Very slowly, as Stephen was speaking, Mr. Gunther forced himself to relax in his chair, though rage and consternation were gathering blackly in his mind. He managed one of his angelic smiles, allowing it to spread in tender light over his round face. Then it stood in his eyes, which sparkled.
“Assuming all this is true, Steve,” he said gently, “how did you know?”
“I keep a dossier on everybody, Mr. Gunther.” Stephen’s voice was full of hard distress, and now he looked at the other man. “Your dossier is very detailed and extensive. I’ve never trusted you.”
“I’m sorry, Steve,” and Mr. Gunther’s tone was deeply regretful. “You never understood about your father and me. I thought you had finally realized, but it seems that I was mistaken.”
He’s putting Steve on the defensive, thought the inwardly laughing Rufus. He saw that Stephen’s fingers were clenched together, and that he was sweating with misery over what he was doing to Mr. Gunther. But Stephen, when he spoke again, spoke with quiet compactness: “You can’t deceive me, Mr. Gunther. You can’t make me feel guilty. I’m sorry you are forcing me to talk like this.”
Mr. Gunther sipped at his brandy. Over the rim of his glass, his eyes were thoughtful. “Do go on with your—explanation,” he suggested kindly.
“I am not ‘explaining,’ sir. I am merely trying to save you time, so you won’t make the mistake of stalking me. You needed us; you knew we had an interest in the System; you knew that the projected new line of the System would injure us. So you and your firm thought we would accede to your carefully laid plan of depressing the stock of the System, and then buying it up and gaining control of that road. And then, in talking with your friends in Chicago, you discussed financing an independent line from Pittsburgh east. By that time, you considered, the System would be in the hands of your company, and the independent line would ruin our company. Perhaps you even contemplated seizing control of us. I am sure you did.”
If Mr. Gunther felt horror, dismay, fury, and defeat, he did not reveal them. He continued to smile at Stephen as at a precocious younger brother who had aroused his admiration by a particularly magical trick. “I am not admitting anything, dear boy,” he said. “I am only interested in your speculations.”
‘They are not speculations, sir.” In spite of himself, Stephen’s voice was becoming a trifle high and vehement. “They are facts, and you know it. Shall I go on?
“I went to Chicago to see if I could avert what you had in mind. I was not trying to ‘outwit’ you at your own game. I was concerned with keeping the System out of your hands, to the ruin of the stockholders, who never concern you at any time. I was concerned with keeping the company solvent, for they are friends of mine; and their projected line, though it would compete with ours, was not planned out of greed but only out of honest competition. Naturally, I was alarmed about the threat to the prosperity of our own company, and so I made a very advantageous agreement with the System.”
“Did you?” asked Mr. Gunther softly.
“I did, sir. Confronted with the fact that the System was planning to compete with us, openly and honestly, but to our disadvantage, I brought to their attention how you were plotting to ruin them, and I asked the president to call his board of directors. I put the matter up to them frankly. I asked them to give us a 999-year lease on their right of way, guaranteed to pay the indebtedness on the line and a rental fee. If they did not accede, and remained blind to your plot, we would have to build a parallel line from Pittsburgh to Chicago, in sheer self-defense.” He paused. “I have the lease, and all agreements, in my brief case.”
He leaned back, sickened and exhausted, and began to stare through one of the library windows. A new snowstorm was gathering; dark clouds massed themselves over the mountains. The earth became stark and flat under a lemon-colored sky.
Mr. Gunther was silent. He had had some few defeats before, but never one so final, so complete, so humiliating. This yokel had manipulated matters with pure genius, which Mr. Gunther knew involved not only imagination and daring, but extraordinary power. How much had Rufus to do with this?
The astute Mr. Gunther said to himself: Rufus didn’t know. He would have been all for my idea; he would have seen the immediate mutual advantage of an alliance with me. The long-range view is not his. It was done by Steve, and only by Steve.
His wrath and mortification were beginning to give him a violent headache, and he was vaguely concerned. The luncheon he had eaten was a mass of stones in his belly. But his face remained kind and open, and his eyes continued to smile.
“Your thesis about my devilishness is very interesting, Steve. I like the way you develop ‘plots.’ Naturally, I shall not either admit or deny the whole fabric. I’m a little flattered, though, about your belief in my omniscience. Let me congratulate you on a very fine piece of business. Your father could not have done better.”
Stephen stood up abruptly. “I am afraid that I am going to make a rude request. I don’t sleep well on trains. I am very tired. I must lie down for a while, so I beg you to excuse me, sir. Shall we meet at dinner?”
“Indeed, yes, my boy,” replied Mr. Gunther solicitously. He stood up, and smiled at Stephen with creamy affection. “Have you a headache? I have some tablets. These business affairs are sometimes tiring, I know. Sleep well. And tonight I shall enjoy a pleasant dinner with your ladies.”
He and Rufus watched in silence as Stephen went out of the room with his ambling and awkward walk. Then Mr. Gunther sat down again in his chair and resumed his smoking. Rufus stood before the fire and appeared to be very interested in it. Long moments passed. Wind rumbled at the windows.
Then Mr. Gunther spoke in the softest of voices: “Rufe, you and I, someday, must have a long conference. A very long conference.”
Rufus turned slowly and looked down at his guest. Mr. Gunther was smiling, and there was a cunning twinkle in his eyes. Rufus smoothed down his mane of fiery hair, and smiled in return. “I am hoping for that,” he said gravely. “Yes, I am hoping for that.”
17
The relationship of Lydia and Sophia had, over the years, congealed into polite hostility. Even when Lydia had come as a bride to the house on the mountain there had never been too much friendliness between the two women, but Sophia had respected Lydia’s dignity and had never attempted any intimacy. The respect had grown over a period of ten years, so that now Sophia was sometimes afraid of her daughter-in-law, whom she intensely disliked. There was something else about Lydia, and that was the art of noncommunication, a repelling of any warmth or human approach. It is because she feels so secure as one of the “Fielding girls,” Sophia thought with anger. She preens herself without reason. She is contented with the illusion that she is important, and probably does not know that some people laugh at her.
No one laughed at Lydia deWitt, in spite of Sophia’s malicious belief. Like Sophia, they were afraid of this disinterested and beautiful woman, who courteously refused to become embroiled in social affairs except on rare occasions. They might whisper to themselves about Rufus’s justifiable “indiscretions,” but when they were with Lydia they fawned upon her and were eagerly grateful for her company.
During the past two years Lydia had demonstrated, to Sophia’s satisfaction at least, that her “queerness” was increasing. She had taken to long and lonely walks on the mountain roads at night. She would be gone as much as three hours at a time, and when she returned her face would be flushed, or very pale, and her eyes would either be too strained and bright, or brooding. Sophia noticed that these walks occurred only when Rufus was away from Portersville. When Rufus was home, Lydia dutifully remained there, the quiet but friendly wife. Once Sophia had mentioned those walks to Rufus, but he only smiled and shrugged.
Lydia’s walks invariably ended in a spot she considered peculiarly her own. She returned always to the place which she had loved as a child, and which she would always love.
One approached it by leaving the mountain road, turning
past a distant wood of ancient elms, climbing a knoll where dark spruces stood tall and thick against the sky, descending to a tiny valley where a stream flowed toward the river, then pushing through a thicket of wild honeysuckle and blackberry bushes. One emerged onto a hidden glade of thick soft grass in the center of which was a mound shaded by silver-birch trees. No one came to this spot, where, in spring, it was sweet with dogwood and wild lilacs, and golden with forsythia, all forming a towering hedge about it. A thin arm of the stream ran along one side of it until the hottest part of summer. Lydia would eat of the wild strawberries which lay in the grass like rubies, and would break off the branches of the lilacs which seemed to her more intoxicating than those in the garden of Stephen’s house. Wild roses grew in the thicket, and tawny field lilies, and tangles of black-eyed daisies. No cattle could wander here, and in so far as Lydia ever knew, no one ever visited its isolation.
Since her marriage she had rarely gone to the glade during the day. During her girlhood it had been her fortress in the hot summer noons, for the trees, shrubs, and thicket kept it always in blue shade. As she had grown older, and before her marriage, she had taken to visiting it at night, when, lying on her back on the low mound, she could fancy herself in an enchanted fairy ring, safe from any intruder, safe from any voice or laughter. She would look up at the sailing moon, or at the cool blaze of stars, and a sense of security would come to her which no house could ever give, and no walls could offer.
Sometimes, during the warm nights, she would fall asleep to the murmur of the little stream, the air scented all about her, the wind in the birches. She would awaken refreshed and renewed, able to resume the burden of a life daily growing more barren and dusty. She was never lonely here, as she was when at home, or among guests. Everything comforted her, the trees, the flowers, the trickle of bright water in the grass, the secret sky, the humming of insects, the quiet breezes. When autumn came, and the glade turned bronze and scarlet and gold, she would feel an intense sadness, a warning of banishment. If she looked toward spring impatiently, it was for the protection of her glade, her flight into herself. Hardly had the snows melted, and the ice thinned on the mountains, when she returned, careless of wet boots and skirts, and looking eagerly for the first blaze of the forsythia, the first violets in the grass.
It was two years ago that her shelter had been invaded.
She never forgot that night of leaping moon and scent and silence. She had gone there, and had seated herself on the mound with a sigh of deep content, the thicket walls closing behind her. A few dark clouds moved across the sky. The crescent moon, abnormally large and radiant, had suddenly plunged like a saber into a cloud, only its shining upper edge visible. Lydia had watched, fascinated. Then, to her great alarm, she had heard the thicket snapping and crackling, and the shadowy figure of a very tall man had appeared, faceless in the quick gloom. She could see his mighty shoulders, his large bare head. He said nothing. He only stood there in silence. The moon withdrew its sword from the cloud and threw down a shower of pale light into the glade. Now everything turned a ghostly silver, trees, shrubs, grass, distant mountains, and the woman sitting in affronted and dismayed silence on the mound. The billows of her smoke-gray muslin dress foamed about her, and her bare shoulders glimmered like white stone in the spectral rays of brilliant moonlight.
She could feel the affrightened quickening of her heart, and she finally said sharply, “Who is it? What do you want?”
“Hello, Lydia,” replied the man in a rough and grating voice. He advanced toward her, his great body lumbering and slow like the body of a beast.
She recognized him now, for the moonlight revealed his face. “Jim,” she said. “Jim Purcell.”
Her heart, instead of quieting, began to race harder. He sat down on the mound beside her, and folded his big arms around his knees. He stared at the thicket through which he had come, and said nothing. Lydia had always believed that if she ever discovered that someone else had found this place it would lose its enchantment for her, that she would feel it had been desecrated and that she could come here no more. But no sense of outrage struck her now, no stir of disappointment or depression.
Crickets clattered loudly in the silence; there was a shrilling of insects in the woods beyond the glade. Now the fragrance of a disturbed earth, fecund, warm, and mysterious, rose up about the woman and the man who sat there so still together. The moonlight struck on the distant mountain peak and turned it into a cone of pale fire.
“How did you find this place, Jim?” asked Lydia, and her voice was gentle.
“Why, Lydia,” he answered, “I always knew you came here. Since you were a kid. Remember? I used to follow you around, since we were knee-high to ducks.” He reached in his pocket for a pipe, struck a lucifer. The orange glow illuminated his gross and pitted face, and Lydia saw it was full of gravity and contentment. She did not find him repellent; she had never found him so.
She could hear the sweet tinkle of her mother’s voice: “But my darling, such a brute! So stupid, my love, and so poor. He shambles, love, and his boots are muddy, and he stares at you like an idiot, truly. How can you endure him?” Her father had said in his frail and patrician voice, “But my pet, Lydia cannot endure him at all. She is only sorry for the poor creature. He has trailed her for years, and she gives him a kind glance occasionally, as one would give a lost and mongrel dog.”
I never wanted to hurt them, thought Lydia. I did not know, then, that it is sometimes necessary to hurt others if you are to save your own soul. She had told Jim Purcell not to come again, that her parents did not like him, and that she would never wound them. Now something began to ache in her like a desolation and an unbearable sadness.
“Guess you always did like me, Lydia, at that,” Purcell rumbled. “Even now. It kind of gives me a comfort when you look at me across a room.”
Lydia’s eyes began to smart. She said, and her voice trembled, “How long ago did you find out that I came here, Jim?”
“Why, Lydia”—and his tone, though harshly accented, was almost gentle—“I’ve known all the time. I would be sittin’ here, thinkin’, and then I’d hear you rustlin’, and I’d dive out the other side, and you’d sit down on this mound. For hours. And I’d be watchin’ you.” He turned to her, and the pits and swollen masses of his face became illuminated with a smile in the moonlight. “But I never let you know it was my place, as well as yours.”
There was a tightness in Lydia’s throat, and a tightness in her heart. The glade swam in dim shadow about her. “Why did you let me know—tonight, Jim?” she asked.
“Well, Lydia, I’ve come to the conclusion that things are gettin’ out of hand with you. Thought you ought to know you have a friend. Don’t know, yet, just what I can do for you, but I’m here, Lydia, any time you need me.” His huge hands touched hers for a single moment, then withdrew. “A rude, uncultured man,” he was privately called. “A dolt. How did he ever get so rich? But, of course, he’s absolutely ruthless and without conscience. And viciously greedy and merciless.”
Lydia knew that he was not “uncultured.” If he spoke “rudely,” it was because of the contempt in which he held the delicate mountebanks and polite buccaneers. If he was ruthless, and Lydia knew he was, it was an open ruthlessness, unlike that of her husband’s. That was why she had never held Jim Purcell in aversion during these later years when he had plunged doggedly, and like an elemental force, toward wealth and power. If he was guilty of unethical machinations, and if he crushed weaker men in his primeval passage, he did it with a contemptuous and potent honesty, with no feeble justifications, with no pious homilies and pretensions.
He was smoking placidly; the little red fire of his pipe waned and glowed. She could see his big shapeless mouth, the crudely fashioned nose, the small lightless eyes. An ugly man, a monstrous man, in a way. Yet, all at once, to the sudden racing of her heart, he appeared to her to be all strength and command.
“I think I always knew you were my fr
iend,” she said. Without volition, her hand lifted and touched his arm timidly. He did not move. His bulky legs were splayed without grace in the light of the moon; his shoulders were mountainous. The pipe continued to wane and glow tranquilly.
“How long are you going to stand it, Lydia?” he asked, not looking at her.
She folded her hands in her soft muslin-draped lap. Her honesty rose to meet his, with all simplicity. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I offered Rufus a divorce years ago. I have been thinking, lately, of going to live in my own house.” She paused.
“Well, why don’t you?”
“Because he would never allow me to take Cornelia with me. And I must be with her, to do what I can.”
He chuckled roughly. “Lydia, you’ll never be able to do anythin’ for that little girl, and you know it. She’s just like her dad.”
“But she’s also a female,” said Lydia, and her voice thickened with pain. “And women aren’t usually as conscienceless as men. She’s a very reasonable child, at times, and I love her dearly, and she loves me. I must do what I can for her.”
“Umph.” He withdrew the pipe from his mouth and the smoke curled up, caught in a silver mist in the moonlight. “Yes, I suppose the kid does love you. I’ve seen you both, in your carriage, when you didn’t see me. But you’ve got to remember that love doesn’t change people’s fundamental character, Lydia.”
“I don’t want her to grow up knowing her mother deserted her,” said Lydia pleadingly. “Later on, many years later, she may use that as a hypocritical defense of any wickedness she does.”
“And maybe she’ll grow up despisin’ a mother who didn’t have the guts to save her own soul,” said Purcell.