Part 24 (1/2)
They all laughed, foolishly, light-heartedly.
Marise consciously delighted in the laughter, in the silly, light tone of their talk, in the feeling of confidence and security which bathed her as warmly as the new wine of the spring suns.h.i.+ne. She thought pa.s.singly, swiftly, with her habitual, satiric wonder at her own fancifulness, of her earlier notions about steel blades and pa.s.ses and parries, and being afraid to walk down the hall with her ”opponent” back of her.
Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on the bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the intensity of which was out of her world altogether, the life, all power, of a modern rich man in great affairs; controlling vast forces, swaying and shaping the lives of thousands of weaker men as no potentate had ever done, living in the instants he allowed himself for personal life (she felt again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other activities. It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad, inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's life, she reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village insignificance into that large-scale landscape.
A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley with its vibrations.
”Is that a train, at this hour?” murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train or not.
”Oh _no!_” said Marise, severely, disapproving the vagueness and inaccuracy of his observation. ”That's the mill-whistle, blowing the closing-hour. You're no true Ashleyan, not to have learned the difference between the voices of the different whistles of the day.”
She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight. ”I think it's part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human imagination, don't you, that we don't hear the beauty of those great steam-whistles. I wonder if it's not unconscious art that gave to our mighty machines such voices of qower.”
”Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a 'mighty machine'?” inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the bench, his arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the garden and at Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.
Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. ”When the train comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and at the crossing, when that n.o.ble rounded note blares out ... why, it's the music for the setting. Nothing else could cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks.”
”I call that going some, 'n.o.ble rounded note'!” murmured Marsh, lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut, against the brilliance of the suns.h.i.+ne.
Marise laughed, and persisted. ”Just because its called a steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till something else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll look back sentimentally and regret it.”
”Maybe _you_ will,” conceded Marsh.
The two elder looked on, idly amused at this give-and-take.
”And I don't suppose,” continued Marise, ”to take another instance of modern lack of imagination, that you have ever noticed, as an element of picturesque power in modern life, the splendid puissance of the traffic cop's presence in a city street.”
They all had a protesting laugh at this, startled for an instant from their dreaminess.
”Yes, and if I could think of more grandiloquent words to express him, I'd use them,” said Marise defiantly, launching out into yet more outrageous flights of rhetoric. ”I could stand for hours on a street corner, admiring the completeness with which he is transfigured out of the human limitations of his mere personality, how he feels, flaming through his every vein and artery, the invincible power of THE LAW, freely set over themselves by all those turbulent, unruly human beings, surging around him in their fiery speed-genii. He raises his arm. It is not a human arm, it is the decree of the entire race. And as far as it can be seen, all those wilful fierce creatures bow themselves to it. The current boils past him in one direction. He lets it go till he thinks fit to stop it. He sounds his whistle, and raises his arm again in that inimitable gesture of omnipotence. And again they bow themselves. Now that the priest before the altar no longer sways humanity as he did, is there anywhere else, any other such visible embodiment of might, majesty, and power as ...”
”Gracious me, Marise!” warned her old cousin. ”I know you're only running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going pretty far when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and things. I don't believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very well.”
”He wouldn't mind,” demurred Marise. ”He'd think it an interesting historical parallel.”
”Mrs. Bayweather would have a thing or two to say.”
”Right you are. _Mrs._ Bayweather would certainly say something!” agreed Marise.
She stood up. ”I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness like the rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the baskets. No, don't you move,” she commanded the others, beginning to stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. ”I'll call the children. And Neale will be here in a moment.”
She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the grape-arbor, still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green. She was calling, ”Children! _Children!_ Come and help with the supper.”
She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of intense quiet, in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun poured a flood of palpable gold on the three motionless figures in the garden.
Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the largest of the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets, a pail, an ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about them, wrought to exaltation by the complicated smell of the eatables.
”Neale was just coming in the front gate,” she explained, as he nodded familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's cheek. ”Cousin Hetty, just _look_ at Elly in that night-cap of Great-aunt Pauline's.
Doesn't she look the image of that old daguerreotype of Grandmother? See here, Mark, who said you could trail that sword out here? That belongs in the attic.”
”Oh, let him, let him,” said Cousin Hetty peaceably.