Ben Blair Part 29

"He calls it 'The Unattainable.'"

"And what is its meaning?"

"Ambition, perfection, complete happiness--anything striven for with one's whole soul."

Florence was studying her companion now as steadily as he had been studying her a moment before. "To your--friend it meant--"

"Happiness."

The girl's hands were clasped in her lap in a way she had when her thoughts were concentrated. "And he never found it?" she asked.

Unconsciously one of Sidwell's hands made a downward motion of deprecation. "He did not. We made the circuit of the earth together in pursuit of it--but all was useless. It seemed as though the more he searched the more he was baffled in his quest."

For a moment the girl made no reply, but in her lap her hands clasped tighter and tighter. A thought that made her finger-tips tingle was taking form in her mind. A dim comprehension of the nature of this man had first suggested it; the fact that the canvas was unsigned had helped give it form. The speaker's last words, his even tone of voice, had not pa.s.sed unnoticed. She turned to the canvas, searched the skilfully concealed outlines of the tattered figure with the upturned eyes. The clasped hands grew white with the tension.

"I didn't know before you were an artist as well as a writer," she said evenly.

Sidwell turned quickly. The girl could feel his look. "I fear," he said, "I fail to grasp your meaning. You think--"

Florence met the speaker's look steadily. "I don't think," she said, "I know. You painted the picture, Mr. Sidwell. That man there on the mountain-side is you!"

Her companion hesitated. His face darkened; his lips opened to speak and closed again.

The girl continued watching him with steady look. "I can hardly believe it," she said absently. "It seems impossible."

Sidwell forced a smile. "Impossible? What? That I should paint a daub like that?"

The girl's tense hands relaxed wearily.

"No, not that you paint, but that the man there--the one finding happiness unattainable--should be you."

The lids dropped just a shade over Sidwell's black eyes. "And why, if you please, should it be more remarkable that I am unhappy than another?"

This time Florence took him up quickly. "Because," she answered, "you seem to have everything one can think of that is needed to make a human being happy--wealth, position, health, ability--all the prizes other people work their lives out for or die for." Again the voice dropped. "I can't understand it." She was silent a moment. "I can't understand it,"

she repeated.

From the girl's face the man's eyes pa.s.sed to the canvas, and rested there. "Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose it is difficult, almost impossible, for you to realize why I am--as I am. You have never had the personal experience--and we only understand what we have felt. The trouble with me is that I have experienced too much, felt too much. I've ceased to take things on trust. Like the youth and the key flower I've forgotten the best." The voice paused, but the eyes still kept to the canvas.

"That picture," he went on, "typifies it all. I painted it, not because I'm an artist, but because in a fas.h.i.+on it expresses something I couldn't put into words, or express in any other way. When I began to climb, the object above me was not happiness but ambition. Wealth and social place, as you say, I already had. They meant nothing to me. What I wanted was to make a name in another way--as a literary man." The dark eyes s.h.i.+fted back to the listener's face, the voice spoke more rapidly.

"I went after the thing that I wanted with all the power and tenacity that was in me. I worked with the one object in view; worked without resting, feverishly. I had successes and failures, failures and successes--a long line of both. At last, as the world puts it, I _arrived_. I got to a position where everything I wrote sold, and sold well; but in the meantime the thing above me, which had been ambition, gradually took on another shape. Perfection it was I longed for now, perfection in my art. It was not enough that the public had accepted me as I was; I was not satisfied with my work. Try as I might, nothing that I wrote ever reached my own standard in its execution. I worked harder than ever; but it was useless. I was confronting the blank wall--the wall of my natural limitations."

The voice paused, and for a moment lowered. "I won't say what I did then; I was--mad almost--the finger-marks of it are on the rock."

The girl could not look longer into the speaker's eyes. She felt as if she were gazing upon a naked human soul, and turned away.

"At last," he went on in his confession, "I came to myself, and was forced to see things as they were. I saw that as well as I thought I had understood life I had not even grasped its meaning. I had fancied the attainment of my object the supreme end, and by every human standard I had succeeded in my purpose; but the thing I had gained was trash.

Wealth, power, notoriety--what were they? Bubbles, nothing more; bubbles that broke in the hand of him who clasped them. The real meaning and object of existence lay deeper, and had nothing whatever to do with the estimate of a person by his fellows. It was a frame of mind of the individual himself."

Florence's face turned farther away, but Sidwell did not notice. "Then, for the last time," he hurried on, "the unattainable changed form for me, and became what it seems now--happiness. For a little time I think I was happy--happy in merely having made the discovery. Then came the reaction. I was as I was, as I am now--a product of my past life, of a civilization essentially artificial. In striving for a false ideal I had unfitted myself for the real when at last I discovered it."

Unconsciously the man had come closer, and his eyes glowed. At last his apathy was shaken off, and his words came in a torrent. "What I was then I am to-day. Mentally, I am like an inebriate, who no longer finds satisfaction in plain food and drink, but craves stimulants. I demand activity, excitement, change. In every hour of my life I realize the narrowness and artificiality of it all; but without it I am unhappy. I sometimes think Mother Nature herself has disowned me; when I try to get near her she draws away--I fancy with a shudder. Solitude of desert, of forest, or of prairie is no longer solitude to me. It is filled with voices--accusing voices; and I rush back to the crowd and the unrest of the city. Even my former pleasures seem to have deserted me. You have spoke often of accomplis.h.i.+ng big things, doing something better than anyone else can do it, as an example of pleasure supreme. If you realized what you were saying you would know its irony. You cannot do a thing better than anyone else. People, like water, strike a dead level.

No matter how you strive, dozens of others can do the thing you are doing. Were you to die, your place would be filled to-morrow, and the world would wag on just the same. There is always someone just beneath you watchfully waiting, ready to seize your place if you relax your effort for a moment. The term 'big things' is relative. To speak it is merely to refer to something you do not personally understand. Nothing seems really big to the one who does it. Nothing is difficult when you understand it. The growing of potatoes in a backyard is just as wonderful a performance as the painting of one of these pictures; it would be more so were it not so common and so necessary. The construction of a steam-engine or an electric dynamo is incomparably more remarkable than the merging of separate thousands of capital into millions of combination, yet mult.i.tudes of men everywhere can do either of the former things and are unnoticed. We wors.h.i.+p what we do not understand, and call it big; but the man in the secret realizes the mockery and smiles."

Closer came the dark face. The black eyes, intense and flas.h.i.+ng, held the listener in their gaze.

"I said that even my pleasures seem to have deserted me. It is true. I used to like to wander about the city, to see it at its busiest, to loiter amid the hum and the roar and the ceaseless activity. I saw in it then only friendly rivalry, like a hurdle race or a football game--something pleasing and stimulating. Now it all affects me in just the reverse way. I look beneath the surface, and my heart sinks to find not friendly compet.i.tion, but a battle, where men and women fight for daily bread, where the weak are crowded and trampled upon by the strong.

In ordinary battle the maimed and the crippled are spared, but here they still fight on. Mercy or quarter is unknown. Oh, it is ghastly! I used to take pleasure in books, in the work of others; but even this satisfaction has been taken from me--except such grim satisfaction as a physician may feel at a _post mortem_. The very labor that made me a success in literature caused me to be a dissector of things around me.

To learn how others attained their ends I must needs tear their work apart and study the fragments. This habit has become a part of me. I overlook the beauty of the product in the working of the machinery that produced it. I watch the mixing of literary confections, served to the reader so that upon laying down the book he may have a good taste in his mouth. People themselves, those I meet from day to day, inevitably go through the same metamorphosis. I see them as characters in a book.

Their foibles and peculiarities are grist for my mill. Everything, everyone, when I appear, slips into the narrow confines of a printed page. I can't even spare myself. Fragments of me can be had for a price at any of the book-stalls. I've become public property--and with no one to blame but myself."

The flow of speech halted. The speaker's face was so near now that the girl could not avoid looking at it.

"Do you wonder," he concluded, "that I am not happy?"

The girl looked up. The two pairs of brown eyes met. Outwardly, she who answered was calm; but in her lap the small hands were clasping each other tightly, so that the blood had left the fingers.

"No, I do not wonder now," she answered simply.

"And you understand?"

"Yes, I--no, there's so much--Oh, take me home, please!" The sentence ended abruptly in a plea. The slender body was trembling as with cold.

"Take me home, please. I want to--to think."

"Florence!" The word was a caress. "Florence!"

But the girl was already on her feet. "Don't say any more to-day! I can't stand it. Take me home!"

Sidwell looked at her closely for a moment; then the mask of conventionality, which for a time had lifted from his face, dropped once more, and he also arose. In silence, side by side, the two made their way down the long hall to the exit. Out of doors, the afternoon sun, serene and smiling, gave them a friendly greeting.

CHAPTER XIX

A VISITOR FROM THE PLAINS

"Papa," said Florence, next morning, as they two sat alone at breakfast, her mother having reported a headache and failed to appear, "let's go somewhere, away from folks, for a week or so."

"Why this sudden change of front?" her father queried. "Not being of the enemy I'm ent.i.tled to the plan of campaign, you know."

Florence observed him steadily, and the father could not but notice how much more mature she seemed than the prairie girl of a few months ago.

"There is no change of front or plan of campaign as far as I know," she replied. "I simply want to get away a bit, that's all." She returned to her neglected breakfast. "There's such a thing as mental dyspepsia, you know, and I feel a twinge of it now and then. I think this new life is being fed to me in doses too large for my digestion."

Mr. Baker eventually acquiesced, as anyone who knew him could have foretold he would do. His wife, also, when the plan was broached to her, hesitatingly agreed, but at the last moment balked and declined to go; so they left without her.