BULLS die; men die; the old order dies,—slowly sometimes, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye.
The change came swiftly upon Eris; passed more swiftly still, leaving no outward trace visible. But when it had passed, the heart and mind of Eris were altered. All doubt, all hesitation fled. She understood that now the road to the stars was open, and that, one day, she would do what she had been born to do.
The World War was partly responsible for the affair. The dye situation in the United States resulted. In Whitewater Mills, both dyes and mordants remained unsatisfactory. The mill chemist could do nothing and they let him go.
Where cotton was used in shoddy combination with wool, permanency of colour scarcely mattered—the poor always getting the dirty end of everything in a nation that has always laughed at a swindle.
But before the war, Whitewater Mills had built a separate plant for fine hosiery, lisle and silk, and had specialised in mauves and blues—fast, unfading, beautiful colours, the secret of which remained in Germany.
Now, desiring to resume, and unable to import, the directors of the mill sent a delegation to New York to find out what could be done.
There the delegates discovered, dug out, and engaged a chemist named E. Stuart Graydon.
It appeared that the secrets of German dyes and mordants were known to Mr. Graydon. How they became known to him he explained very frankly and eloquently. Candour, an engaging smile, pale smooth features full of pale bluish shadows,—these and a trim figure neatly clothed made up the ensemble of Mr. Graydon.
Permanent colour was his specialty. Anyway, his long, steady fingers were permanently stained with acid and nicotine. He was employed by a photographer when they discovered him. Or, to be accurate, he discovered them at their third-class hotel on Broadway.... And never left them until he had signed a contract.
It was after church that somebody introduced E. Stuart Graydon to Eris.
He walked home with the family; and his talent for general conversation earned him an invitation to remain to midday dinner.
Quiet, convincing eloquence was his asset. There appeared to be no subject with which he was not reasonably familiar. His, also, was that terrible gift for familiarity of every description; he became a friend over night, a member of the family in a week. He was what Broadway calls “quick study,” never risking “going stale” by “letter perfect” preparation for an opening.
He took a deep interest in Guernsey breeding. But Odell did the talking. That was how Graydon acquired a reputation for an astonishing versatility;—he started the subject and kept it kindled while others did the talking. And in ten minutes he was able to converse upon the theme with a skilful and convincing fluency entirely irresistible.
After dinner Mazie showed him Fanny’s miniature on ivory.
He smilingly sketched for the family a brief history of miniature painting. It happened that he was minutely familiar with all methods and all branches of Art. Indeed, that was how the entire affair started. And Art accounted for the acid stains, also.
To Eris, Art included the drama, and all that her ardent mind desired. It took Mr. Graydon about five minutes to discover this. And of course it transpired that he knew everything connected with the drama, spoken and silent.
The next evening he came to supper. He talked cattle, ensilage, rotation of crops, sub-soils, inoculation, fertilisers, with Odell until the hypnotised farmer was loth to let him go.
He talked to Mazie about household economy, labour-saving devices, sanitary disposal plants, water systems, bleaches—with which he was dreadfully familiar—furniture polish, incubators.
With the boys he discussed guns and ammunition, traps and trapping, commercial education, the relation of labour to capital, baseball in the State League, ready-made clothing, the respective merits of pointers, setters, bull terriers and Airedales.
Hypnotised yawns protested against the bed hour in the household of Odell. Nobody desired to retire. The spell held like a trap.
As for Eris, she decided to stay in the sitting room with Mr. Graydon when the family’s yawns at last started them blinking bedward.
Odell, yawning frightfully, got into his night-shirt and then into bed; and lay opening and shutting his eyes like an owl on the pillow while Mazie, for the first time in months, did her hair in curl papers.
“A nice, polite, steady young man,” she said, nodding at Odell’s reflection in the looking glass. “My sakes alive, Elmer, what an education he’s got!”
“Stew Graydon knows a thing or two, I guess,” yawned Odell. “You gotta be mighty spry to get a holt onto that young fella.”
“I’ve a notion they pay him a lot down to the mill,” suggested Mazie.
“You can’t expec’ to hire a Noo York man like that fer nothin’,” agreed Odell. “He’s smart, he is. And there’s allus a market fer real smartness. Like as not that young fella will find himself a rich man in ten years. I guesso.”
A silence; Mazie busy with her lustrous hair,—the plump, rosy, vigorous incarnation of matronly health.
In the mirror she caught Elmer’s sleepy eye and laughed, displaying her white teeth.
“You think he kinda favours Eris?” she asked.
“Hey?”
“I don’t know why else he come to supper.”
“He come to supper to talk farmin’ with me,” said Odell gruffly.
“Maybe. Only I guess not,” laughed Mazie.
“Well, why did he come, then? He wanted I should show him the new separator and them samples of cork-brick. He’s a chemist, ain’t he? He’s int-rested in cork-brick and separators ’n’ all like that.”
Mazie twisted a curl paper around a thick brown tress.
“When he talked about the theatre and acting,” she remarked, “did you notice how Eris acted?”
“She gawked at him,” grunted Odell. “She’d better get that pitcher idee outa her fool head,—lazin’ around readin’ them pitcher magazines ’n’ novels, ’n’ moonin all over the place instid of findin’ chores to occupy her ’n’ doin’ them——”
“Oh, hush,” interrupted Mazie; “you talk and take on awful foolish, Elmer. When Eris marries some bright, steady boy, all that trash in her head will go into the slop-pail.”
Odell scowled:
“Well, why don’t she marry, then? She ain’t no help to you——”
“She is! Hush up your head. You’ll miss her, too, when she marries, and some strange man takes her away. I guess I know who aims to do it, too.”
“Well, who aims to do it? Hey? She don’t have nothin’ to say to our Whitewater boys. She allus acts proud and highmighty and uppish. Dan Burns he come sparkin’ her ’n’ she stayed in her room and wouldn’t even come down to supper. ’N’ there was Clay Wallace, ’n’ Buddy Morgan——”
“It looks like she’s willing to be sparked to-night, don’t it?” said Mazie, with an odd little laugh.
Elmer rose on one elbow: “Say, you don’t think he wants our Eris, do yeh?”
“Why not? Isn’t Eris good enough for any man?”
“Well, well, dang it all, Stew Graydon seems diff-runt.... He’s too educated ’n’ stylish for plain folks—’n’ he’s got a big position in the mill. He don’t want our Eris——”
“Why not?” repeated Mazie.
Odell shook his frowsy head: “He’ll want a rich girl. Eris hain’t got only that heifer-money. I can’t give her more’n a mite——”
“That don’t count with me, Elmer.” She flushed, “—it didn’t count with you.”
“Well, you was worth consid’ble more’n cash,” he grunted.
“So’s any girl—if a boy likes her.”
“You think a smart man like Stew Graydon——”
“How do I know?” drawled Mazie. “She’s downstairs yet with him, ain’t she? I never knew her to act that way before. Nor you, either.”
She never had “acted that way before.”
The drowning swimmer and his straw—Eris and the first man she ever had met who had been actually in touch with the mystery of the moving pictures—that was the situation.
For Graydon’s personality she had only the virginal interest which is reassured by a pleasant manner, a pleasing voice, and the trim, neat inconspicuousness of face, figure, and apparel which invites neither criticism nor particular admiration,—nor alarm.
But for his education, his knowledge, his wisdom, his fluency,—above all for his evident sympathy and ability to understand her desire,—she had an excited and passionate need.
As he talked, he looked her over, carefully, cautiously—preoccupied with odd and curious ideas even while conversing about other things.
That evening, when taking leave, he pressed her slender fingers together, gently, not alarming her—scarcely even awaking self-consciousness. He was always the artist, first of all.
After a month, even Elmer understood that Graydon was “sparking” Eris.
And, from the time that Eris first was made to understand that fact she lived in a continuous, confused dream, through the unreality of which sometimes she was aware of her own heart beating with excitement.
He had said to her, one evening, after the family had gone to bed, that the stage was her vocation and that God himself must have ordained that she should, one day, triumph there.
She listened as in a blessed trance. All around her the night air grew heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. A moon was shining. The whippoorwill’s breathless cry came from the snake-fence hedge.
When he had had his mental will of her—excited her almost to blissful tears, soothed her, led her on, deftly, eloquently—he took her smooth hand of a child. All set for the last act, he drew the girl against his shoulder, taking plenty of time.
Her head was still swimming with his eloquence. Hope intoxicated her. His lips meant nothing on her cheek—but her mind was all a-quiver—and it was her mind alone that he had stimulated and excited to an ecstasy uncontrollable; and which now responded and acquiesced.
“And after we marry I am to study for the stage?” she repeated, tremulously, oblivious of his arm tightening around her body.
It transpired, gently and eloquently, that it was for this very reason he desired to marry her and give her what was nearest her girl’s heart—what her girl’s mind most ardently desired in all the world—her liberty to choose.
But he warned her to keep the secret from her family. Trembling, enchanted, almost frightened by the approaching splendour of consummation, she promised in tears.
Then the barrier burst under an overwhelming rush of gratitude. She was his. She would surrender, now, to this man who had suddenly appeared from nowhere;—an emissary of God sent to understand, sympathise, guide her to that destiny which, even he admitted, God had ordained as hers.
Eris was married to E. Stuart Graydon in her twentieth year at the parsonage of the Whitewater Church, at ten o’clock in the morning. All Whitewater attended and gorged. No rural precedent was neglected—neither jest nor rice nor old shoes,—everything happened, from the organ music and the unctuous patronage of “Rev. Styles,” to the thick aroma of the “bounteous repast” at Whitewater Farms, where neighbours came, stuffed themselves, and went away boisterously all that rainy afternoon.
Bride and groom were to depart on the six o’clock train for Niagara.
About five o’clock, the groom, chancing to glance out of the window, saw two men,—strangers in Whitewater but perfectly well known to him,—walking up the path that led to the front door.
For a second he sat motionless; the next, he turned and looked into the grey eyes of his bride.
“Eris,” he said calmly, “if anybody asks for me say I’ve run down to the mill and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
She smiled vaguely as he rose and went out the back way where the automobiles were parked.
A few minutes later Odell was called from the room by one of his sons:
“Say, pop, there’s a party out here inquiring for someone they call Eddie Graydon.”
Odell went out to the porch: “What name?” he demanded, eyeing the two strangers and their dripping umbrellas.
“You Elmer Odell?” demanded the taller man.
“That’s what my ma christened me,” replied Odell, jocosely.
“Your daughter marrying a man who calls himself E. Stuart Graydon?”
“She ain’t marryin’ him. She’s done it.”
“Where is he?”
“He jest stepped out. Gone to the mill to fix up sunthin’ before leavin’.”
The taller man said to his companion: “Run down to the mill, will you?” And, as the other turned and walked rapidly away in the rain:
“I’ve got a warrant for Eddie Graydon when he comes back. That’s one of his names. Eddie Carter is the right one. Sorry for you, Mr. Odell; sorrier for your daughter.”
Odell stared at him, the purple veins beginning to swell on his temples.
“D-dang it!” he stammered,—“what’s all this dinged junk about? Who be you?”
And, when the tall, quiet man had terribly convinced him, Odell staggered, slightly, and wiped the sweat from his temples.
“That lad has a record,” said the detective, in his low, agreeable voice. “He’s a fine artist and a crackerjack chemist. Maybe he don’t know anything about the new tens and twenties. Maybe. Nor anything about the location of the plates.... My God, Mr. Odell, we’ve got to get those plates. Only Brockway could have equalled that engraving. Yes, sir—only the old man.”
Odell scarcely heard him for the thunderous confusion in his brain.
He sat down, heavily, staring at space under knitted brows. Minute after minute passed. The distant laughter and clamour of guests came fitfully from the great kitchen beyond. It rained and rained on the veranda roof.
After a quarter of an hour the detective came in from the porch.
“You got a telephone, Mr. Odell?”
The farmer nodded.
“I want to call up my mate at the mill——” looking around the sitting room and finally locating the instrument. “What’s the mill number?”
“Seven.”
He gave the crank a turn; the metal bell jingled.
After a few moments he got his mate. He talked rapidly in a low, clear voice. Odell heard without listening or understanding. The detective hung up.
“Say,” he said, “that fellow’s gone. He won’t come back here. He’s gone!”
“What say?” mumbled Odell, wiping away the sweat.
“I’m telling you that Eddie Carter has beat us to it. He didn’t go to the mill. He won’t come back here.... Who’s got a big yellow touring car—a Comet Six—in this town?”
Odell put his scarred hands to his forehead: “Doc Benson, I guess,” he said vaguely.
“I guess he’s in there eatin’.”
“Well, tell him his car went out of town twenty minutes ago at sixty per,” said the detective briskly.... “So long. I’m sorry.... Is there a garage in the village where they have cars for hire?”
“At the hotel,” said the farmer.... “By God!...” He got up as though dazed.
“Mazie,” he called hoarsely. Nobody heard him in the gay tumult. He stared after the detective, who was walking swiftly down the path in the rain.
“Jesus,” he whispered.... “He done us all.... ’N’ that’s that! Oh, God!—’n’ that’s that!”
A nine days’ scandal in the village—a year’s food for gossip—and that was that, also.
Neither blame nor disgrace attached to anybody. Nobody thought less of the Odells, nor did they of themselves.
The crash of her dream-house stunned Eris. She took it very silently, with no outward emotion.
After a month the whole thing seemed, in fact, a dream—too unreal to believe or to grieve over.
After three months Odell talked vaguely of getting a di-vorce, “so’s she kin hook up to somebody respectable when she’s a mind to.”
Then Eris flashed fire for the first time:
“I’ll never marry again! Never! I never wanted to anyway. This is enough! I’ll live and die as I am. And there’ll be no more men in my life and no bother about divorce, either. He’ll never come back. What do I care whether I’m married or not! It doesn’t mean anything and it never will. I’m through with marriage and with marrying men! And that’s that!”