EAST OF EDEN

I was with Twining when it happened. Nothing but that--actual presence on the spot--could give me the right to tell the tale; for, untypical as it is, irrelevant, unique, unexpected, to sit at home and imagine it would be merely morbid. Some people may think it morbid to relate it, in any case. To such I can only say that facts need no apology. The thing occurred. What is morbid is the comment of the people very far away who never understood. I was there; day by day, by his side, I saw him through it, and I can honorably assert that Twining was sincere to the core, honest to the bitter end. Though why chosen for this peculiar destiny, I have never been able to guess.

Since my day they have set a statue on the Kingsborough campus that is an adequate portrait of Roger Twining’s type. I don’t know what it calls itself, but it is a young athlete, half in a gown, half out of it, with a football under his arm and hockey shoes on his feet, with a Bible and tennis racquets heaped vaguely against him--a symbolic presentment, I take it, of young Kingsborough going forth to preach the Gospel to every creature. A very nice person, that statue, but too heterogeneously equipped. Twining, to the life: if he could once have got his Polynesians to play basket-ball, he could have gone on, I believe, to expound the Pauline epistles to them with fluent ease. For he was not a fool, and he was the best fellow in the world. Only, you see, by Twining’s time at Kingsborough (he graduated a few years after I did) they had completely canalized religion between Y. M. C. A. embankments. No one cared about categorical imperatives any more--not even Tug Lambert when he was drunk. The statue is the expression of the Kingsborough spirit which moulded Twining. For the very special trick life was going to play him, he was a little handicapped by all those implements of sport. They didn’t fit his fate. Variety without complication--“muscular,” all of it. And Roger Twining was to be an optimist caught by the Furies, a lad by no means Prometheus chained to the Promethean rock. If it weren’t for the old Kingsborough clannishness, I should be tempted to say that he was the seat of a terrific tempest--and was himself only teapot size. But, then, I have always stuck to the categorical imperative; and, while it is an open question in my mind whether you can ever really convert a heathen, I am quite sure that you cannot convert him with basket-ball. In that I side with Aunt Miriam.

Twining himself felt something of it in those first discouraged days at his remote, incredible post, where, by mismanagement at home and the inopportune death on the high seas of the man who was to follow him at once, he was for a time in sole charge. (You will have made out, I hope, that he was a missionary.) As he put it to me petulantly one night on his big verandah, “If I could only have worked backward instead of forward, unlearned all the things a Christian child knows, acquired a totem instead of a diploma!” He was coming to realize, and not without regret, that basket-ball can never take the place of good, soul-shaking ritual. Besides, the natives would not play basket-ball. They preferred to spear fish, and get drunk of an evening, and smile as no Christian has ever smiled.

Now let me get to work and abridge for you the preluding weeks.

Pure Kingsborough clannishness led Twining, when he found me existing, tourist-fashion, in the best hotel on the island, to ask me to come up to the Mission and pay him a visit. Pure Kingsborough clannishness made it possible for me to accept; for, though we had plenty of common acquaintance, we had never known each other, and missionaries are not my tipple. They are like ginger-ale, neither intoxicating nor refreshing. I had been in twenty minds about accepting, and finally I went up to see for myself. Having seen, I stayed. The scene got me. I was new to the South Seas.

I shall never forget how I found Twining, that first day, when I went to return his visit. He was sitting on a palm-wreathed eminence, gazing fixedly down a forty-five-degree slant of vegetation, at the huddle of roofs whence I had climbed to his hill. Behind him, the wooden buildings of his new compound gashed the dense, illimitable green of the jungle. In a year or two the compound would be assimilated to the landscape; it would be caressed, covered, crept over, by innumerable vegetable parasites. But now it was a raw wound in the beauty of the forest. The town lay a few hundred feet below. Beyond the roofs were docks of a sort, and enough corrugated iron to prove that this paradise existed commercially. Then the boats, the reef, and the ocean which took up the tale of infinity where the jungle left it off. Twining sat there on his volcanic headland, staring; and as I approached, a little pile of cocoanuts toppled over on his left foot as he jerked it nervously. The Chinese boy who had guided me to his retreat disappeared with the merest grunt of announcement. Twining nodded, then picked up a cocoanut and flung it petulantly down the slant of vegetation, in the direction of the town. It grazed the green tree-tops for a second or two, then dipped through the branches of a breadfruit and fell, no doubt, to earth somewhere.

“A perfectly good cocoanut wasted,” I remarked, as I sat down beside him.

“I’d like to waste a few thousands,” he groaned. “It would be a darned good thing for these dwellers in Eden if they had to rustle a little more for a living. On my word, I sometimes envy Sherry Spencer over in China--rice-Christians and all. Sherry groans over the Oriental mind. Heavens! It’s something you can get your teeth into, anyhow, even if it bites back. These folk aren’t anything. They’re a law unto themselves. No, there’re not; they’re just a set of privileges unto themselves. Nature cockers them as if they were worth it.... Man, you can’t teach the Gospel to a bunch of people who don’t want anything they haven’t got. They don’t even regret the good old days of long pig.”

“Dying out, aren’t they?”

“Oh yes, and they’ll be Presbyterians when they’re dead, I shouldn’t wonder.” And he kicked the ruins of the cocoanut-heap with a white-canvas toe.

That was Twining’s state of mind when I first envisaged him and his situation. I did not reply; I leaned back and looked, taking my ease; for on this occasion I should have to decide whether or not to accept his invitation. He did not interrupt my contemplation, even by shying another cocoanut. I filled my eyes with the scene, my lungs with the air, my heart with all that uncomprehended exotic implication. The beauty was overpowering. Nothing that you could reasonably ask for was omitted from the landscape. Mountain, gorge, and valley were assembled in a hundred romantic contours; unseen torrents tinkled softly in my ears; the trees and flowers were those of an emperor’s dream. A cool, sweet trade-wind ruffled all that gorgeousness into life. And for the last fillip, the thatched roofs below, constant hint that you were on the threshold of something you could never hope to understand.... Down in the town were officials, commercial travellers, beach-combers, men “from Sydney” (sinister appellation), natives in corduroy trousers--dramatic, full of plot for comic opera or a shilling shocker. But I would eschew drama; I would live for a time on the unspoiled heights.

Had I but known it, I was like a man with weak nerves refusing Stevenson and taking to Sophocles. But I did not know.

“I’ll stay, thank you,” I said at last, and waved my hand inclusively to suggest that it was to Nature I succumbed.

“Ripping, isn’t it? I’m so glad you will,” was Twining’s rejoinder. His tone told me that he was glad, but the tribute to the scenery was merely conventional.

So I came up and stayed with Twining and his aunt Miriam at the Mission. I have, as well as I can, given you some inkling of Twining. You will know more about him later. I must not, I suppose, take time to expound Aunt Miriam, though I succumbed at once to her peculiarly American charm. It is enough here to define her externally--a woman of sixty-odd, with iron-gray hair, and a vast serenity which veiled her executive type. She was not Roger’s aunt; she and her husband had adopted Roger, who was an orphan, and it was her late husband, “Uncle Ephraim” (he, too, in his time, a Kingsborough man), who had destined Roger to the “foreign field.” Roger’s vocation was not spontaneous, you see; it was a form of gratitude, an earnest of devotion; and that is important. Aunt Miriam was there to see that he did his job; but she was especially and chiefly there to help him through the months of his novitiate, to keep his house until he got a wife (“helpmeet” was often Aunt Miriam’s word). Then she would go back to her sisters in Illinois, to whom she wrote long journal-letters. Aunt Miriam never went down the Mission hill to the town. She knitted endlessly, and made calico clothes for those native children whom the grim wolf with privy paw had not yet devoured. And she would sit for hours, her writing-pad on her lap, gazing at the summit of the volcanic headland where I first found Roger and had made my earth-shaking decision. We had people to dinner now and then, and I explored passes and ravines and caves while Roger was busy below us with dark souls that matched the dark skins.

I stayed with them, as retrospectively it seems to me, an unconscionably long time. I was a loafer, with my hands in my pockets, and I had never seen anything I liked so much as this. I sketched a little; I dipped into Twining’s folk-lore books; I bathed in cold mountain pools; I held Aunt Miriam’s wool for her to wind. The place enchanted me in no metaphorical sense. I can never hope to reproduce for you the unreality of that island and its beauty. It was out of the world as I conceived and knew the world; I hung, suspended in time, over the landscape of a dream. There was no past or future; no relation, no claim, no human plot. I might (as in childhood one dreams of doing) have been floating on cirrhus clouds or treading the Milky Way. That is why this story will never seem to me morbid.

From this fourth-dimensional world in which I moved and breathed I was awakened, after many weeks, by the entrance of the heroine. Even then I did not wake all at once, for the manner of her entrance was in keeping with the scene. We were dining that night, Roger and I, with the British consul, and we took a short cut through the jungle, instead of going round by road. The trail was well marked and well used, but even so, the wild guava clipped us close, and we tripped over the offspring of the patriarchal bamboos. As we tore down the last slant, she rose--materialized you might say--before our eyes: a white figure, rounding a huge palm-trunk and standing suddenly before us. She was laughing, under her wreath of orchids, and the juice of a half-eaten mango rippled lusciously over her right hand.

She made no pretence of not knowing us, or of introducing herself. She did not even say, “You are Mr. Twining and Mr. Malcolm, and I am Letitia Quayle, whom you are to meet at dinner.” She merely greeted and joined us. Nor did she apologize for the mango (which is a fruit without social virtues), though she threw it away.

I did not know, just at first, how it affected Twining, for I was busy feeling the pleasant shock of it to the full. She was artless and exquisite as a dryad or as Virginia on the sands of Mauritius. She came forward as if she belonged to us, as if we all belonged together in some naïf legend. She did not break the dream. She was natural as the mango that she flung away to rot beneath the bamboos. Perhaps I can describe better the effect of her apparition if I say that my mind suddenly became a reminiscent welter of _Atala_, _Typee_, and the like--though she was fair as a lily.

It was I who made foolish talk until we turned into the consular garden. Twining was dumb. Only as we climbed the steps of the verandah he turned to her and asked, “Do you ever wear blue?”

“Constantly.” And the least shade of formality, of Europeanism, crept over her face.

“I thought so.” He turned away and walked up to the consul.

My thoughts veered sharply to Aunt Miriam, above. Perhaps the “helpmeet” was nearer than she thought. Roger was pale, his dark eyes had recaptured their lost fervor, and an immortal curiosity sharpened his fine features. Mentally, I withdrew on the spot. I devoted myself to that eminent scientist, Professor Quayle, fellow of every society that exists for the purpose of discovering the skeleton in the racial closet. It was worth while. He was eclectic, as the great scientists are; he knew a lot about anthropology, and could see the humor of a dinosaur. His talk was delightful; negligently challenged by our host, he became the Scheherazade of the Stone Age. Also he had been everywhere--scientists are the pampered children of our generation--and his metaphors were as good as his facts. If this be “shop,” I thought, let me never hear anything else. Letitia had accompanied him to many places far from trade centres, and joined in with eager anecdotes. A curious education, I reflected, as I listened to her. She had never been to Paris or Rome, but she was intimate with sharks and fruit-eating bats, and the Falls of the Zambesi were to her a more familiar name than Niagara. Fair, very fair, her blond hair growing in a widow’s peak; young with the very essence of youth; a child, not of cosmopolis, but of the planet. I let my eyes dwell on her in sheer pleasure, this girl of strictly Saxon featuring, whose familiar allusions were to places, people, food, and customs that I had never heard of. The only drawback to my irresponsible delight (for, remember, I had withdrawn while yet there was time--had taken a great backward leap before I reached the threshold) was Roger’s silence. Though I had never witnessed the phenomenon before, I knew what it was and what it meant: the stored experience of the race had taught me this thing which I had never seen--as you would recognize an earthquake the first time you felt it. Love at first sight was its name; even before we reached the consular garden Roger had handed over the key. So much beauty lies buried for me in that South Sea isle to which I shall never return, and the most beautiful of all things in that isolated dream, I now feel, was the suddenness and completeness of Roger Twining’s surrender to the miracle. They step through the pages of the great fairy-tales--the Dantes, the Romeos, the Siegfrieds--and we watch and listen, and are moved to tears, and go away disbelieving. But once in a thousand moons Life makes the incomparable gesture for herself; and I shall always thank God, in spite of everything, that I have seen love burst into complete flower in a single instant.

Letitia? Well, she was a woman; she had her little part to play; and, that evening, after his hoarse question (“Do you ever wear blue?” How it rings, sinister in my ears, but sweet!) she played it. But he saw her first stepping out of the forest as Virginia. Letitia Quayle was complicated, yes. But what is more complicated than a flower? We prate of the simplicity of Nature by way of disparaging the poor little nursery subtleties of civilization. We are great fools. Letitia Quayle was simple as a rose; and let the botanists say how simple that is. Now you see what I mean. She was idyllically natural--and very complex. She bloomed and glowed with perfect fitness at the heart of that tropic jungle; she surprised us no more than a butterfly. But--simple? I stick to my own theory.

In spite of her initial playing of the part, Letitia came to Roger Twining very naturally. Professor Quayle was due to stay for a month, investigating coral formations. Aunt Miriam lifted Letitia bodily from the hospitalities below and carried her up to the Mission headland. I do not know how else to put it, though of course Mrs. Twining never stirred from the compound. There seemed to be no formal invitations; simply, Aunt Miriam expected her, and she came. Roger and I would take her back, late in the evening, after dinner. Mrs. Twining had seen, as I had seen, and she wanted to be sure. I do not think it occurred to her that Miss Quayle would refuse Roger. Nor did it occur to me, though never was courtship less like courtships at home. Roger showed less ardor than absorption; he went about the business of life as though Letitia were the air he breathed. He took her, you would say, calmly; but she was the basis of existence. When she was not there, he seemed to suffer dumbly, like an animal. I could swear that for a fortnight he spoke no word to her; yet if he had been visibly on his knees, his attitude could not have been clearer. His Polynesians got drunk in peace, those days.

And Letitia? No girl in my world has ever treated a lover, declared or undeclared, as she treated Roger. She turned to him for everything. We picnicked in deep, vine-hung ravines above frigid and shadowed pools; and I have seen her, without coquetry, without affectation, bend her head forward to drink from a cup he held, or feed him a rose apple with her own fingers. They clambered down exotic trails hand in hand, and stood together like children to gaze at a waterfall. Not a hint of passion; only that beautiful and calm clinging to each other. My constant presence did not embarrass them; if it was Arden, I was their faithful fool. Do you wonder that my dream was so long undisturbed, or that, in spite of all that came after, I look back upon it as the most beautiful thing in life--a thing (sometimes I desperately feel) that fate should never have dared to touch?

The wonder of it is, of course, that that fortnight could ever have been. Even I, completely obsessed with the notion that we were existing outside of history, knew that it could not last like this. A breath suffices to destroy so delicate a beauty. I knew the breath would come. Even in tales, it always does. We pay tribute forever to the Eumenides.

All those enchanted days, Aunt Miriam said nothing. She left Letitia to Roger and to me--though Letitia spent many an hour by Aunt Miriam’s side, and God knows what they talked of. That Aunt Miriam’s was not the first disturbing breath, I know. Sixty years of self-control had made Aunt Miriam a marvel of a woman. She was, in this case, the more of a marvel that she had no romance in her. I have been bitter, very bitter, about it all; but, strangely enough, never, in my most sky-defying moods, bitter against Aunt Miriam.

The disturbing breath came, as I knew it would and must; came when Roger Twining’s cup spilled over and his passion declared itself. Disturbing, at first, only in the sense that the manner of perfection changed; that the tenderness quickened and flashed and kindled into a romance so poignant that my eyes smarted in beholding it. By what slow gradations or what swift transmutation, known only to their inmost selves, it came, I cannot say. Though two people were never more meetly chaperoned, they were sometimes alone; and I fancy that change could have become conscious only when they were together in solitude. They came back hand in hand from the volcanic headland where I had first found Roger petulantly staring, and ranged themselves like decorous children before Aunt Miriam and me. The flaming sunset was behind them; the sudden twilight was already darkening the remoter corners of the verandah. Hand in hand, with soft, awe-struck voices, they told us that they were going to be married. It was the gentlest climax I have ever known, yet I felt as if something perfect had passed away. The marvel, as I have said before, was that the previous fortnight could ever have been. Roger Twining fell manfully in love at sight; nothing but the perfect concord of the two creatures could have kept him like a child with her just so long as she wanted to be a child. You pay for concord like that between man and woman--pay with sacrifices laid on the immemorial altar of sex. Love itself is a fever; and, as if that were not enough, the irrelevant world steps in to point out that marriage is a practical matter. With love announced, the world, the flesh, and the devil troop in. Small wonder that priests bolster marriage up with sacraments!

As luck would have it, Professor Quayle had gone, in a motor-boat, to cruise for a few days among outlying uninhabited islands and far reefs whence he could gather polypi at will. Letitia was under the nominal chaperonage of the British consul’s wife, but it had been arranged that she should spend a night or two at the Mission. To this Aunt Miriam now objected. Letitia must not be her guest, she told Roger, until Professor Quayle had sanctioned the betrothal. The flesh had come in, you see, already, and here was the world. The devil got his innings later. Roger affected to be shocked by the conventions--what true lover is not shocked by them?--but Aunt Miriam was adamant. Letitia succumbed dumbly, like a hurt child. It seemed wanton cruelty to part them. That Professor Quayle should refuse Roger was incredible. It was mere superstition, vain as any _tabu_. I took it upon myself to tell Mrs. Twining this; but she did not move a hair’s breadth from her position. Until Letitia’s father could give his consent, she would not have Letitia under her roof as Roger’s betrothed. She owed it to Professor Quayle. So we took Letitia down to the town again, instead of keeping her with us on the heights.

The prohibition was purely formal, as even Aunt Miriam admitted, and Letitia was at liberty to come each morning and “spend the day.” So few of those days of prohibition there were--only three, all told, between the engagement and Professor Quayle’s return. Yet, with their atmosphere of trial, of waiting, we seemed to be taking something indefinite, equivocal, painful, into our lungs with each breath we drew. Gone was the happy oxygen of the idyllic fortnight. Sometimes I gazed up at the low-hung stars and clenched my fists and vowed it shouldn’t pass; that one instant should suffice for Quayle’s consent, and that then Letitia and Roger should wander back hand in hand, for a time, to their Eden. I, their faithful fool, would stand guard between them and the world. Curiously, you see, I did not crave an immediate marriage for them; I craved, rather, a return of the uncapturable days. Nothing had ever been so beautiful as the fortnight of their idyll. Nothing--I set it down with an unflinching pen--ever has been. I stand committed to that.

They stuck--the dears!--more closely to Aunt Miriam during those days. The world and the flesh, as I was saying, had got in their work. They were not so happy as they had been, though love was in every sweet and modest gesture. I knew--don’t ask me how--that they themselves (even as I, the spectator) were looking back rather than forward. Better, infinitely, marriage than this; but, oh, best of all, the unreal days forever past. Their ardor was the tenderest thing imaginable. Even Roger seemed only to want Letitia’s hand to hold--quietly, peacefully, in our presence. It was not mawkish, for there was no ulterior suggestion in that simple, mutual caress. Friends, you would have said, if friends ever had just that hunger. But I knew better than that, for my room was next to Roger’s, and I knew how he paced his wide porch, sleepless, through the night, and how he was never himself again until the morning when Letitia came stepping through the garden, bringing calm with her. They were bad, those three days of the professor’s absence, but so cunningly arranged that each hour was tolerable, almost desirable, compared with the one that followed it. In all that stillness and sweetness, events progressed with catastrophic speed. It seemed as though an unseen hurricane drove us on, though the Trade never ceased its gentle rhythm.

It was the second evening, and the last savored hour before Letitia must descend to the hospitality of the consul’s wife. Mrs. Twining stirred the scented air with some faint rebuke of Roger for neglect of duty. He answered, defending himself. Then Aunt Miriam turned to Letitia to make her peace.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t go down to the school to-morrow, my dear. You can’t know too soon about the work that you will share if you marry Roger.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t.” The girl stopped, as if to find a tone even gentler than that first murmur of hers. “You see, I don’t believe any of it.”

Aunt Miriam gave no sign of what must have been to her a terrible shock. A strong woman, very. “You mean that you are not a Christian, Letitia?”

“A Christian? Oh no. I’ve never been to any church. Father has no religion, and of course I think as he does.”

“You poor child!”

It must have been Letitia Quayle’s beauty that wrung this groan from Mrs. Twining, for on matters of faith she was uncompromising. I felt sick.

“Did you know this, Roger?” His aunt turned to him.

“It never occurred to me to tell him.” Letitia threw in. “Does it matter, Roger?”

Twining answered, slowly, heavily, “Not the least bit in the world, my dear.”

“You see.” The girl turned to Mrs. Twining. “He says it doesn’t matter.”

“But, Letitia”--Aunt Miriam faltered for an instant, then went on--“how could you, an atheist, marry a Christian missionary? A wife must be a helpmeet.”

I breathed more easily now that the fatal word was out; it had not been pronounced before, and it was inevitable that some time it should be.

“I was brought up on all those books Roger has in there. I couldn’t believe the Christian religion--though of course it is a very nice religion. I didn’t know I should have to teach it. I knew Roger would have to, but I supposed I should just stay at home and love him.” Then, with a stifled desperation (but all so gentle--_pianissimo_): “I haven’t thought about marriage much. I’ve only thought about Roger. And--forgive me, Mrs. Twining--if Roger doesn’t mind, need you? He is a missionary himself, you see. He must know best.” Then she tried for mirth. “If Roger throws me over--why, then, we shan’t have to bother with asking father, shall we? It will all be out of the way before he gets back.”

Roger leaned over and grasped Letitia’s hand. Mrs. Twining rose from her deep chair and paced the wide verandah once, twice, three times the length of it. Then she stopped before the pair and spoke, and I knew she was trying not to sound harsh:

“Roger will convert you.”

The two young things started. They had already had time to forget.

“Oh no, I shan’t, Aunt Miriam. I don’t want her different in any way.”

I, of course, said nothing. The idyll was spoiling slowly before my eyes, attacked first here, then there, by insidious, destructive agents. But the hero and heroine were perfect still. How long would it be before the poison ate in--reached the heart of the idyll, and them?

That night I had two sleepless housemates, I knew; I could hear Aunt Miriam walking about her room. Mrs. Twining was a strong woman. She said nothing to me; she bade Roger good-bye when he went off to the school as naturally as if his religious integrity were not threatened. She greeted Letitia with a serenity that was almost sweetness. Only I, perhaps, knew how deep was her disturbance, for I caught her replacing _Primitive Paternity_ on Roger’s shelves with a little disgusted push. I did not know but that she might call on me to be devil’s advocate; to expound to her how one might be non-Christian and yet not heathen. But apparently she was waiting for Quayle’s return before making any move. Twining himself, that day, seemed untroubled. He had not yet awakened from his dream. Letitia, too, seemed unconscious. It was only Aunt Miriam and I who, under a sunny sky, put up helpless hands against the coming storm. I was not shocked, as she was, by Letitia’s non-religiousness. It hit me in quite another place. Roger Twining was not any too enamoured of his profession, as I well knew; it might be that Letitia would ruin it utterly in his eyes. And if Uncle Ephraim (stout old son of Kingsborough) was a portentous ghost to me, who had never seen him, what must he be to Roger, bowed down under his burden of gratitude--and to Aunt Miriam, who had been flesh of his flesh and soul of his sturdy soul? Only three days before, I had walked in Eden with the untroubled pair. And already my fourth-dimensional world was receding into the original myth. The slow sun gave no sign; but the moon, past the full and rising later each evening, seemed to be marking off the stages of the legend. That very night we should sit in darkness, and we should escort Letitia home, each of us with a lantern in his hand.... Believe me, the moon is the real timekeeper; it is she who marks our human intervals.

It came very suddenly, that night, as we sat looking at the stars. By “it” I mean--oh, it is very hard to tell--the real irruption of the devil, perhaps. The world and the flesh, with their simultaneous utterance of the word “marriage,” had had their turn, and they had not been able to shatter the dream. The devil came in, I suppose, with Letitia’s paganism (if you can call it that); but that was only his formal entrance, his conventional cue. We were all breathing a little hard, but we were not without hope. There was a deep plot among us--the only time we four conspired together--to put off consideration of the problem, to pretend that there was no problem. Even Aunt Miriam, with a quiet hand on Letitia’s knee, seemed to be waiting for it to solve--or dissolve--itself. But the devil had made a good entrance. He was in fine form, I may say. None of us helped him, but he did not need our help.

Letitia, as if with a half-thought of explaining herself, of showing the decency of her impious up-bringing, had given us a wandering narrative of her youth. Mrs. Quayle had died when Letitia was ten. Since then, her life had been the interesting and curious thing I have earlier hinted at. Her stress was not, as it had first been, on the exotic side of that wandering life; rather, I thought, on the important things Professor Quayle had done, and the distinguished friends they had had in every part of the globe. But Letitia was not herself interested--she was incapable of “side”--and Aunt Miriam asked no eager questions. She had clasped Letitia’s hand in hers firmly, as if she would hold her bodily back from Heathenesse. Roger had Letitia’s other hand, and so they sat.

Then I was startled by Roger’s voice, seeming to come from very far away, from the inmost recesses of the dream in which he walked:

“Do you ever wear blue, Letitia?”

It was the first question he had ever asked her. It brought back to me all the savor of that woodland miracle when we had met her, garlanded, in the forest, and Virginia had flung away her dripping mango unashamed.

“Often. Do you want me in a blue frock?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll put one on to-morrow. White is what I like best. But why?”

Her tone had changed, as it always changed when she spoke to Roger, and his when he spoke to her. They seemed to strike the same note; their voices mingled; it had nothing to do with the gamut they kept for the rest of the world.

“It’s your widow’s peak, I think. I used to play with a little girl who wore blue and had yellow hair in a widow’s peak. I was very fond of her. What was her name, Aunty?”

Letitia laughed. “Yes, what was her name?”

Mrs. Twining seemed to rouse herself from deafness. “What is it, my dear?”

“The girl I used to play with, who had yellow hair and a widow’s peak, and always wore blue?”

Aunt Miriam answered, slowly, “It must have been Mabel Cheyne, Roger.”

“I remember Minnie Cheyne. She wasn’t like that.”

“Mabel was her little sister who died. You played with her in the very beginning. I am surprised that you remember her.”

“I don’t, very well. It must have been very far back, when I was tiny. I can’t say I really remember Mabel, but I do remember the widow’s peak and the blue dress. Did I go to her funeral?”

“Of course not!” Mrs. Twining’s voice was sharp. “You were far too young to go to funerals. We went, of course. She was a pretty child, and, in your baby way, you were very fond of her. You soon got over it, of course.”

“It is odd that I should remember. But you know I’ve always liked widow’s peaks, uncannily, since Mabel--if that was her name. And she must have had blue dresses.”

“And you want me to wear blue in memory of her?” Letitia was totally without coquetry, I knew, but I thought she would be amused. There was no amusement in her tone, however--only a blank meekness.

“I don’t really care a bit. Only, somehow, blue fits with your hair. I seem to see it that way.”

Mrs. Twining turned to her. “He used to play with Mabel every day--such babies they were. In some queer way, it made an impression.” It was almost as if she were apologizing for Roger’s vagaries.

“As if I cared a hang, dear!” His tone was the Letitia tone again, pure and full--the tone he kept for her. Then I heard it sunk to a whisper. “For me, you are forever and forever in white.” I don’t think Mrs. Twining heard. She had turned her head away from them.

Though we longed for the moon, she did not rise, and Letitia bravely made ready to go. A little breeze had sprung up from the forest, and the scent of ginger struggled with the frangipani in our nostrils. The stars were very clear. We were all loath, in our own way, I think, to let the moment go. Far down the tree-smothered slope to the east, a native voice rose through our silence, piercing it with melancholy song--some late farer from a feast, winding up a green trail to his village.

“Your father comes back to-morrow?” It was Aunt Miriam who asked it, her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“By ten in the morning, he said.”

Aunt Miriam kissed her good-night. “I’ll go down and see him, and fetch you back with me, if he’ll let me.”

“You? And why not I?” Roger broke in.

“You’ll be busy, my dear, in the morning. Your work--your calling--your sacred task--must come first of all. Your people mustn’t think you put even Letitia”--she kissed the girl--“before them. Of course you will see Professor Quayle--but I must see him, too. Your uncle would have wished it done in that way.” There was no gainsaying her tone.

“Can’t I bring father up to you?” Even Letitia knew that Mrs. Twining never left the Mission.

“My dear, I stand in my husband’s place. I must go to him for Roger. And you children must start at once. It is late, I’m afraid. Good-night.” She clasped the girl to her, then kissed Roger and went into the house.

I was privately amused that Mrs. Twining’s conservatism should choose to take, in this instance, so European a form. The gesture didn’t “go” with her, but her firmness did, and I saw afresh how Roger was both supported and handicapped. Wonderful Aunt Miriam!

We stood, the three of us, looking at the stars for a moment before starting down the trail. A faint radiance in the east showed that the moon was on her way to us. How I wish we had waited for her--defied the world, the flesh, and the devil; prolonged that moment, and seen her rise! But we did not. We plunged into the forest on our downward path--I in front, like a link-boy; Letitia and Roger (the darlings!), hand in hand, behind me. My heart was very light over the little matter of creeds; they were so beautiful, those two, together. That, of course, was the devil getting well down to his part--my lightness of heart, I mean.

The next day was, as it were, the last; and I hardly know how to chronicle it for you. I will at least leave out every irrelevant thing, though it was packed, wilfully, with irrelevancies. The native boy who came running to Roger at dawn, because his father was dying; the snake I killed after breakfast in the garden; the sudden shower that came drenchingly down and delayed Mrs. Twining’s expedition to the town--all those things were irrelevant, though they figured in the general irritation of our hearts. Personally, I could hardly wait for the old ex-chief to die, leaving Roger free, or until Aunt Miriam should return, leading Letitia as a bride. I could not read; it was too wet to stroll; I was of no use to any human being. The time seemed very long before Mrs. Twining came back from her unusual journey--gray as wood-ash, and without Letitia. Roger had not yet returned.

She faced me as I met her at the steps, then flung up her hands above her noble head, and passed by me without speaking. Inside the house I heard one low groan. I rushed to her, for I was frightened. “Take care of Roger. Keep him away from me,” she said, in a voice that sounded rusty with age, and passed on to her own room. I heard the key turn.

When Roger did come back, an hour later, exhausted and eager, I could not help him. Letitia had not come. His aunt was locked in her own room, and a terrible silence brooded over the scene. Even Loo seemed to be performing his tasks in a vacuum, for I had neither seen nor heard him.

Roger got admittance to Mrs. Twining’s room, and I spent the longest half-hour I have ever lived, while I waited for him on the headland amid the cocoa-palms, looking out to sea. I say “waited.” I had no knowledge of whether he would come to me; but there I could be either reached or avoided, and even a madman would know that I was discreetly out of earshot of the house.

Finally Roger stood before me, white from head to foot--even his face and his hands were white as the linen he wore. I held out my hand; he took it, and with sudden violence pulled me to my feet. The devil had got in his work.

“Has she told you?”

“Nothing.” I was trembling--physically, I mean. But the young athlete before me stood like a rock.

“Will you go down at once and see Letitia?”

“For God’s sake, go yourself!” I did not know what was the matter, but I felt sure that neither man nor woman, neither science nor creed, could withstand Roger Twining when he looked like that.

“She lied to me last night.”

“Who? What?”

“Aunt Miriam. About Mabel Cheyne.”

“Mabel Cheyne?” I had forgotten the name. I tried to pull my hand from his, to get far enough away from him to focus him, to define his aberration. But his hand was a trap for mine.

“There was no Mabel Cheyne.”

“What of it?”

“Letitia is my sister.”

I sank back so suddenly that, involuntarily, he let me go. There was nothing to add to that statement; no need to trace its birth and growth from Aunt Miriam’s sudden fear, the night before, to the corroboration she had received that morning from Professor Quayle. No need to assemble the evidence; it had been assembled, put together, with tense accuracy, by two suffering, gray-haired people that morning.

Roger Twining had no great desire for speech, I could see. But a few more words were wrung from him: “Letitia never knew until to-day that she was an orphan, that she had been adopted. I’m older. I remembered her, you see, without realizing. You must go to her and talk to her, I am going off to be alone.” And he turned from me toward the forest. Just once he looked back: “Don’t be afraid; I’ll be back in a few hours. Not to lunch. I don’t want any.” He disappeared among the huge breadfruit-trees.

I didn’t go to Letitia. I would in time, I thought, if Roger insisted; but not now, not until I had some notion of what to say. I felt, too, that I must not leave at once. I did not wish to go farther away from Roger, or farther away from Mrs. Twining. Each pulled me with invisible cords, as though I were their defender. When I could think of ten words I could say to Letitia Quayle without touching on a raw wound, I would go. Just now I could not stir.

All sense of time left me. In my retreat I was blind to the sun that might have told me how the hours were passing. Forward and back, forward and back, I went in my dreary mind, from one impossible course of action to another. All through those hours I grew at once more inert and more ashamed of my inertia. My will rose with great gasps to lift me from where I sat; then fell back paralyzed before this or that clear perception of my helplessness. It was the heat of early afternoon, penetrating my high palm roof, that drove me back at last to the house.

Luncheon lay on the table, untasted and undisturbed, hardened into a disgusting effigy of food. Mrs. Twining met me in another room. Her face was drawn and twisted, as though she had had a “stroke,” but she spoke clearly:

“Where is Roger?”

I shrugged my shoulders vaguely. “Safe--off there, somewhere--alone.”

“Go and find him.”

This seemed to be just the urge I needed. I started off obediently. She must have divined that I knew, for as I left the porch she said, in a very low voice:

“I knew there was a little sister, though until to-day I never knew who took her. But when Roger remembered, last night, I suddenly grew afraid. Just for an instant they looked alike. So I lied.”

I walked slowly, hardly directing my footsteps, except that of course I went the way I had seen Roger go. My feet dragged; but by this time my brain was blessedly numb, and I was no longer afraid to present myself with my errand undone. I had lost the sense of faithlessness to duty.

I found him at last beside the musical waterfall, in the deep-shaded, vine-hung ravine. He had wandered back to that scene of passionate innocence, and now sat by the pool where, a few days before, I had seen her drink from the cup he held. He did not question me as I sat down beside him; in silence, in our respective ways, we pieced together the rent fragments of that most beautiful dream. We must both have been very tired, for Twining did not speak at all and I found my eyes drowsily closing to match that blessed anæsthesia of the spirit. The only sounds I heard were the unchanging sounds of Nature, and the remembered voices of my two friends at play in Eden. I saw the green dazzle of leaves, the tender vividness of blossoms, and, now and then, moving as by right among those natural sweetnesses, the white figure of Letitia. I must almost have dreamed in earnest, for during a little space of time I recaptured the unrecapturable. It was as it had been, and we were happy, out of the world.

Finally Roger stirred violently, and I shook myself awake to see him standing, with that face of rock, beside me, staring. Just for a moment I thought it was a dream come true, for, though the things about me were sharp with reality, Letitia stood there before us in the flesh, and spoke--the same white Letitia who had come to us laughing from behind a palm-tree.

“I ran away,” she said, very quietly. “Father doesn’t know. I thought you would be here. So I came, straight.”

She smiled at me--wonderful child!--and held out her hand to Roger. The blood came back into his face, but he did not take her hand. He folded his arms instead, and bent his dark eyes on the ground.

The girl shook her head very sadly, and smiled more sadly still. “May I sit down?” And she went to the rock where she had sat drinking from the cup he held.

If I had not been able to obey Roger’s earlier command to go and talk to Letitia Quayle, I could still less talk to her there, before him. I turned, in silence, to go up the trail down which the white figure had just come.

“Don’t go.” She stopped me. “Roger and I don’t mind. And I’d rather you would hear what I have to say. It’s better so. Come, Roger, sit down.”

She placed me, by her tone, where they had always tacitly placed me in the days now so diabolically reproduced. I was again their faithful fool. She did not touch him, but she beckoned him to sit near her. To my surprise, he sank down in the exact spot she pointed to. I drew off to a little distance, my heart near to breaking.

“Father means to take me away on the _Rarotonga_ to-morrow,” she said, “and of course he didn’t think I’d want to see you again. But I had to say good-bye, didn’t I?”

She tucked her feet up under her like a little girl, and, like a little girl, began plaiting the fronds of a fern. Roger still had not spoken. I did not wonder. How could he speak to a child like that of the dark things that lay between them? What words could he use? And as I looked once more, stealthily, at him, my pity gushed out afresh; for he, too, seemed unready for life, a beautiful young body with soul scarce budded. Yet if he had been the unformed lad I felt him, he would have stretched out his hand and taken hers--as of old.

“It is good-bye, Roger, dear, I suppose.” She had thrown off her hat, and now she bent her head so low over her frond-weaving that I could not see the little peak of hair. “And never again, until we are very old....” Oh, how softly her words came, scarce audible above the waterfall! “I didn’t know anything could hurt so. But we’re hurt together. That’s one thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s one thing.” It was the first time he had spoken, but his voice struck the very note of hers. I turned my head away.

“You won’t even take my hand, will you?” she went on, in her gentle, wondering tone.

He shook his head.

I got up softly, meaning to leave them--to lose myself, at least, just beyond in the trail. I could not endure to be there. A terrible altar was slowly being raised by that secret waterfall; terrible as the altar that legend said had once abided in that spot. It was not meant for me to see the rearing of that sacrificial stone.

But Letitia held me with a gesture of her little hand. “No, you must not go. We must not be alone. I ran away.... It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Then you must come with me.” I knew only that this poignancy must not be prolonged.

“I will.” And she got up, flinging her fronds away. “Good-bye, Roger.” She did not hold out her hand. He stood five paces away from her, his leaden eyes still seeking the ground.

“Not just my hand--once?” she pleaded with him.

And again he shook his head.

“Because it _is_ good-bye.”

Nothing broke the silence.

Then suddenly she moved to his side--close to him, although she did not touch him. I heard her voice change utterly. I saw her face flush, and her eyes draw his unwilling eyes to her. “Because--listen, Roger--if you choose, I’ll stay forever. I don’t understand anything; I don’t believe anything; and nothing they say makes any difference. I love you better than the whole world, or what you call God, or anything. No one is real but you--the rest is just what people get out of books!”

She had flung her head back as she spoke, and I saw her face unforgettably there before me--changed as her voice was changed, the face of a woman hard beset, tragic with passion, beautiful with utter unconsciousness of self. The rite was being accomplished before me. I stood, rooted.

Then Roger Twining did a strange thing. He leaned to her and passed his shaking hand over her beautiful, ageless face as you would pass your hand over a mask. She closed her eyes to his touch, bending forward in complete docility. When he took his hand away, she opened her eyes and smiled up at him as she had smiled of old. The face that had leaped out at us as from an immemorial dark myth was gone, and there again stood the fresh apparition of the forest.

“Good-bye, Letitia. Malcolm will take you back. Good-bye, dear.” And Roger grew young again before my eyes, a boy, biting his lips not to cry.

“Good-bye!” Her voice chimed in with his, and I led her away from the storied spot. Before the bushes closed over us I looked back once. Roger was lying face down on the ground, his shoulders heaving. Letitia’s eyes inquired of mine.

“He’s all right, dear,” I soothed her. “I’ll take care of him. It’s just hell for a little. Don’t look back. Don’t do anything that would be cruel to him.”

I spoke as to a child, and like a child she followed me, unquestioningly, up the trail.