The Preliminaries Part 8

"'Huh!' she said, 'I may n't know much, but I'm wise to this; the folks that have real reasons for a smash-up don't have to come to Reno. They mostly can get their papers on the spot. I guess we're all in the same boat out here. We're just taking what we want.'

"I felt as if I had been struck with a sledge-hammer when she said that, and her eyes seemed to be boring through me like gimlets. I thought I should scream if she said another word.

"'Let's talk about it in the morning,' I said, 'if you'll excuse me.

I'm so tired I simply can't keep my eyes open.'

{117}

"That was n't true. She went to sleep almost instantly, and slept like a baby. I lay beside her, wide awake for hours. What she was, and what she said, had turned a key in my brain. A host of thoughts I didn't know I had came trooping out of some hidden room, and they marched and counter-marched across my mind all night."

Desire got up and began to walk about the room restlessly in her absorption as she recalled all this.

"It was wonderful, Uncle Ben. I wish I could make you understand.

First of all, I recognized that what she said was absolutely true. I said to myself, Desire, you are a civilized, cultivated, mature, distinguished-looking person, well born and well reared--but what has it all done for you? It has, precisely, conducted you to Reno, Nevada.

This girl beside you is {118} uncivilized, uneducated, crude, young, clearly of very common clay. And what has it all done for her but conduct her to Reno, Nevada,--where she finds you, daughter of the Pilgrims. Well met, sister!'

"It was very bitter to think that of myself," said my niece, stopping by my chair. "It may sound foolish, Uncle Ben, but my friends have always insisted I was a _schone Seele_. I, a beautiful soul! I, a soul at all! A white light that I could not shut my eyes against seemed to beat down into my brain. I saw that I was just like the girl beside me in her incredible callousness,--even like the fat, self-satisfied, blonde women I had seen in the town. Oh, those common, common people!

I had thought myself as fine as silk, as tempered as steel, yes, and as pure as flame! But I, too, was a brute.

{119}

"I thought and thought. I thought of Arnold, Arthur, and myself; we are all proud, we are all fastidious, yet we had come to this. We had drifted on the rocks. Pride had n't saved us, nor training, nor intelligence. I had lived in and for these things, and they had not prevented my doing the commonest things like the commonest creatures.

Uncle Ben, I seemed horrible to myself--I can't tell you.

"More doors opened in my mind, and I began to think of you, and mother, and Aunt Mary, and of all the stories you used to tell me of the good Raynies and the bad, the weak Withacres and the strong ones, and what good fighters there were among them. And it seemed to me that I could see and feel--like the flight of wings in the dark over my head-- the pa.s.sing of the struggling generations of my fathers, each one {120} achieving a little more; going from decency to good repute, and from repute to renown, keeping faith with one another and with G.o.d, from father to son.

"And all at once I saw that the dignity of my race did not consist in its honors, nor even in its character, but--forever and always--in its fight for character! It was the struggle that had made us. And I had never struggled--so--I was not made. I was still unformed, shapeless,--and a cheaper thing with all my pretensions than the girl asleep beside me.

"Then there came on me a great desire to be one with my own people.

One life is nothing--somehow I saw it very clearly. Families build righteousness as coral insects build a reef. I felt the yearning to be built into a structure of honesty and honor. Even as I wished {121} this, I saw, in that fierce light beating down upon my brain, that there was something deep within me that forbade me to do the thing I had been planning. It lay at the core of being, dark and stern; it said _No_ to my desires. And I knew it for the strength of every _No_ my fathers ever uttered. It was my inheritance. And as I looked, it seized my will. It shook me free from my longing for Arthur, free from my impatience with Arnold, free from my wish to have my way!

"So--I have come back. It was strong enough to bring me back; it is strong enough to hold me here. I don't care what happens to me after this. _I don't care._ I may not be happy, but I don't seem to want to be happy: I want to do the seemly, fitting things, the decent things.

I don't care if they are stupid; I don't care if I am bored! {122} I wish just what I say. I want to be one with my race. It is they who have brought me back. They held up the torch. I let it fall. Uncle Ben, do you think it has gone out? Suppose one of my children's children should stumble and then say, 'It is not my fault. I inherited this. There was grandmamma who went her willful way so long ago!' I know my dust would s.h.i.+ver in the ground. I can't add any more to the weaknesses and follies that will crush them down. Having my own way costs too much when they must pay. That's it. I have n't the price. I refuse to let them pay.--Will you help me, Uncle Ben? Will you ask Arnold to let me try again? I will be good. I will be humble--almost!

For I must have my children if only that I may pa.s.s this on. The thing is to abolish our complacency. Why--it's {123} what the old religionists meant when they talked about getting down in the dust before their G.o.d! It really, really, is the thing we have to do. And-- my children will never learn it here, among you, where everybody is so happy and self-satisfied. They will never learn it even from the righteous Arnold. If they know it, they will have to learn it from me-- for I am the only repentant sinner of us all! So--I have come back."

Desire's words stirred me strangely. I had sometimes suspected that I allowed my modest pride of descent to feed complacency rather than effort. As she talked, I, too, saw the long procession of the valiant men and women of my race moving forward through the years; I saw how I had lightly arrogated credit to myself for their hard-won excellencies, and reckoned {124} myself a finer gentleman for the battles they had fought. Where were my battles? Where my victories?

Then--I remembered that the Withacres always could talk like angels from heaven. But I looked into Desire's eyes, and that thought shriveled before the flame in them. They met mine exultantly, as steel meets steel. This was no lip eloquence. She was eager for her battles.

"So," I said with wonder, "you have capitulated--to Them."

"Yes--to Them. Oh, it is n't needful, Uncle Ben, that to show my kins.h.i.+p I should work as they did, live as plainly, think as narrowly.

It is all here just the same. I am their child. I will not go against their will. Before ever I was born, they wrote their desires in my flesh. They made the blood to flow in my veins after their ways. {125} And--I am glad! For my children shall be their children.--Uncle Ben, will Arnold take me home?"

I looked at Desire's glowing face that seemed afire with aspiration for the life she had tossed aside. I thought of Arnold's grave lips, steady shoulders, and longing eyes. There fell upon me a vivid sense of the wonderful ingenuity and richness of life's long processes. This diverse pair had traveled devious ways to the end that, after all their married years, they might at last be not unequally mated. My elderly heart sang a canticle of rejoicing, but my speech was circ.u.mspect.

"I incline to believe that he will," I admitted.

{126}

{127}

CLARISSA'S OWN CHILD

{128}

{129}

CLARISSA'S OWN CHILD

I

It was half-past three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in April when a.s.sociate Professor Charleroy (of the Midwest University at Powelton) learned that he was to lose his wife and home.

For April, the day was excessively hot. The mercury stood at eighty-nine degrees on the stuffy little east porch of the Charleroy home. There was no ice in the refrigerator, the house-cleaning was not finished, and the screens were not in. The discomfort of the untimely heat was very great.

Clarissa Charleroy, tired, busy, and flushed of face, knew that she was nervous to the point of hysteria. This {130} condition always gave her a certain added clearness of vision and fluency of speech which her husband, with justice, had learned to dread. Indeed, she dreaded it herself. In such moods she often created for herself situations which she afterwards found irksome. She quite sincerely wished herself one of the women whom fatigue makes quiet and sodden, instead of unduly eloquent.

Paul Charleroy, coming from a cla.s.sroom, found his wife in the dining-room, ironing a s.h.i.+rt-waist. The door was open into the little kitchen beyond, where the range fire was burning industriously, and the heat poured steadily in.

"I thought it would be cooler in here," Clarissa explained wearily, "but it is n't. I have to get these waists ready to wear, and a gingham dress {131} ironed for Marvel. The child is simply roasted in that woolen thing. But the starch _will_ stick to the irons!"

Professor Charleroy shut the door into the kitchen. He frowned at the ironing-board, balanced on two chairs in front of the window. Small changes in the household arrangements were likely to discompose him.

In his own house he was vaguely conscious always of seeking a calm which did not exist there.

"Can't the washerwoman do that ironing?" he inquired.

Clarissa dropped her iron and confronted him dramatically.

"Doubtless--if I could afford to pay her," she responded. "As you are already aware, the salary of a.s.sociate professors in the Midwest University is fourteen hundred dollars a year. When steak was a s.h.i.+lling a pound {132} and eggs fifteen cents a dozen and the washerwoman asked a dollar a day, one could afford to have her help longer. Now it is different."

Professor Charleroy moved quietly over to the ironing-board and put the flatiron, which was still hot enough to scorch, upon its stand.

Then he arranged, in a gla.s.s, the handful of daffodils he was carrying, and set them where the April suns.h.i.+ne fell across them.

"Yes, I know it is different," he said gloomily. "But it may be different again if I can place my text-book. When we married, Clarissa, I thought your own little income would be sufficient to protect you from such economies as I knew would be most distasteful to you--but, somehow, it--it does n't seem to do it."

"It goes," returned Clarissa. "I don't {133} know how it goes, but it does. I dare say I'm not a good manager. It is n't as if I dressed well, for I don't. But I would n't mind, if we could go to Chicago for a week of music and theatres in the spring. But we can't do anything but live--and _that_ is n't living! Something is wrong with the whole system of woman's work in the world. I don't know what it is, but I mean to find out. Somebody has got to do something about it."

She threw back her small blonde head as she spoke, and it was as if she gave the universe and all its powers warning that she did not purpose to live indefinitely under such an ill-arranged order of things as they were maintaining. Let the universe look to itself!

"I met Baumgarten of the Midwest Ice Company on the campus. He says {134} if this weather holds, he will start his ice-wagons to-morrow,"

suggested her husband anxiously. He had very definite reasons for wis.h.i.+ng to divert Clarissa from consideration of all the things that are out of joint in the world.

"Ice is a detail. Sometimes details do help," admitted Clarissa, fanning her blazing cheeks.

"We will have Jacob come and wash the windows and put on the screens in the morning," he continued very gently. "And I will uncover the roses and rake the beds this afternoon. I should have done it last week, but no one could forsee this weather."