‘Don’t say that, Nick! It’s a call.’
‘You’ve got a call to stay at home; and if you haven’t heard of it, I’m a committee to notify you,’ said Tarvin doggedly. He shied a pebble into the irrigating ditch, and eyed the racing current with lowering brows.
‘Dear Nick, how can you bear to urge any one who is free to stay at home and shirk after what we’ve heard to-night?’
‘Well, by the holy smoke, some one has got to urge girls to stand by the old machine, these days! You girls are no good at all under the new regulations until you desert. It’s the road to honour.’
‘Desert!’ gasped Kate. She turned her eyes on him.
‘Well, what do you call it? That’s what the little girl I used to know on Section 10 of the N.P. and Y. would have called it. O Kate dear, put yourself back in the old days; remember yourself then, remember what we used to be to each other, and see if you don’t see it that way. You’ve got a father and mother, haven’t you? You can’t say it’s the square thing to give them up. And you’ve got a man sitting beside you on this bridge who loves you for all he’s worth—loves you, you dear old thing, for keeps. You used to like him a little bit too. Eh?’
He slid his arm about her as he spoke, and for a moment she let it rest there.
‘Does that mean nothing to you either? Don’t you seem to see a call here, too, Kate?’
He forced her to turn her face to him, and gazed wistfully into her eyes for a moment. They were brown, and the moonlight deepened their sober depths.
‘Do you think you have a claim?’ she asked, after a moment.
‘I’ll think almost anything to keep you. But no; I haven’t any claim—or none at least that you are not free to jump. But we all have a claim; hang it, the situation has a claim. If you don’t stay, you go back on it. That’s what I mean.’
‘You don’t take a serious view of things, Nick,’ she said, putting down his arm.
Tarvin didn’t see the connection; but he said good-humouredly, ‘Oh yes, I do! There’s no serious view of life I won’t take in fun to please you.’
‘You see,—you’re not in earnest.’
There’s one thing I’m in earnest about,’ he whispered in her ear.
‘Is there?’ She turned away her head.
‘I can’t live without you.’ He leaned toward her, and added in a lower voice: ‘Another thing, Kate—I won’t.’
Kate compressed her lips. She had her own will. They sat on the bridge beating out their difference until they heard the kitchen clock in a cabin on the other side of the ditch strike eleven. The stream came down out of the mountains that loomed above them; they were half-a-mile from the town. The stillness and the loneliness closed on Tarvin with a physical grip as Kate got up and said decisively that she must go home. He knew she meant that she must go to India, and his own will crumpled helplessly for the moment within hers. He asked himself whether this was the will by which he earned his living, the will which at twenty-eight had made him a successful man by Topaz standards, which was taking him to the State Legislature, and which would one day take him much further, unless what ceased to be what. He shook himself scornfully; but he had to add to himself that after all she was only a girl, if he did love her, before he could stride to her side, as she turned her back on him, and say, ‘See here, young woman, you’re away off!’
She did not answer, but walked on.
‘You’re not going to throw your life away on this Indian scheme,’ he pursued. ‘I won’t have it. Your father won’t have it. Your mother will kick and scream at it, and I’ll be there to encourage her. We have some use for your life, if you haven’t. You don’t know the size of your contract. The land isn’t fit for rats; it’s the Bad Lands—yes, that’s just what it is, a great big Bad Lands—morally, physically, and agriculturally, Bad Lands. It’s no place for white men, let alone white women; there’s no climate, no government, no drainage; and there’s cholera, heat, and fighting until you can’t rest. You’ll find it all in the Sunday papers. You want to stay right where you are, young lady!’
She stopped a moment in the road they were following back to Topaz and glanced at his face in the moonlight. He took her hand, and, for all his masterfulness, awaited her word with parted lips.
‘ You’re a good man, Nick, but,’ she drooped her eyes, ‘I’m going to sail on the 31st for Calcutta.’
▲▲▲
II
Beware the man who’s crossed in love,
For pent-up steam must find its vent;
Step back when he is on the move,
And lend him all the Continent.
The Buck and the Saw.
To sail from New York on the 31st she must leave Topaz by the 27th at latest. It was now the 15th. Tarvin made the most of the intervening time. He called on her at her home every evening, and argued it out with her.
Kate listened with the gentlest willingness to be convinced, but with a dread firmness round the corners of her mouth, and with a sad wish to be good to him, if she could, battling in her eyes with a sadder helplessness.
‘I’m called!’ she cried. ‘I’m called. I can’t get away from it. I can’t help listening. I can’t help going.’
And, as she told him, grieving, how the cry of her sisters out of that dim misery, that was yet so distinct, tugged at her heart—how the useless horror and torture of their lives called on her by night and by day, Tarvin could not refuse to respect the solemnly felt need that drew her from him. He could not help begging her in every accent he knew not to hearken to it, but the painful pull of the cry she heard was not a strange or incredible thing to his own generous heart. He only urged hotly that there were other cries, and that there were other people to attend to this one. He, too, had a need, the need for her; and she another, if she would stop a moment to listen to it. They needed each other; that was the supreme need. The women in India could wait; they would go over and look them up later, when the Three C.’s had come to Topaz, and he had made his pile. Meanwhile there was happiness; meanwhile there was love! He was ingenious, he was deeply in love, he knew what he wanted, and he found the most persuasive language for making it seem to be what she wanted in disguise. Kate had to strengthen her resolution often in the intervals between his visits. She could not say much in reply. She had no such gift of communicating herself as Tarvin. Hers was the still, deep, voiceless nature that can only feel and act.
She had the kind of pluck and the capacity for silent endurance which goes with such natures, or she must often have faltered and turned back from the resolve which had come upon her in the schoolgarden that spring day, in the two years that followed it. Her parents were the first obstacle. They refused outright to allow her to study medicine. She had wished to be both physician and nurse, believing that in India she would find use for both callings; but since she could follow only one, she was content to enrol herself as a student at a New York training-school for nurses, and this her parents suffered in the bewilderment of finding that they had forgotten how to oppose her gently resolute will through the lifelong habit of yielding to it.
Her ideas had made her mother wish, when she explained them to her, that she had let her grow up wild, as she had once seemed certain to do. She was even sorry that the child’s father had at last found something to do away from the awful railroad. The railroad now ran two ways from Topaz; Kate had returned from school to find the track stretching a hundred miles to the westward, and her family still there. This time the boom had overtaken them before they