the stables.

Malcourt was interested to see that he could stride now without waddling.

"Marvellous, marvellous!—the power of love!" he mused sentimentally; "Porty is no longer rotund—only majestically portly. See where he hastens lightly to his Alida!

"Shepherd fair and maidens all—Too-ri-looral!Too-ri-looral!"

And, very gracefully, he sketched a step or two in contra-dance to his own shadow on the grass.

"Shepherd fair and maidens all—Truly rural,Too-ri-looral,Man prefers his maidens plural;One is none, he wants them all!Too-ri-looral!Too-ri-looral—"

And he sauntered off humming gaily, making playful passes at the trees with his riding-crop as he passed.

Later he aided his wife to mount and stood looking after her as she rode away, Portlaw pounding along heavily beside her.

"All alone with the daisies," he said, looking around him when they had disappeared.

Toward noon he ordered a horse, ate his luncheon in leisurely solitude, read yesterday's papers while he smoked, then went out, mounted, and took the road to Pride's Fall, letting his horse choose his own pace.

Moving along through the pretty forest road, he glanced casually right and left as he advanced, tapping his riding-boots in rhythm to the air he was humming in a careless undertone—something about a shepherd and the plural tastes of man.

His mood was inspired by that odd merriment which came from sheer perversity. When the depths and shallows of his contradictory character were disturbed a ripple of what passed for mirth covered all the surface; if there was any profundity to the man the ripple obscured it. No eye had ever penetrated the secrecy of what lay below; none ever would. Perhaps there was nothing there.

He journeyed on, his horse ambling or walking as it suited him, or sometimes veering to stretch a long glossy neck and nip at a bunch of leaves.

The cock-partridge stood on his drumming-log and defied the forest rider, all unseen; rabbit and squirrel sat bolt upright with palpitating flanks and moist bright eyes at gaze; overhead the slow hawks sailed, looking down at him as he rode.

Sometimes Malcourt whistled to himself, sometimes he sang in a variably agreeable voice, and now and then he quoted the poets, taking pleasure in the precision of his own diction.

"C'est le jour des morts,Mirliton, Mirlitaine!Requiescant in pace!"

he chanted; and quoted more of the same bard with a grimace, adding, as he spurred his horse:

"Poeta nascitur, non fit!—the poet's nasty and not fit. Zut! Boum-boum! Get along, old fellow, or we'll never see the pretty ladies of Pride's this blooming day!"

There was a shorter cut by a spotted trail, and when he saw the first blaze glimmering through the leaves he steered his horse toward it. The sound of voices came distantly from the wooded heights above—far laughter, the faint aroma of a wood fire; no doubt some picnickers—trespassing as usual, but that was Mrs. Ascott's affair.

A little later, far below him, he caught a glimpse of a white gown among the trees. There was a spring down there somewhere in that thicket of silver birches; probably one of the trespassers was drinking. So, idly curious, he rode that way, his horse making no sound on the thick moss.

"If she's ornamental," he said to himself, "I'll linger to point out the sin of trespassing; that is if she is sufficiently ornamental—"

His horse stepped on a dead branch which cracked; the girl in white, who had been looking out through the birch-trees across the valley, turned her head.

They recognised each other even at that distance; he uttered a low exclamation of satisfaction, sprang from his saddle, and led his horse down among the mossy rocks of the water-course to the shelf of rock overhanging the ravine where she stood as motionless as one of the silver saplings.

"Virginia," he said, humorously abashed, "shall I say I am glad to see you, and how d'you do, and offer you my hand?—or had I better not?"

He thought she meant to answer; perhaps she meant to, but found no voice at her disposal.

He dropped his bridle over a branch and, drawing off his gloves, walked up to where she was standing.

"I knew you were at Pride's Hall," he said; "I'm aware, also, that nobody there either expected or wished to see me. But I wanted to see you; and little things of that sort couldn't keep me away. Where are the others?"

She strove twice to answer him, then turned abruptly, steadying herself against a birch-tree with one arm.

"Where are the others, Virginia?" he asked gently.

"On the rocks beyond."

"Picnicking?"

"Yes."

"How charming!" he said; "as though one couldn't see enough country out of one's windows every minute in the year. But you can't tell where sentiment will crop up; some people don't object to chasing ants off the dishes and fishing sticks out of the milk. I do.... It's rather fortunate I found you alone: saves a frigid reception and cruel comments after I'm gone.... After I'm gone, Virginia."

He seated himself where the sunlight fell agreeably and looked off over the valley. A shrunken river ran below—a mere thread of life through its own stony skeleton—a mockery of what it once had been before the white-hided things on two legs had cut the forests from the hills and killed its cool mossy sources in their channels. The crushers of pulp and the sawyers of logs had done their dirty work thoroughly; their acids and their sawdust poisoned and choked; their devastation turned the tree-clothed hill flanks to arid lumps of sand and rock.

He said aloud, "to think of these trees being turned into newspapers!"

He looked up at her whimsically.

"The least I can do is to help grow them again. As a phosphate I might amount to something—if I'm carefully spaded in." And in a lower voice just escaping mockery: "How are you, Virginia?"

"I am perfectly well."

"Are you well enough to sit down and talk to me for half an hour?"

She made no reply.

"Don't be dignified; there is nothing more inartistic, except a woman who is trying to be brave on an inadequate income."

She did not move or look at him.

"Virginia—dear?"

"What?"

"Do you remember that day we met in the surf; and you said something insolent to me, and bent over, laying your palms flat on the water, looking at me over your shoulder?"

"Yes."

"You knew what you were doing?"

"Yes."

"This is part of the consequences. That's what life is, nothing but a game of consequences. I knew what I was doing; you admit you were responsible for yourself; and nothing but consequences have resulted ever since. Sit down and be reasonable and friendly; won't you?"

"I cannot stay here."

"Try," he said, smiling, and made room for her on the sun-crisped moss. A little later she seated herself with an absent-minded air and gazed out across the valley. A leaf or two, prematurely yellow, drifted from the birches.

"It reminds me," he said thoughtfully, "of that exquisite poem on Autumn:

"'The autumn leaves are falling,They're falling everywhere;They're falling in the atmosphere,They're falling in the air—'

—and I don't remember any more, dear."

"Did you wish to say anything to me besides nonsense?" she asked, flushing.

"Did you expect anything else from me?"

"I had no reason to."

"Oh; I thought you might have been prepared for a little wickedness."

She turned her eyes, more green than blue, on him.

"I was not unprepared."

"Nor I," he said gaily; "don't let's disappoint each other. You know our theory is that the old families are decadent; and I think we ought to try to prove any theory we advance—in the interests of psychology. Don't you?"

"I think we have proved it."

He laughed, and passing his arm around her drew her head so that it rested against his face.

"That is particularly dishonourable," she said in an odd voice.

"Because I'm married?"

"Yes; and because I know it."

"That's true; you didn't know it when we were at Palm Beach. That was tamer than this. I think now we can very easily prove our theory." And he kissed her, still laughing. But when he did it again, she turned her face against his shoulder.

"Courage," he said; "we ought to be able to prove this theory of ours—you and I together—"

She was crying.

"If you're feeling guilty on Shiela's account, you needn't," he said. "Didn't you know she can scarcely endure me?"

"Y-yes."

"Well, then—"

"No—no—no! Louis—I care too much—"

"For yourself?"

"N-no."

"For me? For Shiela? For public opinion?"

"No."

"For what?"

"I—I think it must be for—for—just for being—decent."

He inspected her with lively interest.

"Hello," he said coolly, "you're disproving our theory!"

She turned her face away from him, touching her eyes with her handkerchief.

"Or," he added ironically, "is there another man?"

"No," she said without resentment; and there was a certain quality in her voice new to him—a curious sweetness that he had never before perceived.

"Tell me," he said quietly, "have you really suffered?"

"Suffered? Yes."

"You really cared for me?"

"I do still."

A flicker of the old malice lighted his face.

"But you won't let me kiss you? Why?"

She looked up into his eyes. "I feel as powerless with you as I was before. You could always have had your will. Once I would not have blamed you. Now it would be cowardly—because—I have forgiven myself—"

"I won't disturb your vows," he said seriously.

"Then—I think you had better go."

"I am going.... I only wanted to see you again.... May I ask you something, dear?"

"Ask it," she said.

"Then—you are going to get over this, aren't you?"

"Not as long as you live, Louis."

"Oh!… And suppose I were not living?"

"I don't know."

"You'd recover, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Well, you'd never have any other temptation—"

She turned scarlet.

"That is wicked!"

"It certainly is," he said with great gravity; "and I must come to the scarcely flattering conclusion that there is in me a source of hideous depravity, the unseen emanations of which, like those of the classic upas-tree, are purest poison to a woman morally constituted as you are."

She looked up as he laughed; but there was no mirth in her bewildered eyes.

"There is something in you, Louis, which is fatal to the better side of me."

"The other Virginia couldn't endure me, I know."

"My other self learned to love your better self."

"I have none—"

"I have seen it revealed in—"

"Oh, yes," he laughed, "revealed in what you used to call one of my infernal flashes of chivalry."

"Yes," she said quietly, "in that."

He sat very still there in the afternoon sunshine, pondering; and sometimes his gaze searched the valley depths below, lost among the tree-tops; sometimes he studied the far horizon where the little blue hills stood up against the sky like little blue waves at sea. His hat was off; the cliff breeze played with his dark curly hair, lifting it at the temples, stirring the one obstinate strand that never lay quite flat on the crown of his head.

Twice she looked around as though to interrupt his preoccupation, but he neither responded nor even seemed to be aware of her; and she sighed imperceptibly and followed his errant eyes with her own.

At last:

"Is there no way out of it for you, Louis? I am not thinking of myself," she added simply.

He turned fully around.

"If there was a way out I'd take it and marry you."

"I did not ask for that; I was thinking of you."

He was silent.

"Besides," she said, "I know that you do not love me."

"That is true only because I will not. I could."

She looked at him.

"But," he said calmly, "I mustn't; because there is no way out for me—there's no way out of anything for me—while I live—down here."

"Down—where?"

"On this exotic planet called the earth, dear child," he said with mocking gravity. "I'm a sort of moon-calf—a seed blown clear from Saturn's surface, which fell here and sprouted into the thing you call Louis Malcourt." And, his perverse gaiety in full possession of him again, he laughed, and his mirth was tinctured with the bitter-sweet of that humorous malice which jeered unkindly only at himself.

"All to the bad, Virginia—all to the bow-wows—judging me from your narrow, earthly standard and the laws of your local divinity. That's why I want to see the real One and ask Him how bad I really am. They'd tell me down here that I'll never see Him. Zut! I'll take that chance—not such a long shot either. Why, if I am no good, the risk is all the better; He is because of such as I! No need for Him where all the ba-bas are white as the driven snow, and all the little white doves keep their feathers clean and coo-coo hymns from dawn to sunset.... By the way, I never gave you anything, did I?—a Chinese god, for example?"

She shook her head, bewildered at his inconsequences.

"No, I never did. You're not entitled to a gift of a Chinese god from me. But I've given eighteen of them to a number of—ah—friends. I had nineteen, but never had the—right to present that nineteenth god."

"What do you mean, Louis?"

"Oh, those gilded idols are the deities of secrecy. Their commandment is, 'Thou shalt not be found out.' So I distributed them among those who worship them—that is, I have so directed my executors.... By the way, I made a new will."

He looked at her cheerfully, evidently very much pleased with himself.

"And what do you think I've left to you?"

"Louis, I don't—"

"Why, the bridle, saddle, crop, and spurs I wore that day when we rode to the ocean! Don't you remember the day that you noticed me listening and asked me what I heard?"

"Y-yes—"

"And I told you I was listening to my father?"

Again that same chilly tremor passed over her as it had then.

The sun, over the Adirondack foot-hills, hung above bands of smouldering cloud. Presently it dipped into them, hanging triple-ringed, like Saturn on fire.

"It's time for you to go," he said in an altered voice; and she turned to find him standing and ready to aid her.

A little pale with the realisation that the end had come so soon, she rose and walked slowly back to where his horse stood munching leaves.

"Well, Virginia—good-bye, little girl. You'll be all right before long."

There was no humour left in his voice now; no mocking in his dark gaze.

She raised her eyes to his in vague distress.

"Where are the others?" he asked. "Oh, up on those rocks? Yes, I see the smoke of their fire.... Say good-bye to them for me—not now—some day."

She did not understand him; he hesitated, smiled, and took her in his arms.

"Good-bye, dear," he said.

"Good-bye."

They kissed.

After she was half-way to the top of the rocks he mounted his horse. She did not look back.

"She's a good little sport," he said, smiling; and, gathering bridle, turned back into the forest. This time he neither sang nor whistled as he rode through the red splendour of the western sun. But he was very busy listening.

There was plenty to hear, too; wood-thrushes were melodious in the late afternoon light; infant crows cawed from high nests unseen in the leafy tree-tops; the stream's thin, silvery song threaded the forest quiet, accompanying him as he rode home.

Home? Yes—if this silent house where he dismounted could be called that. The place was very still. Evidently the servants had taken advantage of their master's and mistress's absence to wander out into the woods. Some of the stablemen had the dogs out, too; there was nobody in sight to take his horse, so he led the animal to the stables and found there a lad to relieve him.

Then he retraced his steps to the house and entered the deserted garden where pearl-tinted spikes of iris perfumed the air and great masses of peonies nodded along borders banked deep under the long wall. A few butterflies still flitted in the golden radiance, but already that solemn harbinger of sunset, the garden toad, had emerged from leafy obscurity into the gravel path, and hopped heavily forward as Malcourt passed by.

The house—nothing can be as silent as an empty house—echoed his spurred tread from porch to stairway. He went up to the first landing, not knowing why, then roamed aimlessly through, wandering from room to room, idly, looking on familiar things as though they were strange—strange, but uninteresting.

Upstairs and down, in, around, and about he drifted, quiet as a cat, avoiding only his wife's bedroom. He had never entered it since their marriage; he did not care to do so now, though the door stood wide. And, indifferent, he turned without even a glance, and traversing the hall, descended the stairs to the library.

For a while he sat there, legs crossed, drumming thoughtfully on his boot with his riding-crop; and after a while he dragged the chair forward and picked up a pen.

"Why not?" he said aloud; "it will save railroad fare—and she'll need it all."

So, to his lawyer in New York he wrote:

"I won't come to town after all. You have my letter and you know what I want done. Nobody is likely to dispute the matter, and it won't require a will to make my wife carry out the essence of the thing."

And signed his name.

When he had sealed and directed the letter he could find no stamp; so he left it on the table.

"That's the usual way they find such letters," he said, smiling to himself as the thought struck him. "It certainly is hard to be original.... But then I'm not ambitious."

He found another sheet of paper and wrote to Hamil:

"All the same you are wrong; I have always been your friend. My father comes first, as always; you second. There is no third."

This note, signed, sealed, and addressed, he left with the other.

"Certainly I am not original in the least," he said, beginning another note.

"DOLLY DEAR:

"You have made good. Continuez, chère énfant—and if you don't know what that means your French lessons are in vain. Now the usual few words: don't let any man who is not married to you lay the weight of his little finger on you! Don't ignore convention unless there is a good reason—and then don't! When you're tired of behaving yourself go to sleep; and if you can't sleep, sleep some more; and then some. Men are exactly like women until they differ from them; there is no real mystery about either outside of popular novels.