Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 50
“Surely they’ll get a rope up to us some way?”
Will knew as well as did the others that there was no way; but his speech struck the sullen heart of the chief with remorse. He turned. “I hope you’ll all forgive me for getting you up here.”
A sound, half sob, half giggle, came from the parched lips of Eugene Madrillon, as he patted Tom on the shoulder without speaking, and Crailey nodded quietly, then left the group and went to the eastern edge of the roof and looked out upon the crowd. Cummings dropped the line and sat down, burying his hot face in his arms, for they all saw that Vanrevel thought “it was no use,” but a question of a few minutes, and they would retreat across the gable and either jump or go down with the roof.
Since the world began, idle and industrious philosophers have speculated much upon the thoughts of men about to die; yet it cannot be too ingenuous to believe that such thoughts vary as the men, their characters, and conditions of life vary. Nevertheless, pursuant with the traditions of minstrelsy and romance, it is conceivable that young, unmarried men, called upon to face desperate situations, might, at the crucial moment, rush to a common experience of summoning the vision, each of his heart’s desire, and to meet, each his doom, with her name upon his lips.
An extraordinary thing occurred in the present instance, for, by means of some fragmentary remarks let fall at the time, and afterward recalled such as Tappingham Marsh’s gasping: “At least it will be on her father’s roof!” and from other things later overheard, an inevitable deduction has been reached that four of the five gentlemen in the perilous case herein described were occupied with the vision of the same person, to wit: Miss Elizabeth Carewe, “the last — the prettiest — to come to town!”
Crailey Gray, alone, spoke not at all; but why did he strain and strain his eyes toward that empty’ pedestal with the grotesque carvings? Did he seek Fanchon there, or was Miss Carewe the last sweet apparition in the fancies of all five of the unhappy young men?
The coincidence of the actual appearance of the lady among them, therefore seemed the more miraculous, when, wan and hopeless, staggering desperately backward to the gable-ridge, they heard a clear contralto voice behind them:
“Hadn’t you better all come down now?” it said.— “The stairway will be on fire before long.”
Only one thing could have been more shockingly unexpected to the five than that there should be a sixth person on the roof, and this was that the sixth person should be Miss Betty Carewe.
They turned, aghast, agape, chopfallen with astonishment, stunned, and incredulous.
She stood just behind the gable-ridge, smiling amiably, a most incongruous little pink fan in her hand, the smoke-wreaths partly obscuring her and curling between the five and her white dress, like mists floating across the new moon.
Was it but a kindly phantasm of the brain? Was it the incarnation of the last vision of the lost Volunteers? Was it a Valkyrie assuming that lovely likeness to perch upon this eyrie, waiting to bear their heroic souls to Valhalla, or — was it Miss Betty Carewe?
To the chief she spoke — all of them agreed to that afterward — but it was Crailey who answered, while Tom could only stare, and stand wagging his head at the lovely phantom, like a Mandarin on a shelf.
“My mother in heaven!” gasped Crailey. “How did you come up here?”
“There’s a trap in the roof on the other side of the ridge,” she said, and she began to fan herself with the pink fan. “A stairway runs all the way down — old Nelson showed me through these buildings yesterday — and that side isn’t on fire yet. I’m so sorry I didn’t think of it until a moment ago, because you could have brought the water up that way. But don’t you think you’d better come down now?”
CHAPTER VII. The Comedian
NOT SAVAGE HUN, nor “barbarous Vandyke,” nor demon Apache, could wish to dwell upon the state of mind of the Chief of the Rouen Volunteer Fire Department; therefore, let the curtain of mercy descend. Without a word, he turned and dragged the nozzle to the eastern eaves, whence, after a warning gesture to those below, he dropped it to the ground. And, out of compassion, it should be little more than hinted that the gesture of warning was very slight.
When the rescued band reached the foot of the last flight of stairs, they beheld the open doorway as a frame for a great press of intent and con-torted faces, every eye still strained to watch the roof; none of the harrowed spectators comprehending the appearance of the girl’s figure there, nor able to see whither she had led the five young men, until Tappingham Marsh raised a shout as he leaped out of the door and danced upon the solid earth again.
Then, indeed, there was a mighty uproar; cheer after cheer ascended to the red vault of heaven; women wept, men whooped, and the people rushed for the heroes with wide-open, welcoming arms. Jefferson Bareaud and Frank Chenoweth and General Trumble dashed at Tom Vanrevel with incoherent cries of thanksgiving, shaking his hands and beating him hysterically upon the back. He greeted them with bitter laughter.
“Help get the water into the next warehouse; this one is beyond control, but we can save the other two. Take the lines in through the door!” He brushed the rejoicing friends off abruptly, and went on in a queer, hollow voice: “There are stairs — and I’m so sorry I didn’t think of it until a moment ago, because you could have brought the water up that way!”
A remarkable case of desertion had occurred, the previous instant, under his eyes. As the party emerged from the warehouse into the street, Tom heard Crailey say hurriedly to Miss Carewe: “Let me get you away come quickly!” saw him suddenly seize her band, and, eluding the onrushing crowd, run with her round the corner of the building. And somehow, through what inspiration, or through what knowledge of his partner’s “temperament,” heaven knows, the prophetic soul of the chief was unhappily assured that Crailey would offer himself as escort to her home, and find acceptance. But why not? Was it Crailey who had publicly called his fellow-man fool, idiot, imbecile, at the top of his lungs, only to find himself the proven numskull of the universe! Tom stood for a moment staring after the vanishing pair, while over his face stole the strangest expression that ever man saw there; then, with meekly bowed shoulders, he turned again to his work.
At the corner of the warehouse, Miss Carewe detached her hand from Crailey’s, yet still followed him as he made a quick detour round the next building. A minute or two later they found themselves, undetected, upon Main Street in the rear of the crowd. There Crailey paused.
“Forgive me,” he said, breathlessly, “for taking your hand. I thought you would like to get away.”
She regarded him gravely, so that he found it difficult to read her look, except that it was seriously questioning; but whether the interrogation was addressed to him or to herself he could not determine. After a silence she said:
“I don’t know why I followed you. I believe it must have been because you didn’t give me time to think.”
This, of course, made him even quicker with her than before. “It’s all over,” he said briskly. “The first warehouse is gone; the second will go, but they’ll save the others easily enough, now that you have pointed out that the lines may be utilized otherwise than as adjuncts of performances on the high trapeze!” They were standing by a picket-fence, and he leaned against it, overcome by mirth in which she did not join. Her gravity reacted upon him at once, and his laughter was stopped short. “Will you not accept me as an escort to your home?” he said formally. “I do not know,” she returned simply, the sort of honest trouble in her glance that is seen only in very young eyes.
“‘What reason in the world!” he returned, with a crafty sharpness of astonishment.
She continued to gaze upon him thoughtfully, while he tried to look into her eyes, but was baffled because the radiant beams from the lady’s orbs (as the elder Chenoweth might have said) rested somewhere dangerously near his chin, which worried him, for, though his chin made no retreat and was far from ill-looking, it was, nevertheless, that feature which he most distrusted. “Won’t you tell me why not?” he repeated, uneasily.
“Because,” she answered at last, speaking hesitatingly, “because it isn’t so easy a matter for me as you seem to think. You have not been introduced to me, and I know you never will be, and that what you told me was true.”
“Which part of what I told you?” The question escaped from him instantly.
“That the others might come when they liked, but that you could not.”
“Oh yes, yes.” His expression altered to a sincere dejection; his shoulders drooped, and his voice indicated supreme annoyance. “I might have known someone would tell you! Who was it? Did they say why I—”
“On account of your quarrel with my father.”
“My quarrel with your father!” he exclaimed; and his face lit with an elated surprise; his shoulders straightened. He took a step nearer her, and asked, eagerly: “Who told you that?”
“My father himself. He spoke of a Mr. Vanrevel whom he — disliked, and whom I must not meet; and, remembering what you had said, of course I knew that you were he.”
“Oh!” Crailey’s lips began to form a smile of such appealing and inimitable sweetness that Voltaire would have trusted him; a smile alto-gether rose-leaves. “Then I lose you,” he said, “for my only chance to know you was in keeping it hidden from you. And now you understand!”
“No,” she answered, gravely, “I don’t understand; that is what troubles me. If I did, and believed you had the right of the difference, I could believe it no sin that you should speak to me, should take me home now. I think it is wrong not to act from your own understanding of things.”
The young man set his expression as one indomitably fixed upon the course of honor, cost what it might; and, in the very action, his lurking pleasure in doing it hopped out in the flicker of a twinkle in his eyes, and as instantly sought cover again — the flea in the rose-jar.
“Then you must ask some other,” he said, firmly. “A disinterested person should tell you. The difference was political in the beginning, but became personal afterward; and it is now a quarrel which can never be patched up, though, for my part, I wish that it could be. I can say no more, because a party to it should not speak.”
She met his level look squarely at last; and no man ever had a more truthful pair of eyes than Crailey Gray, for it was his great accomplishment that he could adjust his emotion, his reason, and something that might be called his faith, to fit any situation in any character.
“You may take me home,” she answered. “I may be wrong, and even disloyal; but I do not feel it so, now. You did a very brave thing tonight to save him from loss, and I think that what you have said was just what you should have said.”
So they went down the street, the hubbub and confusion of the fire growing more and more indistinct behind them. They walked slowly, and, for a time, neither spoke; yet the silence was of a kind which the adept rejoiced to have produced thus soon — their second meeting. For he believed there were more strange things in heaven and earth than Horatio wot; and one of the strangest was that whenever he was near an attractive woman during a silence such as this, something not to be defined, but as effective as it was indefinite, always went out from him to her. It was like a word of tenderness, a word too gentle, too compelling, too sweet, to be part of any tongue, spoken or written. And more: this ineffable word had an echo, and came back to him from the woman.
As his partner had in dress, so Crailey had with women, some color of the Beau; but it was not in what experience had given him to recognize as a fact: that they were apt to fall in love with him. (That they were apt to remain in love with him — he understood perfectly — was another matter.) And he knew when they were doing it; could have told them accurately, at each step, what they were feeling, thinking, dreaming, during the process, because he was usually exhibiting the same symptoms to himself at the same time.
Thus, his own breast occupied with that dizzy elation which followed its reception of the insane young god’s arrows, and his heart warm with the rise of the old emotion that he knew so well, he was nevertheless able to walk with his finger on the pulse of the exquisite moment, counting her heartbeats and his own.
So, to his fancy, as they walked, the little space between them was hung with brilliant strands, like gossamer chains of gold, already linking them together; every second fixing another slender, precious fetter, binding them closer, drawing her nearer. He waited until they passed into the shadows of the deserted Carewe Street before he spoke. There he stopped abruptly; at which she turned, astonished.
“Now that you have saved my life,” he said, in a low, tremulous tone, “what are you going to do with it?”
Her eyes opened almost as widely as they had at her first sight of him in her garden. There was a long pause before she replied, and when she did, it was to his considerable surprise.
“I have never seen a play, except the funny little ones we acted at the convent,” she said, “but isn’t that the way they speak on the stage?”
Crailey realized that his judgment of the silence bad been mistaken, and yet it was with a thrill of delight that he recognized her clear reading of him. He had been too florid again.
“Let us go.” His voice was soft with restrained forgiveness. “You mocked me once before.
“Mocked you?” she repeated, as they went on.
“Mocked me,” he said, firmly. “Mocked me for seeming theatrical, and yet you have learned that what I said was true; as you will again.”
She mused upon this; then, as in whimsical indulgence to an importunate child:
“Well, tell me what you mean when you say I saved your life.”
“You came alone,” he began, hastily, “to stand upon that burning roof—”
“Whence all but him had fled!” Her laughter rang out, interrupting him. “My room was on the fourth floor at St. Mary’s, and I didn’t mind climbing three flights this evening.”
Crailey’s good-nature was always perfect. “You mock me and you mock me!” he cried, and made her laughter but part of a gay duet. “I know I have gone too fast, have said things I should have waited to say; but, ah! remember the small chance I have against the others who can see you when they like. Don’t flout me because I try to make the most of a rare, stolen moment with you.”
“Do!” she exclaimed, grave upon the instant. “Do make the most of it! I have nothing but inexperience. Make the most by treating me seriously. Won’t you? I know you can, and I — I—” She faltered to a full stop. She was earnest and quiet, and there had been something in her tone, too — as very often there was — that showed how young she was. “Oh!” she began again, turning to him impulsively, “I have thought about you since that evening in the garden, and I have wished I could know you. I can’t be quite clear how it happened, but even those few minutes left a number of strong impressions about you. And the strongest was that you were one with whom I could talk of a great many things, if you would only be real with me. I believe — though I’m not sure why I do — that it is very difficult for you to be real; perhaps because you are so different at different times that you aren’t sure, yourself, which the real you is. But the person that you are beginning to be for my benefit must be the most trifling of all your selves, lighter and easier to put on than the little mask you carried the other night. If there were nothing better underneath the mask, I might play, too.”
“Did you learn this at the convent?” gasped Crailey.
“There was a world there in miniature,” she answered, speaking very quickly. “I think all people are made of the same materials, only in such different proportions. I think a little world might hold as much as the largest, if you thought it all out hard enough, and your experience might be just as broad and deep in a small corner of the earth as anywhere else. But I don’t know! I want to understand — I want to understand everything! I read books, and there are people — but no one who tells me what I want — I—”
“Stop.” He lifted his hand. “I won’t act; I shall never ‘play’ for you again.” He was breathless; the witching silence was nothing to what stirred him now. A singular exaltation rose in him, together with the reckless impulse to speak from the mood her vehement confidence had in-spired. He gave way to it.
“I know, I know,” he said huskily. “I understand all you mean, all you feel, all you wish. It is all echoing here, and here, and here!” He touched his breast, his eyes, and his forehead with the fingers of his long and slender hand. “We sigh and strain our eyes and stretch out our arms in the dark, groping always for the strange blessing that is just beyond our grasp, seeking for the precious unknown that lies just over the horizon! It’s what they meant by the pot of gold where the rainbow ends — only, it may be there, after all!”
They stopped unconsciously, and remained standing at the lower end of the Carewe hedge. The western glow had faded, and she was gazing at him through the darkness, leaning forward, never dreaming that her tight grasp had broken the sticks of the little pink fan.
“Yes,” she whispered, eagerly. “You are right: you understand!”
He went on, the words coming faster and faster: “We are haunted — you and I — by the wish to know all things, and by the question that lies under every thought we have: the agonizing Whither? Isn’t it like that? It is really death that makes us think. You are a good Catholic: you go to mass; but you wish to know. Does God reign, or did it all happen? Sometimes it seems so deadly probable that the universe just was, no God to plan it, nothing but things; that we die as sparrows die, and the brain is all the soul we have, a thing that becomes clogged and stops some day. And is that all?”
