Роберт Чамберс - Who Goes There!

"I don't. I like to catch little fish. But my ferocity ends there. Kervyn, shall we try the trout for an hour this afternoon?"

Valentine turned up her dainty nose. "I shall take Mr. Guild myself. You'd better find a gamekeeper who'll teach you how to shoot off a gun." And, to Guild: "I'll take you now if you like. It's only a little way to the Silverwiltz. Shall I get a rod and fly–book for you?"

Karen, watching her, saw the frank challenge in her pretty brown eyes, saw Guild's swift response to that gay defiance. It was only the light, irresponsible encounter of two young people who had liked each other at sight and who had already established a frank understanding.

So Valentine went into the house and returned presently switching a light fly–rod and a cast of flies; and Guild walked over and joined her.

To Karen he looked very tall and sunburned, and unfamiliar in his blue–serge lounging clothes—very perfectly groomed, very severe, and unapproachable; and so much older, so much more mature, so much wiser than she had thought him.

And, as her eyes followed him from where she was seated among the terrace flowers, she realized more than ever that she did not know what to say to him, what to do with him, or how to answer such a man.

Her face grew very serious; she was becoming more deeply impressed with the seriousness of what he had asked of her; of her own responsibility. And yet, as far as love was concerned, she could find no answer for him. Friendship, swift, devoted, almost passionate, she had given him—a friendship which had withstood the hard shocks of anger and distrust, and the more bewildering shock of his kiss.

She still cared for him, relied on him; wished for his companionship. But, beyond that, what had happened, followed by his sudden demand, had startled and confused her, and, so far, she did not know whether it was in her to respond. Love loomed before her, mighty and unknown, and the solemnity of its pledges and of its overwhelming obligations had assumed proportions which awed her nineteen years.

In her heart always had towered a very lofty monument to the sacredness of love, fearsomely chaste, flameless, majestic. So pure, so immaculate was this solemn and supreme edifice she had already builded that the moment's thrill in his arms had seemed to violate it. For the girl had always believed a kiss to be in itself part of that vague, indefinite miracle of supreme surrender. And the knowledge and guilt of it still flushed her cheeks at intervals and meddled with her heart.

She had forgiven, had tried to readjust herself before her mystic altar. There was nothing else to do. And the awakened woman in her aided her and taught her, inspiring, exciting her with a knowledge new to her, the knowledge of her power.

Then, as she sat there looking at this man and at the brown–eyed girl beside him, suddenly she experienced a subtle sense of fear: fear of what? She did not know, did not ask herself. Not even the apprehension, the dread of parting with him had made her afraid; not even the certainty that he was going to join his regiment had aroused in her more than a sense of impending loneliness.

But something was waking it now—something that pierced her through and through: and she caught her breath sharply, like a child who has been startled.

For the first time in her life the sense of possession had been aroused in her, and with it the subtle instinct to defend what was her own.

She looked very intensely at the brown eyes of the young girl who stood laughing and gossiping there with the man she did not know how to answer—the man with whom she did not know what to do. But every instinct in her was alert to place upon this man the unmistakable sign of ownership. He was hers, no matter what she might do with him.

To Darrel, trying to converse with her, she replied smilingly, mechanically; but her small ears were ringing with the gay laughter of Valentine and the quick, smiling responses of Guild as they stood with their heads together over the contents of the fly–book, consulting, advising, and selecting the most likely and murderous lures.

Neither of them glanced in her direction; apparently they were most happily absorbed in this brand new friendship of theirs.

Very slowly and thoughtfully Karen's small head sank; and she sat gazing at the brilliant masses of salvia bloom clustering at her feet, silent, overwhelmed under the tremendous knowledge of what had come upon her here in the sunshine of a cloudless sky.

"Au revoir!" called back Valentine airily; "we shall return before dusk with a dozen very large trout!"

Guild turned to make his adieux, hat in hand; caught Karen's eye, nodded pleasantly, and walked away across the lawn, with Valentine close beside him, still discussing and fussing over the cast they had chosen for the trout's undoing.

The lamps had not yet been lighted in the big, comfortable living–room and late sunlight striped wall and ceiling with rose where Karen sat sewing, and Darrel, curled up in a vast armchair, frowned over a book. And well he might, for it was a treatise on German art.

His patience arriving at the vanishing point he started to hurl the book from him, then remembering that it was not his to hurl, slapped it shut.

Which caused Karen to lift her deep violet eyes inquiringly.

"Teutonic Kultur! I've got its number," he said. Which observation conveyed no meaning to Karen.

"German art," he explained. "It used to be merely ample, adipose, and indigestible. Now the moderns have made it sinister and unclean. The ham–fist has become the mailed fist; the fat and trickling source of Teutonic inspiration has become polluted. There is no decadence more hideous than the brain cancer of a Hercules."

Karen followed him with intelligent interest. She said with hesitation: "The moderns, I think, are wandering outside immutable boundaries. Frontiers are eternal. If any mind believes the inclosed territory exhausted, there is nothing further to be found outside in the waste places—only chaos. And the mind must shift to another and totally different pasture—which also has its boundaries eternal and fixed."

"Right!" exclaimed Darrel. "No sculptor can find for sculpture any new mode of expression beyond the limits of the materials which have always existed; no painter can wander outside the range of black and white, or beyond the surface allotted him; the composer can express himself in music only within the limits of the audible scale; the writer is a prisoner to grammatical expression, walled always within the margins of the printed page. Outside, as you say, lies chaos, possibly madness. The moderns are roaming there. And some of them are announcing the discovery of German Kultur where they have barked their mental shins in outer darkness."

Karen smiled. "It is that way in music I think. The dissonance of mental disturbance warns sanity in almost every bar of modern music. It is that which is so appalling to me, Mr. Darrel—that in some modernism is visible and audible more and more the menace of mental and moral disintegration. And the wholesome shrink from it."

Darrel said: "Three insane 'thinkers' have led Germany to the brink where she now stands swaying. God help her, in the end, to convalescence—" he stared at the fading sunbeams on the wall, and staring, quoted:

"'_Over broken oaths and

Through a sea of blood._'"

He looked up. "I'm sorry: I forget you are German."

"I forget that I am supposed to be, too…. But you have not offended me. I know war is senseless. I know that war will not always be the method used to settle disputes. There will be great changes beginning very soon in the world, I think."

"I believe so, too. It will begin by a recognition of the rights of smaller nations to self–government. It will be an area of respect for the weak. Government by consent is not enough; it must become government by request. And the scriptures shall remain no more sacred than the tiniest 'scrap of paper' in the archives of the numerically smallest independent community on earth.