by H. F. Heard
“This grove,” he said, “is really very classic and up at this end”—they had walked well away from the rough trail—“is as quiet as we could wish.”
The olives had not been tended for years. Coarse grass and the fallen layers of blade-shaped leaves covered the ground. The place was rapidly becoming a thicket. In the heart of it you were in a natural arbor.
“Fortunately,” he said to himself as he cantered away, “I can say to Kermit that I’ve just come up with an invitation and so I needn’t stay.”
The photographic researcher was at work. He accepted Mrs. Heron’s invitation readily enough and volunteered that if she liked he would try a few photos of the place.
“I’ve got a new plate I want to try. It gives tone-gradations which I don’t think anyone yet has secured.”
At dinner that evening he wore his livery with a new acceptance. Joe, as he valeted him, had noticed with delight that instead of being, as he had been for quite a while now, perfunctory and bored about it all, this evening he once again paid attention, looked in the glass and turned as the valet adjusted the vest and smoothed the coat’s shoulders. Mrs. Heron also noticed the difference in his air.
“Can Mr. Kermit come to tea next week?” she asked as soon as they were seated.
“Yes, and he suggested himself that if you would permit, he would like to take a few photographs. He has, I think, some new color-filter method. He believes the place would be a splendid scene on which to try out the new plate.”
“Yes,” she said, glancing around the room. “The place would look lovely in a good color photograph.”
Her eyes ranged complacently around the setting she had made, at her own jewels, lace, and brocade, at the liveried servants, at the table set with her fine silver, and finally rested on him. He was content to stand her inspection, as her most expensive, most finished piece.
“As long as she is inventorying us she will be thinking,” he reflected, “about art. She won’t ask what subjects Kermit and I discussed the livelong day.”
He had never liked to lie unnecessarily.
He managed to see Marion Gayton once before the tea party. Joe was pleased with him that morning. He not only let himself be dressed with care, but actually asked for what he had refused so often of late that even Joe’s initiative had been blunted.
“I will wear my riding coat today.”
“It serves as a kind of camouflage,” he said to himself. “As long as they see me dressed up they’ll be content to think they have me tied up.” The remark itself was, of course, a camouflage, raised by his need always to have two reasons for any one course and to play a part even to himself.
She was waiting for him in the deserted olive grove. She showed her pleased admiration at his care: “I’m glad you have troubled to put on full dress.”
He was increasingly happy with her. Surely here, at last, was the true solution of his life. Here was someone who understood him, who would love him as he actually was and for himself, with whom he need be neither a respectable modern nor a museum exhibit. He must have someone who was not graspingly possessive like his mother and yet would be a constant mirror in which he might reflect himself.
“This is a lovely spot,” he remarked as they were parting, “but it really isn’t quite suitable to urbanites such as ourselves.”
“Very well,” she answered quietly. “Next time come to my place. It’s right up at this end of town. I took it because I wanted to be quiet and to be able to get out straight into the country without having to pass anyone’s door!” They were certain enough of each other now to be openly secretive. “You can approach through an oak grove on the undeveloped side. It’s quite thick and comes right up to the house at the back. No one will see you coming.”
“Very well, next time. Now tell me exactly how one gets there.”
She gave him the directions carefully and they parted.
Kermit’s visit to Plantation House was a success in every way. On his arrival he was shown up to Arnoldo’s laboratory. There he was helpful in a number of ways. They worked away happily for a couple of hours or more.
“This is a nice room for laboratory work,” he remarked.
“It was, we believe, the best bedroom in hot weather,” Arnoldo told him.
“Queer dreams the old sleepers would have had, even though their sleep is perhaps not more than a dozen years old, if they could have foreseen this work being done here. Why, we ourselves don’t really know what impressions we are making on this room, with these radiations.”
“How do you mean?” Arnoldo asked.
“Well, some rays, as we discussed, go echoing about, bounding off the surfaces they strike and re-ringing we don’t know how long, and others seem to dive into that fog we call matter and emerge again like a spouting whale, where and when, again no one can say. Talk of ghosts …”
The fancy pleased Arnoldo, but only for a moment. His mind drifted on.
“Did you bring your cameras and other gear with you?”
“Yes, I left them downstairs.”
“Perhaps it would be better to take the photographs before tea.”
“The light would be better, yes.”
They went down. Mrs. Heron was waiting for them in the big hall, looking, Arnoldo had to own, really distinguished in her white Empire dress, a silver wreath in her thick hair, a dark-blue cloak hanging down from her shoulders to the back hem of her dress.
Kermit said the right thing: “That would make a perfectly balanced picture, Mrs. Heron. Would you let me take it?”
“Very well,” she smiled. “You are a quick worker.”
He was. In a few minutes he had made several exposures.
“Now may I take one or two of the front of the house,” he asked, “and the other ground-floor rooms?”
He was back in the hall, where tea was to be served, just as it was ready. He appreciated everything with intelligent praise, told her that the color scheme of the house would tell beautifully in the photographs, then admired the proportions of the rooms, and finally asked about the silver. She was a little afraid that he might be interested and inquiring about the crest. But he was evidently careless about antiquarianism.
“Silver,” he explained his position, “should be interesting to every photographer. Without it we would have had no photography. I suppose this is old, but it seems to me to be lovely because it’s still contemporary, of perfect shape to our eye today, whenever it may have been made. It and the house, whoever designed them, knew how to make them of timeless, efficient beauty. The more efficiencies meet in one object, the more beautiful it is. This house seems to me the most modern I’ve seen. Most so-called modern stuff is dated in a couple of years.”
She was gratified. When he added, “Forgive a personal remark, but I am glad you have followed the opening which you saw the house gave,” she was delighted.
Arnoldo, however, shifted a little uneasily in his chair. Would Irene ask Kermit to stay to dinner so that he would have to appear fully “periodized” too in front of the photographic eye?
But evidently Kermit’s remarks, if they had any specific aim, were pointed in another direction.
“If you are not too tired, would it be too much trouble if I asked you to sit, or rather to stand, for a few more exposures?”
“Certainly,” she responded, rising. “Would you like me again in the middle of the room?”
“It’s rather an experiment,” he replied. “Indeed, I can’t be sure I shall get any results to show you. But I would very much like to try. No; I don’t think I’ll ask you to stand there, but with your back to this great mirror.”
He spent some time arranging his camera. It was quite the old-fashioned procedure—with the tripod, the black velvet cloth over the head, and the boxes of plates smuggled in like a conjurer’s preparations. He even added a little cone fixed to the top of the camera and facing Mrs. Heron.
She laughed at that. “Do you want to record my voice as well as my
face?”
“No, no,” came a muffled voice from under the velvet head-shroud. “And please, would you remain quite still and not smile?”
A little nettled by his tone, Mrs. Heron stiffened involuntarily but adequately. After a good deal of shuffling and gentle snapping he emerged.
“Thank you, thank you; I think that was quite satisfactory.” He paused. “Do you know, I believe we photographers are really diagnosticians.”
She suspected that he was going to say something about her mood. Her forbiddingness, which had been lifting, began to resettle. Arnoldo thought that Kermit was going to spoil what, right up till then, had been a brilliantly successful visit.
The photographer continued, however, “I feel sure we are. And on the strength of that, Mrs. Heron, I wish to congratulate you on something even happier than the possession of a place as lovely as this. You are, I feel sure after these last studies which you have permitted me to make, that person who is even rarer than one possessing and able to show perfect taste—you have completely unimpaired vitality.”
The slightly impaired social weather returned instantly to “fair.”
And when, having accompanied her back to her seat, Kermit remarked, turning to Arnoldo, “May I close my visit by having one study of you?” she remarked, “You don’t mind him being in his laboratory suit? You know …”
Arnoldo, who might have objected to being photographed at all, fearing he might be asked to go up and change, moved out at once.
“Yes,” said Kermit; “as Mrs. Heron stood, please, with your back to the mirror.”
Again the shuffling, the conjurer smuggling, and again, after a muffled click or so, Kermit reappeared.
“I believe I can say the same of you. A perfect condition of vitality—at least,” he added, as he dismantled the camera emplacement and stacked the parts in their respective cases, “that is the impression I get very strongly.”
“You’ll let us see the photos, won’t you?” said the hostess.
“Certainly, certainly; the simple color ones I feel fairly certain of. As I said, the particular beauty of this place will, I feel sure, register well. But these last ones were more in the nature of an experiment. I’m not sure I will get any result, at least that can be shown.”
“Well, if you do, let us see.”
They parted, each side evidently content with the visit.
Chapter XI
Arnoldo’s chief interest, however, no longer lay in having an acceptable visitor able to come to the house and share scientific discussion. He was glad that Kermit was accepted but not anxious that he should come often, particularly because there might, in casual conversation, tend to appear a considerable discrepancy between the number of times Arnoldo had let it be understood that he was gone to visit the Hermit and the number of times the Hermit could remember being visited. But this slight risk was removed, as such risks often are, by another and more pressing one, and by the way this latter risk was avoided.
Arnoldo’s mind was full of the possibility of visiting Miss Gayton. Though he went, as was wise, to work in the upstairs laboratory, he did not work; he steadily daydreamed. He had never cared much for smoking, so his mother’s dislike of it did not vex him, but now as he sat fidgeting in his laboratory he found cigarette smoking did soothe him. For the first time the big, clean workroom and the clean linen in which he was dressed for work, did not seem to him a freedom from the frozen stylization of the rest of the house. On the contrary, it felt, of all places, now the most confining. As he got ready to ride he could think, as Joe caparisoned him, how Marion would admire his turn-out and recall that in a day or two she would see him.
On the day they had settled, a day on which she had no school, he dressed with his old enthusiasm, announced that he would take a long ride, probably call in at Kermit’s on his way back, and they might expect him in the evening. He rode off as though to go up into the hills. Then, when he had reached the abandoned olive grove, he followed her instructions and made a long detour through scrub-oak country and little glades over which occasional winter flood-rains had spread fans of gravel. At last he recognized the turning point she had told him to look for, a new concrete culvert meant to channel the cloudburst rains. Following this, he came to a small arch which spanned it. There was visible a line which evidently marked the limit of some real-estate layout. A canter along this through a glade of oaks led to where, at right angles, a small road ended. Yes, there was the house she had described as hers. He dismounted and led his horse to the fence which made her back yard a small garden hemmed off from the trees.
She was waiting for him, gave the mare a couple of apples as he fastened the bridle to the fence gate, and led the way into the house.
“No one would come out as far as this,” she said. “Even the crank who built it, left it. I thought I was lucky—now I know I was.” Then, rather quickly, “Even the mail is delivered to a box well down this road and after it’s turned off toward the town.”
It was, he thought, one of the happiest days he could remember. They were secret, secure, sufficient. True, the little house was a queer, cramped setting for their type of romance—they who were to be the expression of a spacious elegance, but, at least for the present, they were enough in themselves. And it was not too solemn; indeed, it was great fun.
“You mustn’t disarrange my cravat, or let a drop of coffee fall on my buckskins, or even leave powder on the velvet collar or fingerprints on the gilt of my buttons. Joe, my mirror-valet, would detect these little blurs on my bandbox brightness and know that his work of art had been tampered with!”
They laughed. Time changed softly into top-gear. He told her not only of what he thought a life of style should be, how art should and could be present in every detail. He spoke of his scientific research.
“I’d like to help.”
“Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do part of the work here.”
It made the affair less specifically an “affair” if they shared work, and scientific work, as well as art. He had not ceased to need as many reasons as possible for anything he did.
“I’m checking up on the radiation output of certain new tubes. It would help quite a lot if you could do part of the work that’s just record-keeping. They’ll run on the house current.”
He told her of his philosophy, or that collection of milling thoughts which, as they circled in his mind, gave him the impression of having thought things out or around.
“We’re all looking for some complete expression,” he said, “but it can’t be found in a moment. It’s a matter of refining down—of streamlining, in fact,” he said, looking down at his clean-cut garments. “Gradually, as we cut back and pare away, we find what we are looking for—the essential, structural, salient lines.”
“Finally the line,” she said.
He was pleased that she had followed him, but did not want her to go too far.
“We must have touch and tact and feel our way and know where to stop.”
Again she was intelligently willing to take his point and lead: “Someone told me,” she recalled, “that there were occasions when they had to take away a marble from Rodin. He would have gone on carving, graving, polishing until nothing would have been left.”
They laughed again.
Indeed, it was so easy a day that even when they were discussing his theories of life, most of their conversation was light, hardly needing to be spoken; most of the sentences could be “smiled off.”
He kept, though, a certain sense that time was passing, which is perhaps easy for a person who never wholly lives in one world, or in one present. He was not going to spoil his day by having to hurry home, arrive late, not have time to relax but feel during dinner nervous and suspicious of Irene’s suspicion. Always his chief pleasure had been recollection: the actual moment was too tense, too full of irrelevant detail which, he could not compose around the central experience. He was determined to avoid having the bouquet of this event spoiled b
y having to “bolt” it. He told her well in advance, arranged to send her a typewritten note about the next meeting, brushed himself down, and went out of the house.
The mare was a little restless and, when he was mounted, showed her impatience by a good deal of prancing. Even when, to give her more room, he wheeled her round and let her come out into the roadway from the woodland edge where she might have knocked him against a tree, she flung up her heels a bit and finally, out of high spirits, neighed loudly. As he circled around on her before she broke off into a gallop toward the woodland, he had had a glimpse right down the road to where it turned to join the thoroughfare. In that moment he saw, passing across the opening, a small worn car. It was some distance away but there was no doubt of it, and looking out of it, up in their direction, was Doc the mailman.
“What silly luck!” he said to himself angrily. “And if I can recognize him inside that weatherbeaten car, how much will he have recognized me, mounted and fitted as I am! And he’ll know what I’m doing up in this corner! Damn!”
He gave the horse a sharp cut and galloped off, only waving to Marian.
Yet as he sat at dinner in the ultra-civilized setting where he was placed as master, it seemed silly to drop an affair simply because a gossip might report on it. On the other hand, why spoil everything just because of wanting a little more? He could meet her in the olive grove; that was safe. He revolved the cut-glass stem of his wine glass between his thumb and finger, feeling the sharp prism edges blunted to his touch through the kidskin, watching the red reflection of the wine thrown like a bloodstain on the white of his hand.
Suddenly he thought of a way out. Why had it not occurred to him before? He became bright and entertaining. Mrs. Heron was happy. It was a delightful evening. He asked her to play—when had he last done that?—turned over her music, himself volunteered to sing a ballad; he hardly ever sang, though he had that easy kind of Italian tenor which she liked. She had wanted him to have lessons. But always his self-consciousness about being managed, educated, “produced,” together with his laziness, gave him sufficient reasons for refusing. This evening, though, she was as happy as he had been that afternoon. He sat up with her, asked her to take a stroll out in the moonlight along the formal garden. When they came in she was tired.