Part 8 (1/2)
”Ellen is right,” she told him; ”it doesn't really matter so long as somebody finds me.”
”But what have _I_ done?” Peter was sore with a sense of personal slight. ”It wasn't in the story that there should be a whole crop of dragons.”
”All dragons are made so that where one head comes off there are seven in its place; and you must remember if somebody didn't go about slaying them, I couldn't be at all.” This as she said it had a deep meaning for Peter that afterward escaped him. ”And you can hold the dream. It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pa.s.s.”
”I'm sick of dreams,” said Peter. ”A man dies after a little who is fed on nothing else.”
”They die quicker if they stop dreaming; on those that have the gift for it the business of dreaming falls. Listen! How many that you know have found me?”
”A great many think they have; it comes to the same thing.”
”The same for them; but you must see that I can never really _be_ until I am for those outside the dream. The trouble with you is that you'd wake up after a while and you would _know_.”
”Yes,” Peter admitted, ”I should know.”
”Well, then,” she was oh, so gentle about it, ”yours is the better part.
If you can't have me, at least you're not stopping me by leaving off for something else. In the dream I can live and grow, and you can grow to me. Do you remember what happened to Ada Harvey? I've saved you from that at any rate.”
”No,” said Peter, ”it was the dragon saved me. I thought you were she.
It's saved me from lots of things, now that I think of it.”
”Ah, that's what we have to do between us, Peter, we have to save you.
You're worth saving.”
”Save me for what?” Peter cried out to her and so strongly in his loneliness that he found himself starting up from his bed with it. He could see the dragon spitting flames as before, and the pale light from the swinging street lamp gilding the frame of the picture. Though he did not understand all that had happened to him, as he lay down again he was more comforted than he had been at any time since he had made up his mind that he was to be a bachelor.
PART FOUR
IN WHICH THE LOVELY LADY MAKES A FINAL APPEARANCE
PART FOUR
IN WHICH THE LOVELY LADY MAKES A FINAL APPEARANCE
I
On the day that the silver-laced maple, then in fullest leaf, had pa.s.sed by the s.p.a.ce of three delicate palm-shaped banners the sill of the third-story office window, Lessing, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Brokers in Real Estate, crossed over to his partner's desk before sitting down at his own, and remained quietly leaning against it and looking out of the window without a word. He remained there staring out over the new, orderly growth of the suburb, toward the river, until the stenographer from the outer room had come in with the vase which she had been filling with great golden roses, and gone out again, after placing it carefully in the exact middle of the top of the junior partner's desk. By that time Lessing's rather plump, practical hand had crept out along the rim of the desk until it was covered by Peter's lean one, and still neither of them had said a word. The roses had come in from Lessing's country place that morning in Lessing's car, and Lessing's wife had gathered them. There were exactly seventeen, full-blown and fragrant, and one small bud of promise which Peter presently removed from its vase to his b.u.t.ton hole. The act had almost the significance of a ritual, a thing done many times with particular meaning.
”Somehow,” Peter said as he fastened it with a pin underneath his lapel, ”seventeen years seems a shorter time to look back on than to look forward to.”
”Well, when we've put twenty-five years of work into it--and that's nothing to what we'll get into the next seventeen.” Lessing's tone keyed admirably with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new growth. The senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained richness of the office furniture from which the new was not yet worn, and returned to the contemplation of the towering white c.u.muli beginning to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. ”There's no end to what a man can lift,” he a.s.serted confidently, ”once he's got his feet under him.”
”We've carried a lot,” Peter a.s.sented cheerfully, ”and sometimes it was rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. The question is”--and here his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his eyes--”the real question is, I suppose, what it is carrying us _to_.”
”Where's the good of that?” Julian protested. ”It's only a limitation to set out for a particular place. The fun is in the going. You keep right along with the procession until old age gets you. The thing is just to keep it up as long as you can.” He swung himself into a sitting posture on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left his partner's eyes. ”What's the idea?” he wished affectionately to know.