Hare and Tortoise

She checked her musings in alarm at the menacing word “affected.”

Was it affectation on Keble’s part? Or was there perhaps a winnowed level of civilization thousands of miles east of these uncouth hills and beyond the sea where precious phrases like Pater’s and correct manners like Keble’s were matter of course? In any such milieu what sort of figure could she hope to cut?

No doubt a pitiful one. And her thoughts drifted wistfully but resignedly down the stream of consciousness.

It was not the first time she had failed to keep stroke with Keble in the literary excursions he conducted on cool evenings before a log fire that had been burning since their marriage in the autumn, six months before. Only a few evenings past he had read a poem by Robert Browning, who was to Louise merely a name that had fallen from the lips of her English teacher at Normal School. She had felt herself rather pleasantly scratched and pommeled by the lines as Keble had read them, but they had failed to make continuous sense. And next morning, when she had gone to the book-shelves to read and ponder in private, she hadn’t even been able to identify the incoherent poem among the host of others in the red volume.

Once, too, when he had been playing the piano she had been humiliatingly inept. For an hour she had been happy to lie back and listen to harmonies which, though they had signified no more to her than a monologue in a foreign tongue, had moved her to the verge of tears. Then he had played something he called a prelude, a pallidly gay composition utterly unlike many others called preludes, and on finishing it had turned to ascertain its effect upon her. She hadn’t been listening carefully, for it had set an old tune running in her head. “It’s pretty, dear,” she had commented. “It reminds me of something Nana used to hum.”

Her remark was inspired, for the suave prelude in question was no more than a modern elaboration of a folk-theme that was a common heritage of the composer and Nana. But the association between a French-Canadian servant-girl and the winner of a recent prix de Rome had been too remote even for her musically discerning young husband, who had got up from the piano with a hint of forbearance in his manner. That had cut her to the quick, for it had implied maladdress on her part, and gradually, through an intuitive process that hurt, she had gained an inkling of the incongruity of her comparison. She had wished to state the incongruity and turn it off with a touch of satire aimed at her headlong self, but chagrin had held her mute. It was one of those occasions where an attempted explanation would only underline the regrettable fact that an explanation had been needed. Her ideas, she felt, would always be ill-assorted; her comments, however good per se, irrelevant. Her mind was a basket tumbling over with wild flowers; it must be annoying for Keble to find pollen on his nose from a dandelion in the basket after he had leaned forward at the invitation of a violet.

Rising from her couch she crossed the room on tiptoe and sat on the arm of Keble’s chair, leaning her head on his back as he continued to read.

“After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air,” read Keble.

The faint sweet airs of a Western Canadian spring,—the first after a sharp long winter,—were at the black open window, stirring the curtains, cooling her cheek; and Keble was with Marius the Epicurean in Rome, seven thousand miles and many centuries away.

“. . . Marius climbed the long flights of steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newest mode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavy. . . .”

Louise placed her hands across the page and leaned forward over Keble’s shoulder to kiss the cheek half-turned in polite interrogation. “Are fasciae puttees, darling?” she inquired. Not that she really cared. Indeed she was dismayed when he began to explain, and yawned. Penitently she sank to an attitude of attention upon a stool at his feet. Keble got up for his pipe, placing the book on a large rough table beside neat piles of books and reviews.

Louise remained on her footstool looking after him; then, as he turned to come back, transferred her gaze to her hands, got up, biting her lip, and crossed the room for her needlework.

Keble’s influence during the last year had been chastening. Her own ideas were vivid, but impetuous; they often scampered to the edge of abysses—and plunged in. At times she abruptly stopped, lost in wonderment at her husband’s easy, measured stride. Keble, like Marius, mounted flights of thought in dainty fasciae,—never in plain puttees,—and always step by step. She dashed up, pell-mell, and sometimes beat him; but often fell sprawling at the emperor’s feet. Whereupon Keble would help her up, brush her, and pet her a little, only to resume the gait that she admired but despaired of acquiring. Beyond her despair there was an ache, for she had come to believe that, as Lord Chesterfield put it, “Those lesser talents, of an engaging, insinuating manner, or easy good breeding, a gentle behavior and address, are of infinitely more advantage than they are generally thought to be.” Even in Alberta.

She herself had written pages and pages of prose, and had filled an old copy-book with incoherent little poems of which Keble knew nothing. They sang of winds sweeping through canyons and across sage plains, of snowy forests and frozen rivers; they uttered vague lament, unrest, exultation. Through them surged yearnings and confessions that abashed her. She kept them as mementoes of youthful rebellion, shut them up in a corner of the old box that had conveyed her meagre marriage equipment hither from her father’s tiny house in the Valley, and then watched Keble’s eyes and lips, listened to his spun-silver sentences in the hope of acquiring clues to—she scarcely knew what.

Keble had come to the second lighting of a thoughtful pipe before the silence was broken. He looked for some moments in her direction before saying, “What sort of tea-cozy thing are you making now, dear?”

Tea-cozy thing! It was a bureau scarf,—a beautiful, beautiful one! For the birthday of Aunt Denise Mornay-Mareuil in Quebec. And Louise sacrilegiously crossed herself.

“So beautiful,” he agreed, “that Aunt Denise will take it straight to her chapel and lay it across the altar where she says her prayers. You know your father’s theory that despite oneself one plays into the hands of the priests. How are you going to get around that, little heretic?”

“By writing to Aunt Denise that it’s for her bureau! My conscience will be clear. Besides, I’m making it to give her pleasure, and if it pleases her to put it on the altar where she prays for that old scamp, then why not? She loved him, and that’s enough for her,—the poor dear cross old funny!”

“Would an atheist altar cloth intercept Aunt Denise’s Roman prayers? Perhaps turn them into curses?”

Louise ignored this and bit off a piece of silk. “Besides, I’m not such a limited heretic as Papa. I’m a comprehensive heretic.”

“What kind of thing is that, for goodness’ sake?”

“It’s a kind of thing that pays more attention to people’s gists than to whether they cross their i’s and dot their t’s. It’s a kind of thing that’s going out to the pantry and get you something to eat before bed time, even though it knows it’s bad for you.”