Who Goes There!

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.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LIAR

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.

"The era of physical vastness, of spheres of influence, of scope is dying. The supreme wickedness of the world is Force. That must end for nations and for men. Only one conflict remains inevitable and eternal; the battle of minds, which can have no end."

For an American and an operator in real estate, Darrel's philosophy was harmlessly respectable if not very new. But he thought it both new and original, which pleased him intensely.

As for Karen, she had been thinking of Guild for the last few minutes. Her sewing lay in her lap, her dark, curly head rested in the depths of her arm-chair. Sunlight had almost faded on the wall.

Through the window she could see the trees. The golden-green depths of the beech-wood were growing dusky. Against the terrace masses of salvia and geraniums glowed like coals on fire. The brown-eyed girl had been away with him a long while.

Mrs. Courland came in, looking more youthful and pretty than ever, and seated herself with her knitting. The very last ray from the sinking sun fell on her ruddy hair.

"Think you are right, Harry," she said quietly to Darrel. "I think we will sail when you do. The men on the place are becoming very much excited over this Uhlan raid on the cattle. I could hear them from my bedroom window out by the winter fold, and they were talking loudly as well as recklessly."

"There's no telling what these forest people may do," admitted Darrel. "I am immensely relieved to know that you and Valentine are to sail when I do. As for Kervyn Guild – " he made a hopeless gesture – "his mind is made up and that always settles it with him."

"He won't return with you?"

"No. He's joining the Belgians."

"Really!"

"Yes. You see his people were Belgian some generations back. It's a matter of honour with him and argument is wasted. But it hits me pretty hard."

"I can understand. He is a most delightful man."

"He is as straight and square as he is delightful. His mother is charming; his younger brother is everything you'd expect him to be after knowing Kervyn. Theirs is a very united family, but, do you know I am as certain as I am of anything that his mother absolutely approves of what he is about to do. She is that sort. It may kill her, but she'll die smiling."

Mrs. Courland's serious, sweet eyes rested on him, solemn with sympathy for the mother she had never met.

"The horrid thing about it all," continued Darrel, "is that Kervyn is one man in a million; – and in a more terrible sense that is all he can be in this frightful and endless slaughter which they no longer even pretend to call one battle or many.

"He's a drop in an ocean, only another cipher in the trenches where hell's hail rains day and night, day and night, beating out lives without distinction, without the intelligence of choice – just raining, raining, and beating out life!.. I can scarcely endure the thought of Kervyn ending that way – such a man – my friend – "

His voice seemed hoarse and he got up abruptly and walked to the window.

Ashes of roses lingered in the west; the forest was calm; not a leaf stirred in the lilac-tinted dusk.

Karen, who had been listening, stirred in the depths of her chair and clasped her fingers over her sewing.

Mrs. Courland said quietly:

"It is pleasant for any woman to have known such a man as Mr. Guild."

"Yes," said Karen.

"If the charm of his personality so impresses us who have known him only a very little while, I am thinking what those who are near and dear to him must feel."

"I, too," said Karen, faintly.

"Yet she loves him best who would not have it otherwise it seems."

"Yes; he must go," said Karen. "Some could not have it – otherwise."

A man came to light the lamps. And a little while after they were lighted Mrs. Courland quietly looked up from her knitting. One swift, clear glance she gave; saw in the young girl's eyes what she had already divined must be there. Then bent again above her ivory needles. After a while she sighed, very lightly.

"They're late," remarked Darrel from the window.

"They are probably strolling up the drive; Valentine knows enough not to get lost," said her mother.

After a few moments Karen said: "Would my playing disturb you?"