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Margaret Pedler - The Moon out of Reach

M >> Margaret Pedler >> The Moon out of Reach



THE MOON OUT OF REACH


BY

MARGARET PEDLER



AUTHOR OF

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE, THE SPLENDID FOLLY, THE LAMP OF FATE,
ETC.







NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS



Made in the United States of America




COPYRIGHT, 1921,

MARGARET PEDLER






PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I THE SHINING SHIP
II THE GOOD SAMARITAN
III A QUESTION OF EXTERNALS
IV THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
V "PREUX CHEVALIER"
VI A FORGOTTEN FAN
VII THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
VIII THE MIDDLE OF THE STAIRCASE
IX A SKIRMISH WITH DEATH
X INDECISION
XI GOING WITH THE TIDE
XII THE DOUBLE BARRIER
XIII BY THE LOVERS' BRIDGE
XIV RELATIONS-IN-LAW
XV KING ARTHUR'S CASTLE
XVI SACRED TROTH
XVII "THE KEYS OF HEAVEN"
XVIII "TILL DEATH US DO PART"
XIX THE PRICE
XX THE CAKE DOOR
XXI LADY GERTRUDE'S POINT OF VIEW
XXII THE OFFERING OF FIRST-FRUITS
XXIII A QUESTION OF HONOUR
XXIV FLIGHT!
XXV AN UNEXPECTED MEETING
XXVI "THE WIDTH OF A WORLD BETWEEN"
XXVII THE DARK ANGEL
XXVIII GOOD-BYE!
XXIX ON THIN ICE
XXX SEEKING TO FORGET
XXXI TOWARDS UNKNOWN WAYS
XXXII THE GREEN CAR
XXXIII KEEPING FAITH
XXXIV THE WHITE FLAME
XXXV THE GATES OF FATE
XXXVI ROGER'S REFUSAL
XXXVII THE GREAT HEALER




EMPTY HANDS

Away in the sky, high over our heads,
With the width of a world between,
The far Moon sails like a shining ship
Which the Dreamer's eyes have seen.

And empty hands are outstretched, in vain,
While aching eyes beseech,
And hearts may break that cry for the Moon,
The silver Moon out of reach!

But sometimes God on His great white Throne
Looks down from the Heaven above,
And lays in the hands that are empty
The tremulous Star of Love.

MARGARET PEDLER.



NOTE:--Musical setting by Adrian Butt. Published by Edward Schuberth &
Co., 11 East 22nd Street, New York.




THE MOON OUT OF REACH


CHAPTER I

THE SHINING SHIP

She was kneeling on the hearthrug, grasping the poker firmly in one hand.
Now and again she gave the fire a truculent prod with it as though to
emphasise her remarks.

"'Ask and ye shall receive'! . . . '_Tout vient a point a celui qui sait
attendre_'! Where on earth is there any foundation for such optimism,
I'd like to know?"

A sleek brown head bent determinedly above some sewing lifted itself, and
a pair of amused eyes rested on the speaker.

"Really, Nan, you mustn't confound French proverbs with quotations from
the Scriptures. They're not at all the same thing."

"Those two run on parallel lines, anyway. When I was a kiddie I used to
pray--I've prayed for hours, and it wasn't through any lack of faith that
my prayers weren't answered. On the contrary, I was enormously
astonished to find how entirely the Almighty had overlooked my request
for a white pony like the one at the circus."

"Well, then, my dear, try to solace yourself with the fact that
'everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait.'"

"But it doesn't!"

Penelope Craig reflected a moment.

"Do you--know--how to wait?" she demanded, with a significant little
accent on the word "know."

"I've waited in vain. No white pony has ever come, and if it trotted in
now--why, I don't want one any longer. I tell you, Penny"--tapping an
emphatic forefinger on the other's knee--"you never get your wishes until
you've out-grown them."

"You've reached the mature age of three-and-twenty"--drily. "It's a
trifle early to be so definite."

"Not a bit! I want my wishes _now_, while I'm young and can enjoy
them--lots of money, and amusement, and happiness! They'll be no good to
me when I'm seventy or so!"

"Even at seventy," remarked Penelope sagely, "wealth is better than
poverty--much. And I can imagine amusement and happiness being quite
desirable even at three score years and ten."

Nan Davenant grimaced.

"Philosophers," she observed, "are a highly irritating species."

"But what do you want, my dear? You're always kicking against the pricks.
What do you really _want_?"

The coals slipped with a grumble in the grate and a blue flame shot up
the chimney. Nan stretched out her hand for the matches and lit a
cigarette. Then she blew a cloud of speculative smoke into the air.

"I don't know," she said slowly. Adding whimsically: "I believe that's
the root of the trouble."

Penelope regarded her critically.

"I'll tell you what's the matter," she returned. "During the war you
lived on excitement--"

"I worked jolly hard," interpolated Nan indignantly.

The other's eyes softened.

"I know you worked," she said quickly. "Like a brick. But all the same
you did live on excitement--narrow shaves of death during air-raids,
dances galore, and beautiful boys in khaki, home on leave in convenient
rotation, to take you anywhere and everywhere. You felt you were working
for them and they knew they were fighting for you, and the whole four
years was just one pulsing, throbbing rush. Oh, I know! You were caught
up into it just the same as the rest of the world, and now that it's over
and normal existence is feebly struggling up to the surface again, you're
all to pieces, hugely dissatisfied, like everyone else."

"At least I'm in the fashion, then!"

Penelope smiled briefly.

"Small credit to you if you are," she retorted. "People are simply
shirking work nowadays. And you're as bad as anyone. You've not tried
to pick up the threads again--you're just idling round."

"It's catching, I expect," temporised Nan beguilingly.

But the lines on Penelope's face refused to relax.

"It's because it's easier to play than to work," she replied with grim
candour.

"Don't scold, Penny." Nan brought the influence of a pair of appealing
blue eyes to bear on the matter. "I really mean to begin work--soon."

"When?" demanded the other searchingly.

Nan's charming mouth, with its short, curved upper lip, widened into a
smile of friendly mockery.

"You don't expect me to supply you with the exact day and hour, do you?
Don't be so fearfully precise, Penny! I can't run myself on railway
time-table lines. You need never hope for it."

"I don't"--shortly. Adding, with a twinkle: "Even I'm not quite such an
optimist as that!"

As she spoke, Penelope laid down her sewing and stretched cramped arms
above her head.

"At this point," she observed, "the House adjourned for tea. Nan, it's
your week for domesticity. Go and make tea."

Nan scrambled up from the hearthrug obediently and disappeared into the
kitchen regions, while Penelope, curling herself up on a cushion in front
of the fire, sat musing.

For nearly six years now she and Nan had shared the flat they were living
in. When they had first joined forces, Nan had been at the beginning of
her career as a pianist and was still studying, while Penelope, her
senior by five years, had already been before the public as a singer for
some considerable time. With the outbreak of the war, they had both
thrown themselves heartily into war work of various kinds, reserving only
a certain portion of their time for professional purposes. The double
work had proved a considerable strain on each of them, and now that the
war was past it seemed as though Nan, at least, were incapable of getting
a fresh grip on things.

Luckily--or, from some points of view, unluckily--she was the recipient
of an allowance of three hundred a year from a wealthy and benevolent
uncle. Without this, the two girls might have found it difficult to
weather the profitless intervals which punctuated their professional
engagements. But with this addition to their income they rubbed along
pretty well, and contrived to find a fair amount of amusement in life
through the medium of their many friends in London.

Penelope, the elder of the two by five years, was the daughter of a
country rector, long since dead. She had known the significance of the
words "small means" all her life, and managed the financial affairs of
the little menage in Edenhall Mansions with creditable success. Whereas
Nan Davenant, flung at her parents' death from the shelter of a home
where wealth and reckless expenditure had prevailed, knew less than
nothing of the elaborate art of cutting one's coat according to the
cloth. Nor could she ever be brought to understand that there are only
twenty shillings in a pound--and that at the present moment even twenty
shillings were worth considerably less than they appeared to be.

There are certain people in the world who seem cast for the part of
onlooker. Of these Penelope was one. Evenly her life had slipped along
with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses,
entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the
lives of some. Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on.

Naturally of an observant turn of mind, she had learned to penetrate the
veil that hangs behind the actions of humanity, into the secret,
temperamental places whence those actions emanate, and had achieved a
somewhat rare comprehension and tolerance of her fellows.

From her father, who had been for thirty years the arbiter of affairs
both great and small in a country parish and had yet succeeded in
retaining the undivided affection of his flock, she had inherited a spice
of humorous philosophy, and this, combined with a very practical sense of
justice, enabled her to accept human nature as she found it--without
contempt, without censoriousness, and sometimes with a breathless
admiration for its unexpectedly heroic qualities.

She it was who alone had some slight understanding of Nan Davenant's
complexities--complexities of temperament which both baffled the
unfortunate possessor of them and hopelessly misled the world at large.

The Davenant history showed a line of men and women gifted beyond the
average, the artistic bias paramount, and the interpolation of a
Frenchwoman four generations ago, in the person of Nan's
great-grandmother, had only added to the temperamental burden of the
race. She had been a strange, brilliant creature, with about her that
mysterious touch of genius which by its destined suffering buys
forgiveness for its destined sins.

And in Nan the soul of her French ancestress lived anew. The charm of
the frail and fair Angele de Varincourt--baffling, elusive, but
irresistible--was hers, and the soul of the artist, with its restless
imagination, its craving for the beautiful, its sensitive response to all
emotion--this, too, was her inheritance.

To Penelope, Nan's ultimate unfolding was a matter of absorbing interest.
Her own small triumphs as a singer paled into insignificance beside the
riot of her visions for Nan's future. Nevertheless, she was sometimes
conscious of an undercurrent of foreboding. Something was lacking. Had
the gods, giving so much, withheld the two best gifts of all--Success and
Happiness?

While Penelope mused in the firelight, the clatter of china issuing from
the kitchen premises indicated unusual domestic activity on Nan's part,
and finally culminated in her entry into the sitting-room, bearing a
laden tea-tray.

"Hot scones!" she announced joyfully. "I've made a burnt offering of
myself, toasting them."

Penelope smiled.

"What an infant you are, Nan," she returned. "I sometimes wonder if
you'll ever grow up?"

"I hope not"--with great promptitude. "I detest extremely grown-up
people. But what are you brooding over so darkly? Cease those
philosophical reflections in which you've been indulging--it's a positive
vice with you, Penny--and give me some tea."

Penelope laughed and began to pour out tea.

"I half thought Maryon Rooke might be here by now," remarked Nan,
selecting a scone from the golden-brown pyramid on the plate and
carefully avoiding Penelope's eyes. "He said he might look in some time
this afternoon."

Penelope held the teapot arrested in mid-air.

"How condescending of him!" she commented drily. "If he comes--then exit
Penelope."

"You're an ideal chaperon, Penny," murmured Nan with approval.

"Chaperons are superfluous women nowadays. And you and Maryon are so
nearly engaged that you wouldn't require one even if they weren't out of
date."

"Are we?" A queer look of uncertainty showed in Nan's eyes. One might
almost have said she was afraid.

"Aren't you?" Penelope's counter-question flashed back swiftly. "I
thought there was a perfectly definite understanding between you?"

"So you trot tactfully away when he comes? Nice of you, Penny."

"It's not in the least 'nice' of me," retorted the other. "I happen to
be giving a singing-lesson at half-past five, that's all." After a pause
she added tentatively: "Nan, why don't you take some pupils? It
means--hard cash."

"And endless patience!" commented Nan, "No, don't ask me that, Penny, as
you love me! I couldn't watch their silly fingers lumbering over the
piano."

"Well, why don't you take more concert work? You could get it if you
chose! You're simply throwing away your chances! How long is it since
you composed anything, I'd like to know?"

"Precisely five minutes--just now when I was in the kitchen. Listen, and
I'll play it to you. It's a setting to those words of old Omar:

'Ah, Love! could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!'

I was burning my fingers in the performance of duty and the
appropriateness of the words struck me," she added with a malicious
little grin.

She seated, herself at the piano and her slim, nervous hands wandered
soundlessly a moment above the keys. Then a wailing minor melody grew
beneath them--unsatisfied, asking, with now and then an ecstasy of joyous
chords that only died again into the querying despair of the original
theme. She broke off abruptly, humming the words beneath her breath.

Penelope crossed the room and, laying her hands on the girl's shoulders,
twisted her round so that she faced her.

"Nan, it's sheer madness! You've got this wonderful talent--a real gift
of the gods--and you do nothing with it!"

Nan laughed uncertainly and bent her bead so that all Penelope could see
was a cloud of dusky hair.

"I can't," she said.

"Why not?" Penelope's voice was urgent. "Why don't you work up that
last composition, for instance, and get it published? Surely"--giving
her a little wrathful shake--"surely you've some ambition?"

"Do you remember what that funny old Scotch clairvoyant said to me? . . .
'You have ambition--great ambition--but not the stability or perseverance
to achieve.'"

Penelope's level brows contracted into a frown and she shook her head
dissentingly.

"It's true--every word of it," asserted Nan.

The other dropped her hands from Nan's shoulders and turned away.

"You'll break everyone's heart before you've finished," she said. Adding
in a lighter tone: "I'm going out now. If Maryon Rooke comes, don't
begin by breaking his for him."

The door closed behind her and Nan, left alone, strolled restlessly over
to the window and stood looking out.

"Break his!" she whispered under her breath. "Dear old Penny! She
doesn't know the probabilities in this particular game of chance."

The slanting afternoon sunlight revealed once more that sudden touch of
gravity--almost of fear--in her face. It was rather a charming face,
delicately angled, with cheeks that hollowed slightly beneath the
cheek-bones and a chin which would have been pointed had not old Dame
Nature changed her mind at the last moment and elected to put a provoking
little cleft there. Nor could even the merciless light of a wintry sun
find a flaw in her skin. It was one of those rare, creamy skins, with a
golden undertone and the feature of a flower petal, sometimes found in
conjunction with dark hair. The faint colour in her cheeks was of that
same warm rose which the sun kisses into glowing life on the velvet skin
of an apricot.

The colour deepened suddenly in her face as the sound of an electric bell
trilled through the flat. Dropping her arms to her sides, she stood
motionless, like a bird poised for flight. Then, with a little impatient
shrug of her shoulders, she made her way slowly, almost unwillingly,
across the hall and threw open the door.

"You, Maryon?" she said a trifle breathlessly. Then, as he entered:
"I--I hardly expected you."

He took both her hands in his and kissed them.

"It's several years since I expected anything," he answered. "Now--I
only hope."

Nan smiled.

"Come in, pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very
doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the flat doesn't run to
whisky-and-soda."

"Coffee, please--and your conversation--will suffice. 'A Loaf of
Bread . . . and Thou beside me singing in the Wilderness' . . ."

"You'd much prefer a whisky-and-soda and a grilled steak to the loaf
and--the et ceteras," observed Nan cynically. "There's a very wide gulf
between what a man says and what he thinks."

"There's a much wider one between what a man wants and what he gets," he
returned grimly.

"You'll soon have all you want," she answered. "You're well on the way
to fame already."

"Do you know," he remarked irrelevantly, "your eyes are exactly like blue
violets. I'd like to paint you, Nan."

"Perhaps I'll sit for you some day," she replied, handing him his coffee.
"That is, if you're very good."

Maryon Rooke was a man the merit of whose work was just beginning to be
noticed in the art world. For years he had laboured unacknowledged and
with increasing bitterness--for he knew his own worth. But now, though,
still only in his early thirties, his reputation, particularly as a
painter of women's portraits, had begun to be noised abroad. His feet
were on the lower rungs of the ladder, and it was generally prophesied
that he would ultimately reach the top. His gifts were undeniable, and
there was a certain ruthlessness in the line of the lips above the small
Van Dyck beard he wore which suggested that he would permit little to
stand in the way of his attaining his goal--be it what it might.

"You'd make a delightful picture, Sun-kissed," he said, narrowing his
eyes and using one of his most frequent names for her. "With your blue
violet eyes and that rose-petal skin of yours."

Nan smiled involuntarily.

"Don't be so flowery, Maryon. Really, you and Penelope are very good
antidotes to each other! She's just been giving me a lecture on the
error of my ways. She doesn't waste any breath over my appearance, bless
her!"

"What's the crime?"

"Lack of application, waste of opportunities, and general idleness."

"It's all true." Rooke leaned forward, his eyes lit by momentary
enthusiasm. They were curious eyes--hazel brown, with a misleading
softness in them that appealed to every woman he met. "It's all true,"
he repeated. "You could do big things, Nan. And you do nothing."

Nan laughed, half-pleased, half-vexed.

"I think you overrate my capabilities."

"I don't. There are very few pianists who have your technique, and fewer
still, your soul and power of interpretation."

"Oh, yes, there are. Heaps. And they've got what I lack."

"And that is?"

"The power to hold their audience."

"You lack that? You who can hold a man--"

She broke in excitedly.

"Yes, I can hold one man--or woman. I can play to a few people and hold
them. I know that. But--I can't hold a crowd."

Rooke regarded her thoughtfully. Perhaps it was true that in spite of
her charm, of the compelling fascination which made her so
unforgettable--did he not know how unforgettable!--she yet lacked the
tremendous force of magnetic personality which penetrates through a whole
concourse of people, temperamentally differing as the poles, and carries
them away on one great tidal wave of enthusiasm and applause.

"It may be true," he said, at last, reluctantly. "I don't think you
possess great animal magnetism! Yours is a more elusive, more--how shall
I put it?--an attraction more spirituelle. . . . To those it touches,
worse luck, a more enduring one."

"More enduring?"

"Far more. Animal magnetism is a thing of bodily presence. Once one is
away from it--apart--one is free. Until the next meeting! But _your_
victims aren't even free from you when you're not there."

"It sounds a trifle boring. Like a visitor who never knows when it's
time to go."

Rooke smiled.

"You're trying to switch me off the main theme, which is your work."

She sprang up.

"Don't bully me any more," she said quickly, "and I'll play you one of my
recent compositions."

She sauntered across to the piano and began to play a little ripping
melody, full of sunshine and laughter, and though a sob ran through it,
it was smothered by the overlying gaiety. Rooke crossed to her side and
quietly lifted her hands from the keys.

"Charming," he said. "But it doesn't ring true. That was meant for a
sad song. As it stands, it's merely flippant--insincere. And
insincerity is the knell of art."

Nan skimmed the surface defiantly.

"What a disagreeable criticism! You might have given me some
encouragement instead of crushing my poor little attempt at composition
like that!"

Rooke looked at her gravely. With him, sincerity in art was a fetish; in
life, a superfluity. But for the moment he was genuinely moved. The
poseur's mask which he habitually wore slipped aside and the real man
peeped out.

"Yours ought to be more than attempts," he said quietly. "It's in you to
do something really big. And you must do it. If not, you'll go to
pieces. You don't understand yourself."

"And do you profess to?"

"A little." He smiled down at her. "The gods have given you the golden
gift--the creative faculty. And there's a price to pay if you don't use
the gift."

Nan's "blue violet" eyes held a startled look.

"You've got something which isn't given to everyone. To precious few, in
fact! And if you don't use it, it will poison everything. We artists
_may not_ rust. If we do, the soul corrodes."

The sincerity of his tone was unmistakable. Art was the only altar at
which Rooke worshipped, it was probably the only altar at which he ever
would worship consistently. Nan suddenly yielded to the driving force at
the back of his speech.

"Listen to this, then," she said. "It's a setting to some words I came
across the other day."

She handed him a slip of paper on which the words were written and his
eyes ran swiftly down the verses of the brief lyric:


EMPTY HANDS

Away in the sky, high over our heads,
With the width of a world between,
The far Moon sails like a shining ship
Which the Dreamer's eyes have seen.

And empty hands are out-stretched in vain,
While aching eyes beseech,
And hearts may break that cry for the Moon,
The silver Moon out of reach!

But sometimes God on His great white Throne
Looks down from the Heaven above,
And lays in the hands that are empty
The tremulous Star of Love.


Nan played softly, humming the melody in the wistful little pipe of a
voice which was all that Mature had endowed her with. But it had an
appealing quality--the heart-touching quality of the mezzo-soprano--while
through the music ran the same unsatisfied cry as in her setting of the
old Tentmaker's passionate words--a terrible demand for those things that
life sometimes withholds.

As she ceased playing Maryon Rooke spoke musingly.

"It's a queer world," he said. "What a man wants he can't have. He sees
the good gifts and may not take them. Or, if he takes the one he wants
the most--he loses all the rest. Fame and love and life--the great god
Circumstance arranges all these little matters for us. . . . And mighty
badly sometimes! And that's why I can't--why I mustn't--"

He broke off abruptly, checking what he had intended to say. Nan felt as
though a door had been shut in her face. This man had a rare faculty for
implying everything and saying nothing.

"I don't understand," she said rather low.

"An artist isn't a free agent--not free to take the things life offers,"
he answered steadily. "He's seen 'the far Moon' with the Dreamer's eyes,
and that's probably all he'll ever see of it. His 'empty hands' may not
even grasp at the star."

He had adapted the verses very cleverly to suit his purpose. With a
sudden flash of intuition Nan understood him, and the fear which had
knocked at her heart, when Penelope had assumed that there was a definite
understanding between herself and Rooke, knocked again. Poetically
wrapped up, he was in reality handing her out her conge--frankly
admitting that art came first and love a poor second.

He twisted his shoulders irritably.

"Last talks are always odious!" he flung out abruptly.

"Last?" she queried. Her fingers were trifling nervously with the pages
of an album of songs that rested against the music-desk.

He did not look at her.

"Yes," he said quietly. "I'm going away. I leave for Paris to-morrow."

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