Man's Country/Chapter 12
DETROIT society is old and staid. Its traditions run back to the English occupation—even back of that to the French—but they run also forward to the new crop of motor millionaires, and there were always new people breaking in. Among these climbers this season there appeared eventually a smooth, symmetrical young man of twenty-six or seven, whose presence began to be noted quite regularly at dinners, dances, whist parties, and the like—a young person with regular features, a black comb-back, an olive skin that was ruddy in the high lights, a pair of dark but light-filled eyes, and a determined mouth which smiled easily—what romantically-minded women are apt to call a dark, interesting face.
His manners lacked the easy assurance of those to the habit born; yet they lacked it only in confidence of execution. That would come with practice. He seemed instinctively to say the right thing and to do the right thing; and, in a society where young men from sheer arrogance of birth were sometimes apt to be too bold, too impudently sure of themselves, a certain shyness—a little lack of assurance—was almost a charm.
George Judson was having his chance at last; and appeared quite well equipped to make the most of it. Since his high school days he had not ceased to keep up the habit of cultural reading—history, essays, science, philosophy, the masterpieces of fiction—and maintained a certain acquaintance with what was being said ia the smarter periodicals. Seldom had a day been so long or so wearing that he did not rest his mind and feed it with some nibblings from a book or worth-while magazine. This enabled him to talk well. He danced acceptably and played a passable hand at bridge. But what commended him to the younger set was that he was a jolly devil and went in for sports. He rode, he golfed, he played tennis, and pulled an oar on the river.
Fay Gilman was fond of equestrian exercise and took it quite regularly at stated hours. "Oh, what a beautiful horse!" she exclaimed one day, as a dappled sorrel with a flash of white in the face went single-footing by. "And what a perfect rider!" Her eyes turned to follow him.
She did not know that this was a moment the rider had lived for calculatingly; that he had combed the Mississippi Valley for the handsomest of the colts of Artist Montrose, a beautiful horse he had seen at a County Fair some-
, where in the west on one of his earliest motor-selling trips; or that he had spent three painful months under instruction, to acquire that seat on an English saddle—all in the hope that he might encounter her like this and that she might make just the remark she had made about horse and rider.
Neither did he know now that she had made it; but was thrilled enough with getting a glimpse of her as he passed—in her riding suit of linen with black boots and a black derby hat from under which her eyes looked bluer, her cheeks rosier, than they had ever looked to him before.
"Why, I do believe that is the young man who was driving father at the time of the accident and who brought him home. I heard that he had made a lot of money. He was such a distressed spectacle that day in the hall."
Fay made this remark to Dean Galt, her riding companion, who loved her with a slow, cold fire and bored her by a humble persistence that was the more irritating to her because she feared she must some day succumb to it.
"Purse-proud and thoroughly disagreeable—always showing off—that up-start type!" criticised Dean, who had been incensed by what he regarded as alienated admiration, and who, incidentally, had inherited his millions. "I can't stand 'em," he concluded virtuously.
Fay made no reply.
A day or two later she met George Judson formally at one of Miss Browning's affairs and, as she danced with him, felt something strange and indefinable proceeding from his embrace. It was not the step and rhythm. It was something that proceeded from himself and rather defied analysis. Fay was piqued that he did not ask her for another dance immediately, that she might sample the experience again and continue its study empirically, as it were. After that the tide of the evening seemed to bear him away from her.
From the time of that first dance, Fay Gilman encountered George Judson rather frequently at one social affair or another; and always he intrigued her interest; always there was some mysterious but thrilling sense of an interplay of currents between them. What piqued her still was that he seemed to be unconscious of this. Certainly he was not especially attentive to her; but showered his favors on many girls alike. This was a trifle irritating to her pride. He was the first man she had ever wanted to see around her more frequently than he was willing to exhibit himself.
Put out for a time with him, she began contrarily to make deliberate but artful attempts to attract him. To her great joy he proved instantly responsive to these. The moment she began to show an especial pleasure in his society he began to confess by his manner an especial pleasure in hers. Being a wilful and resourceful young person with entirely too much leisure on her hands, she set out deliberately to test the lengths of this responsiveness. She proposed horseback rides at what would prove unusual and perhaps difficult hours for a man in business life; and smilingly he accepted their challenge. She proposed foursomes on the golf course with breakfast after at the Country Club and cruelly forced Dean Galt to be one of the quartet—but always herself paired off with George. She made him one of a party off for a three days' cruise on the lake in her steam yacht Gray Gull.
And George Judson took no banters. He lost all shyness; his clear eyes had laughter and the joy of living and frank admiration and—something else in them when they rested on her; but she could not quite fathom what.
She said to herself that she got an unusual thrill out of him because he was so unlike the other men of her acquaintance. He seemed in some ways so much older and in others so much younger than other men who were obviously of his own age.
He charmed her physically, and he ravished her imagination by the solid things which he had done and by those which he proposed to
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do, of which he made no secret to her. She used to look at the walls of that great and ever-growing factory with his name upon it in letters so long and tall, and marvel to think that the man who had produced it was this so charming playfellow of hers—who now wooed her ardently with his eyes, but never with his lips.
He told her one day the story of that factory's creation out of an ideal formed suddenly in boyhood, told it with certain notable omissions and a certain lightness of manner that was assumed to mask the fact that he was talking so much about himself.
"Oh, I think that is wonderful," she cried at its conclusion. "Won-der-ful!"
"How'd you like to go through the plant?" he asked.
"Oh, I'd love it!" cried the girl enraptured. "I never had any use for an old factory before—but one that you built!" and she paused to drop coquettish eyes and let a fringe of dark lashes caress a pair of cheeks that to George Judson looked good enough to eat right then.
With his usual directness of action George set the visit for that very afternoon. To make the thing properly climactic, he drove Fay first through Franklin Street and halted before the shack-like structure in which he had found Milton Morris seven years before. The old wire-mesh sign was yet about it. "Milton Morris—Gas Engines," it still proclaimed, though rather drunkenly, and the paint was nearly weathered from that wooden insert which had borne once in sharp black letters the single word: "Automobiles."
"That's where we began," he said; and could not altogether keep a strain of emotion out of his voice.
"Imagine!" commented Fay; and then they started out to the Judson-Morris Motor Works. She stood before its long fagade in reverence. To her it became a magic—the creation of an over-tired schoolboy.
In her heart was awe of the achievement and awe of the man, as they stepped through the open portal into this clanging, screeching, cavernous jungle of wheels and belts and pulleys and strange shapes of roaring machines that somehow suggested gnashing, prehistoric monsters. And to think that this dynamic, steaming crater was the real den of the lion whom she had been using so freely and satisfactorily as a riding, dancing, golfing-partner! She was suddenly conscience-stricken and ashamed of her wilful vanity that had been mean enough to glory in compelling his attendance at her side when perhaps he should have been here.
From that hour she saw George Judson no longer as a mere romantic figure of business. She saw him instead as a sort of vulcan at the forge—always framed by the vast dramatic environment of that huge, thundering factory. From that day forward her respect for the young man deepened, as did her appreciation of his devotion. It seemed so much more of a compliment when George Judson came to idle with her. She was doubly grateful for it. Sometimes she had the absurd wish to reciprocate—she indulged the speculation that as George came to play with her, so she might go to work with him. The girl was a good deal mixed. Was she in love with George Judson or was she enamored by his achievements? The spell of his dominance was surely overshadowing her; and the strength of it was witnessed to by the fact that the Gilmans failed to go away for the summer.
September and late September came and the Gilmans were still at home, with, one particular day, George Judson on Montrose Boy and Fay on Princess May, cantering along a Grosse Pointe road. The zest and tang of autumn was in the air; the glory of it was painted on the trees. As they galloped, a rustic summer-house upon the lake shore came into sight, looking bleak and lonesome—so lonesome that it appealed to something in the breasts of the young people who by this time found nothing so unendurable, so worthy of sympathy as loneliness. They halted their horses as by a common instinct and gazed at it with a mutual interest.
"Let's go over there and sit in that summer-house," proposed George.
"Let's!" agreed Fay, eagerly as if she too found something especially desirable in the anachronistic trysting place.
They swung from saddles and George tied the horses securely. Once gained, the summer-house seemed cordially hospitable. A clump of trees, still leaved but no longer verdant, fended off the chill lake breeze and filled all the air with a tuneful rustling. A late September sun looked in through the space that had been left unscreened of vine to form a door. Upon a rough-hewn bench in this beam of warming sunshine the young adventurers sat and must have felt their souls glow warm as well.
"Remember my telling you about that talk with Charlie King and my deciding the same day to be a horseless wagon builder?" he asked, trying to be casual.
"Why, of course I do, George," she said and smiled on him, encouragingly if not fondly. "I remember everything you ever told me."
"Well, there was something I left out that happened that day—something more important."
"More important? Why, what could that have been? And why did you leave it out?"
"Because . . . The Goat Girl!" he answered enigmatically.
"The Goat Girl?" Fay queried, not associating readily, as the psychologists say.
"Yes—you remember, don't you, one day when you and your little white goats ran away from home and an old, brindled tin-can-eater hopped on them, but a boy in a cabbage patch jumped over the fence and—"
"And were you that boy?" Fay almost screamed at him in her joy and amazement, clutching both his hands for an instant.
"Yes," he said, and held her hand playfully, "I'm the boy."
"You were an awfully nice boy, I remember that, but—rather—rather soiled—as I recall."
"No doubt," said George, but he didn't want to be either complimented or teased. He wanted to be seriously and sentimentally reminiscent; and as she was perfectly willing, he told her—or tried to tell her—the story of the place the little red velvet queen had occupied in his life, and that she—not the mere manufacture of horseless wagons—had been his real inspiration.
"And to think that you never told me before?" the girl remembered suddenly to reproach. "George! It almost frightens me. You can keep things so deep in you—and keep after what you want so forever and ever till you get it."
"But I didn't want to tell you I was the cabbage-patch boy until you understood me well enough to know what the red velvet queen could have meant to me. And now I can. Now I guess you do."
Her eyes widened with slow wonder. "For me?" she murmured, with breath coming quickly, with lifted brows and searching, humbled eyes. "Ever since that absurd goat episode, you have been building a life for me? And you knew that I would be kept for you? Would be ready for you when you were ready for me. You believed that?" There was a note of superstitious credulity in her tones.
"Yes, Fay," George's voice was low and almost religious. "It was just like a faith in the universe. Just as I believed in the goodness of God, so, little woman, I believed in you." He was looking levelly into her eyes.
The girl felt first a sense of being vastly complimented as if she had been selected for some signal honor. Then she felt humbled, unworthy of such steadfast devotion through those long, and to her, careless, unmindful years.
She rose up to fly, with quick, startled eyes. But there could be no flying. She was rooted to the spot. A nebulous rainbow cloud of delicious intimacy seemed to envelop them graciously. She was in his arms without an effort—on her part or his. Her hands were on his breast and she was looking up into his face trustfully, expectantly even, when suddenly—the thing happened. All at once he was crushing her to him madly, and she was wanting to be crushed, her lips fused to his lips. His proposal, so carefully thought out, had been short-circuited. Love like a spark had leaped from heart to heart before the tardy words could utter themselves.
George Judson had planned it a thousand times—how reverently and how tenderly he would hold her in his arms and whisper his love to her enraptured ears—but something—the touch of her, the warmth of her, the infectious, intimate nearness of her—the long, long want of a dozen years—
After a time, rather breathless, they stared and each saw in the other's eyes a fleeting look of fright. There followed another kiss, more tender, less passionate, than the first, full of reassurance and the sweet promise of a sincere and mutual love. Almost immediately they were sitting again on the rustic bench, he reproaching himself, and she poking at some locks of hair which she felt rather than saw were disarranged; both were laughing nervously.
"I—I didn't finish—" he remembered—with obvious embarrassment.
"What is it, George?" she asked softly, with her hands clasped upon his breast again and a look of devotion in her eyes.
"Just this, Fay," he answered gravely. "I love you with all my heart and with all of my life, and I want you to love me. . . . Do you?"
"Do I?" she reflected aloud. "Why, yes, George, I—" She hesitated a moment, then gazed at him with a shy but enlarging smile. "Why, of course, I love you," she admitted naïvely, "now—now that you ask me," and the long lashes were lowered to her blushing cheeks. "Who could help loving you?"
"You darling!" he murmured, and gave her the slow, reverent kiss he had meant to give at first; then stood regarding her with a kind of holy contemplation. He thrilled with the greatest happiness he had ever known. It was like—like what he had thought it would be. He had won her—and he was panting from the effort as a man might be expected to pant after a twelve-year chase.
In another instant he was exulting, male-like, over his conquest. He had made this wonderful girl love him. His head straightened, a very proud feeling came into his breast, and he glanced about him over her shoulder like a man who had conquered the world—the richest, widest, most wonderful world—the world of a woman's heart; and that heart was now pulsing against his own with a steady rhythm that was the most inspiring drum beat to which he had ever listened. It made him somehow eager to be up and out and doing.
In his present mood there was one resemblance to that which came over him on the day when the committee from the banks had insisted that he should acquire the stock-control and the presidency of Judson-Morris. That thing was over when his mind had accepted the fact; the rest was mere detail. So now his wooing seemed over. Hehad won Fay Gilman. He had added her unto his life. All that remained to complete the addition were forms and ceremonies. Details. They belonged to her. He would leave them to her, for his own mind was rushing on—turning back rather from this romantic excursion.
The lovers rode side by side to the porte cochère of the new home Stephen Gilman had built, and together they broke to his widow, with mutual blushes and mutual assistance, the news of their engagement.
Mrs. Gilman heard them gravely and sensibly, betrayed no surprise, and offered no objections.
"I think it's a good match," she conceded frankly—"if Fay had to marry! I think it is one her father would approve of—knowing what Mr. Judson has come to."
"What he will come to," corrected Fay with proud loyalty. "George is hardly started yet."
But Mrs. Gilman, at first so cool, threatened now to become emotional; she fixed sober eyes on George and lifting both her hands to his shoulders, held him at arm's length, looking as levelly into his eyes as she could manage.
"George Judson! Do you realize what it means when a mother gives her daughter into a man's keeping?" she demanded soberly, while dark, piercing eyes searched his significantly.
"I suppose not," stammered George, breaking under that gaze; "but I can try to."
"You will have to tame Fay," she conceded rather surprisingly, and remarked it with some conviction.
"Mamma!" reproved that young lady laughingly.
"But see that you do it gently," the mother urged with the mists of maternal love in her eyes. "Don't hurt her. Don't break her spirit."
It was on this same great day that George drove Fay out to call upon his father and mother. Malachi Judson, sitting in his invalid chair with stubby gray hair sticking straight up and stubby old-fashioned beard bristling straight down, with the elevated eyebrows which gave him a habitually alert expression, gazed with solemn, assaying glance upon the sparkling beauty of Fay Gilman, whose first presence had brightened the house like the entry of a flood of sunshine, and unhesitatingly approved her.
"She's a pippin, George," he croaked solemnly, whereupon Fay laughed with joy and relief at finding herself, after such critical appraising, so whole-heartedly accepted by this funny, doom-stricken old man.
Mary Judson's manner was, of course, different. She adjusted her spectacles, took the girl's hands timidly but surely in hers and gazed for some time into her engaging countenance, with Fay blushing, smiling and even giggling in her embarrassment.
"Fay, you're a good girl," decided George's mother. "I can see that; and not highty-tighty; but you've got a job on your hands. George has always been a little bit undisciplined. He's spoiled father and me, and of course we've spoiled him. I've known some woman would have to take George in hand and break him to harness like. He's been too successful, George has, and he's stiff in the neck, but he's a well-meaning boy. Don't break his heart when you're domesticating him, so to speak, will you, Fay?"
"Mother! Mother!" protested George laughing, and Fay was laughing also at the coincidence, and wondering if this was the sort of thing that mothers always said to prospective sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. Yet she could not seem to scoff.
"I won't, Mother Judson," she declared and gravely kissed the trembling, wistful lips, but immediately turned to point a gleeful, mocking finger at George. "Oh, I'll bend him," she cried exultantly, "but I'll bend him gently, so gently that you won't even hear him crack."
George, proud, happy, laughing at his mother's misgivings as he had always laughed at them, flashed a wink to his father.
When the lovers got outside, they laughed again. Fay knew that it was mostly a joke, this talk about taming a husband. Why, to curb and guide George Judson would be a task so delightful that she looked forward to it with the happiest anticipations. Never had there been a man come near her who was so easily amenable. As for George, he knew that Fay, sweetest, most reasonable, most pliant of human companions, was tamed already. How foolish mothers were about some things anyway!