August First Part 3

I wish you could have heard how quietly and naturally Robert Halarkenden answered me. He considered a moment first, in his Scotch way, and then he said: "Do not you see, la.s.sie, that's where it was simple, verra simple. Houses and lands and a place in the world are small affairs after love, and mine was come to s.h.i.+pwreck. So it seemed to me I'd try living free of the care of possessions. I'd try the old rule, that a man to find his life must lay it down. It was verra simple, as I'm telling you, once I'd got the fancy for it. Laying down a life is not such a hard business; it's only to make up your mind.

And I did indeed find life in doing it, I was care-free as few are in those forest years."

I think you would have agreed with me, Mr. McBirney, that the middle-aged, lined face of my uncle's gardener was beautiful as he said those things. "Why did you leave the forest?" I asked him then; you may believe I'd forgotten about my bones by now.

"Ah, you'll find it grows irksome to be coddling one's own soul indefinitely," he confided to me with the pretty gentleness which breaks through his Scotch manner once in a while. "One gets tired of one's self, the spoiled body. I hungered to do something for somebody besides Robert Halarkenden. I'd taken charge of a lad with tuberculosis one summer up there, and I'd cured him, and I had a thought I could do the same for other lads. I wanted to get near a city to have that chance. I've been doing it here," and then he drew back into his Scotchness and was suddenly cold and reserved. But I knew that was shyness, and because he had spoken of his secret good deeds and was uncomfortable.

So I was not frozen. "You have!" I pounced on him. And I made him tell me how, besides his unending gardening, besides his limitless reading, he has been, all these years, working in the city in his few spare hours, spending himself and his wages--wages!--and helping, healing, giving all the time--like you----

I felt the most torturing envy of my life as I listened to that. _I_ wanted to be generous and wonderful and self-forgetting, and have a great, free heart "of spirit, fire, and dew." _I_ wanted the something in me that made that still radiance of Robert Halarkenden's eyes. You see? "I"--always "I." That's the way I'm made. Utterly selfish. I can't even see heavenliness but I want to s.n.a.t.c.h it for myself. Robin never thought once that he was getting heavenliness--he only thought that he was giving help. Different from me. And all these years that I have been prancing around his garden of delight in two hundred dollar frocks--oh lots of them, for I'm rich and extravagant and I buy things because they're pretty and not because I need them--all these years he has been saving most of his seventy-five dollars a month, and getting sick children sent south, and never mentioning it. Why, I own a place south. I'm not such a beast but that--well, very likely I am a beast--I don't know. Anyhow, I've consistently lived the life of a selfish b.u.t.terfly. And I cling to it. Despise me if you will. I do.

I like my pretty clothes and my car, and how I do love my two saddle-horses! And I like dancing, too--I turn into a bird in the tree-tops when I dance, with not a care, not a responsibility. I don't want to give all that up. Have I got to? Have I _got_ to "lay down my life" to find it? For, somehow, cling as I will to all these things, something is pus.h.i.+ng, pus.h.i.+ng back of them, stronger than them. You started it. I want the big things now--I want to be worth while. But yet clothes and gayety and horses and automobiles--I'm glued tight in that round. I don't believe I can tear loose. I don't believe I want to. Do you see--I'm in torment. And--silly idiot that I am--it's not for me to decide anything. I'm turning into a ton of stone--I'll be a horrible unhuman monster and have to give it all up and have nothing in return. Soon I'll lay down my life and _not_ find it. I won't. I'll pull the trigger. Will I? Do you see how I vacillate and s.h.i.+ver and boil? This is my soul I'm pouring out to you. I hope you don't mind hot liquids. What you wrote about the actor made me sit still a whole half-hour without stirring a finger, with your letter in my hands. It was glorious--there's no question. You meant it to inspire me. But he had a job. I haven't. Back to me again, you see--unending me. Do you know about the man who used to say "Now let's go into the garden and talk about me"?

In any case, thank you for telling me that story. I'm glad to know that there are people like that--several of them. I know you and Robin anyhow, but the actor makes the world seem fuller of courage and worth-whileness. I wish a little of it would leak into--oh, _me_ again. _Me_ is getting "irksome," as Robin said. Remember to tell me the boy's name.

Yours gratefully if unsatisfactorily, AUGUST FIRST.

P. S.--Robert Halarkenden isn't his real name. It's his grandmother's father's name, and Welsh. I don't know the real one.

P. S. No. 2. If it isn't inconsistent, and if you think I'm worth while, you might pray just a sc.r.a.p too. That I may get to be like you and Robin.

P. S. No. 3. But you know it's the truth that I'm balky at giving up everything in sight. I'd hate myself in bad clothes. _Can't_ I have good ones and yet be worth while? Oh, I see. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad so long as I don't care too much. But I do care.

Then they hamper me--eh? Is that the idea? This is the last postscript to this letter. Write a quick one--I'm needing it.

WARCHESTER, St. Andrew's Parish House, Sept. 23d.

I don't think it matters what his real name is. I'd been thinking all along, that he was just a convenient fiction, useful for an address, and now he turns out about the realest person going. Sometimes I imagine perhaps it will be like that when we get through with this world and wake up into what's after--that the things we've pa.s.sed over pretty much here and been vague about will blaze out as the eternal verities. A miracle happened that day in your September garden.

You've surely read "_Sur la Branche_"--that book written around a woman's belief in the Providence of G.o.d? Well, that's what I mean.

Why did Halarkenden come down out of the woods into your uncle's garden? Why did you tell him, of all people? Why was it you who got through to the truth about him? Why did it all happen just the minute you most needed it? Of course I believe it--every word, exactly as you wrote it. It's impossible things like that which do happen and help us to bear the flatly ordinary. It's the incredible things that shout with reality. Miracles ought to be ordinary affairs--we don't believe in them because we're always straining every nerve to keep them from happening. We get so confused in the continual muddle of our own mistakes that when something does come straight through, as it was intended to do, we're like those men who heard the voice of G.o.d that day and told one another anxiously that it thundered.

Just think what went to make up those five minutes which gave you the lift you had to have--that young Scotchman, beating back his devils up in the lonely mountains all those years ago--that's when it started.

And then fetch it down to now; his leaving home forever--and his exile in the woods--considerably different from a camping trip--the silent days, worse--the nights. And all the time his mind going back and back to what he'd left behind--his home, seeing every little corner of it--you know the tortures of imagination--his friends--the girl--always the girl--wondering why, and why, and why. Think of the days and months without seeing one of your own kind. He had to have books; his wild garden had to blossom. That man wasn't "coddling" his soul--he was ripping and tearing it into shreds and then pounding it together again with a hammer and with nails. All alone. That's the hardest, I suppose. And then, when it was all done and the worst of the pain and the torment pa.s.sed, away up there in the forests, Robert Halarkenden--it _is_ true, isn't it?--he rose from the dead, and being risen, he took a hand in the big business of the world. And his latest job is you. Has that occurred to you? I don't mean to say that he went through all that just to be a help to you. But I do say that if he hadn't gone through it he wouldn't have been a help to anybody. He did it. You needed to find out about it. He told you. It got through. Things sometimes do.

Suppose he hadn't come down from the mountains that day--that they'd found him there--that he hadn't had the nerve to face it? Who would have cured the tuberculosis lad--who would have sent the children south--who would have brushed through your uncle's garden hedge in Forest Gate, Illinois, and told you what you needed to be told? If _you_ should turn out not to have the nerve--if, some day you--? Then what about _your_ job? n.o.body can ever do another person's real work, and, if it isn't done, I think it's likely we'll have to keep company with our undone, unattempted jobs forever. Mostly rather little jobs they are, too--so much the more shame for having dodged them. You say that you haven't got one. Maybe not, just now. But how do you know it isn't right around the corner? Did Halarkenden have you in mind those years he fought with beasts? No--not you--it was the girl back in Scotland. But here you are, getting the benefit of it. It's a small place, the world, and we're tied and tangled together--it won't do to cut loose. That spoils things, and it's all to come right at the last, if we'll only let it.

Possibly you'll think it's silly or childish, but I believe maybe this life with its queer tasks and happenings is just the great, typical Fairy Story, with Heaven at the last. They're true--that's why unspoiled children love fairy stories. They begin, they march with incident, best of all, one finds always at the end that "'They' lived happily ever afterward." "They," is you, and I hope it's me. The trouble with people mainly is that they're too grown up. Who knows what children see and hear in the summer twilights, on the way home from play? There's the big, round moon, tangled in the tree-tops--one remembers that--and there's the night wind, idling down the dusty street. Surely, though, more than that, but we've forgotten. Isn't growing up largely a process of forgetting, rather than of getting, knowledge? Of course there's cube-root and partial payments and fear and pain and love--one does acquire that sort of thing--but doesn't it maybe cost the losing of the right point of view? And that's too expensive. Naturally, or, perhaps, unnaturally, we can't afford to be caught sailing wash-tub boats across the troubled seas of orchard gra.s.s, or watching for fairies in the moonlight, but can't we somehow continue to want to give ourselves to similar adventure? There's a good deal of difference, first and last, between childishness and childlikeness--enough to make the one plain foolishness, and the other the qualification for entrance into the Kingdom of G.o.d. I'd rather have let cube-root go and have kept more of my imagination. The other day, in the middle of a catechism I was holding in the parish school, a small youngster rose to his feet and solemnly a.s.sured the company present that "the pickshers of G.o.d in the church" were "all wrong."

Naturally we argued, which was a mistake. He got me. "G.o.d," said he, "is a Spirit, and spirits don't look like those colored pickshers in the windows." You see, he knew. He still remembers. But the higher mathematics and a few brisk sins will a.s.sist him to forget. Too bad.

Still, when we get back home again surely it will all "come back" like a forgotten language.

Meantime there are two hundred dollar frocks to consider, as well as miracles in gardens. And that's all right, so long as the frocks are worthy the background, which I venture to suppose, of course, they are.

The subject of clothes interests me a good deal just now, as I'm engaged in living on my salary. It's all a question of what one can afford, financially and spiritually. I gather you're not a bankrupt either way. I don't recall anything in Holy Writ that seems to require dowdiness as necessary to salvation. If one's got money it's fortunate--if money's got one--that's different. Which is my plat.i.tudinous way of agreeing with the last postscript of your letter.

I know you're getting to look at things properly again. To lose one's life certainly does not mean to kill it, and to give it away one needn't fling it to the dogs. And when you do connect with your job you'll recognize it and you'll know how to do it. I'd like to watch you. Once get your imagination going properly again and the days are rose and gold. Oh, not all of them--but a good many--enough.

I nearly forgot about Theodore. There's humor for you--Theodore, "The Gift of G.o.d"--that's the name they gave him sixteen good years ago somewhere over in Scotland as you'd have guessed from the rest of it, which is Alan McGregor. He is an orphan, is Theodore, but he doesn't wear the uniform of the Orphans' Home--far from it! He wears soft raiment and lives in kings' houses, or what amounts to the same thing.

I am engaged in exorcising the devil out of him and in teaching him enough Latin to get into a decent school at the earliest instant. The Latin goes well--three nights a week from eight to half-past nine. But the devil takes advantage of every one of those nine points of law which possession is said to give, and doesn't go at all. I am the only living person who knows how to define "charm." Charm is the most conspicuous attribute of the devil, and young McGregor has got it.

Likewise other qualities, the ones, for instance, which make his name so rather awfully funny. You'd have to know Theodore to appreciate just how funny.

It was the rector who "wished" him on to me. The rector is one of his guardians, and being Theodore's guardian is a business which requires at least one undersecretary, and I'm that. Theodore and hot water have the strongest affinity known to psychological chemistry. So I'm kept busy. But it's all the keenest sport you can imagine, and it's going to be tremendously worth while if I can make a success of it. He's the right kind of bad, and he's getting ready to grow into a great, big, straight out-and-outer, with a mind like lightning and a heart like one of the sons of G.o.d. But that kind is always the worst risk. He has the weapons to get him through the fight with splendor, only they're every one two-edged, and you have to be careful with swords that cut both ways. His father was an inventor genius and there are bales of money and already it has begun to press down on him a little. Still, that may be the exact right thing. He has talked about it once or twice as a nice boy would. There's a place on the other side which comes to him, with factories and such things. He wanted to know wouldn't it be his business to see that the working people were properly looked after; I gathered he's been reading books, trying to find out. And then he got suddenly shy and very bright red as to the face, and cleared out. So far, so good, but it isn't far enough. Not yet.

That's my present job. You'll get yours.

Wasn't it wonderful--I mean Halarkenden! When I think of him and then of myself it gives me a good deal of a jounce. It surprises me that I ever had the conceit to think I could handle this parson proposition.

Lately I've not been over-cheerful about it. That's one reason why your letter did me good.

I hear the Gift of G.o.d coming up the stairs, and I've neglected to look up the Future Periphrastic Conjugation and that ticklish difference between the Gerund and the Gerundive, which is vital.

One thing more--your second postscript. You didn't suppose that I don't, did you? Only, not like me!

GEOFFREY McBIRNEY.

The man took the letter down the three flights to the post-box at the entrance of the Parish House and dropped it, with a certain deliberation, as if he were speaking to someone whom he cared for, with a certain hesitation, as if he were not sure that he had spoken well, into the box. As he mounted the stairs again his springing gait was slower than usual. It was very late, but he drew a long chair close and poked the hard-coal fire till it glowed to him like a bed of jewels, all alive and stirred to their hot hearts; opals and topazes and rubies and cairngorms and the souls of blue sapphires and purple amethysts playing ghostly over the rest. He dropped into the chair and the tall, black-clothed figure fell into lax lines; his long fingers, the fingers of an artist, a musician, lay on the arms of the chair limply as if disconnected from any central power; there was surely despair, hopelessness, in the man's att.i.tude. His gray eyes glowed from under the straight black brows with much of the hidden flame, the smouldering intensity of the coals at which he gazed. He sat so perhaps half an hour, staring moodily at the orange heart of the fire.

Then suddenly, with a smothered half-syllable, with a hand thrown out impatiently, he was on his feet with a bound, and with that his arms were against the tall mantel and his head dropped in them, and he was gazing down so and talking aloud, rapidly, disjointedly, out of his loneliness, to his friend, the red fire. "How can I--how dare I? A square peg in a round hole--and the extra corners all weakness and wickedness. Selfishness--incompetence--I to set up to do the Lord's special work! I to preach to others--If it were not blasphemy it would be a joke--a ghastly joke. I can't go on--I have to pull out.

Yet--how can I? They'll think--people will think--oh what _does_ it matter what people will think? Only--if it hurt the rector--if it hurt the work? And Theodore--but--someone else would do him--more good than I can. There ought to be--an older man--to belong. Surely G.o.d will look after His gift--His gift!" The quick lightning of the brilliant eyes, which in this man often took the place of a smile, flashed; then the changing face was suddenly grim with a wrenching feeling, yet bright with a wind of tenderness not to be held back. The soul came out of hiding and wrote itself on the muscles of the face.

"She--that's it--that's the gist of it--fool that I am. To think--to dream--to dare to hope. But I _don't_ hope," he brought out savagely, and flung his shoulders straight and caught the wooden shelf with a grip. "I don't hope--I just"--the voice dropped, and his head fell on his arms again. "I won't say it. I'm not utterly mad yet." He picked up the poker and stirred the fire, and put on coal from a scuttle, and went and sat down again in the chair. "Something has got to be decided," he spoke again to the coals in the grate. "I've got to know if I ought to stay at this job, or if it's an impertinence." For minutes then he was silent, intent, it seemed, on the fire. Then again he spoke in the low, clear voice whose simplicity, whose purity reached, though he did not know it, the inmost hearts of the people to whom he preached. "I will make a test of her," he said, telling the fire his decision. "If she is safe and wins through to the real things, I'll believe that I've been let do that, and that I'm fit for work. If she doesn't--if I can't pull off that one job which is so distinctly put up to me--I'll leave." With a swing he had put out the lights in the big, bare living-room and gone into the bedroom beyond.

He tried to sleep, but the tortured nerves, the nerves of a high-bred race-horse, eager, ever ready for action, would not be quiet. The great, rich city, the great poverty-stricken ma.s.ses seething through it, the rus.h.i.+ng, grinding work of the huge parish, had eaten into his youth and strength enormously already in six months. He had given himself right and left, suffered with the suffering, as no human being can and keep balance, till now he was, unknowingly, at the edge of a breakdown. And the distrust of his own fitness, the forgetfulness that, under one's own limitations, is an unlimited reserve which is the only hope of any of us in any real work; this was the form of the retort of his overwrought nerves. Yet at last he slept.

Meantime as he slept the hours crept away and it was morning and an early postman came and opened the box with a rattling key and took out three letters which the deaconess had sent to her scattered family, and one, oddly written, which the janitor had executed for his mother in Italy, and the letter to the girl. From hand to hand it sped, and away, and was hidden in a sack in a long mail-train, and at last, Robert Halarkenden, on the 25th of September, came down the garden path, and the girl, reading in the wild garden, laid aside her book and watched him as he came, and thought how familiar and pleasant a sight was the gaunt, tall figure, pausing on the gravelled walk to touch a blossom, to lift a fallen branch, as lovingly as a father would care for his children. "A letter, la.s.sie," Robert Halarkenden said, and held out the thick envelope; and then did an extraordinary thing for Robert Halarkenden. He looked at the address in the unmistakable, big, black writing and looked at the girl and stood a moment, with a question in his eyes. The girl flushed. "Checkmate in six moves" was quite enough to say to this girl; one did not have to play the game brutally to a finish.

She laughed then. "I knew you must have wondered," she said, and with that she told the story of the letters.

"It's no wrong," Robert Halarkenden considered.

The girl jumped to her answer. "Wrong!" she cried, "I should say not.

It's salvation--hope--life. Maybe all that; at the least it's the powers of good, fighting for me. Something of the sort--I don't know,"

she finished lamely. With that she was deep in her letter and Robert Halarkenden had moved a few yards and was tending a shrub that seemed to need nursing.

October the Sixth.

MY DEAR MR. McBIRNEY--

"The night wind idling down the dusty street"--You do make patterns out of the dictionary which please me. But I know that irritates you, for words are not what you are paying attention to--of course--if they were, yours wouldn't be so wonderful. It's the wind of the spirit that blows them into beautiful shapes for you, I suppose. To let that go, for it's immaterial--you think I might have a job? I? That I might do a real thing for anybody ever? If you only knew me. If you only could see the mountains of whipped cream and Maraschino cherries, the cliffs of French clothes and automobiles, the mora.s.ses of afternoon teas and dances and calls and luxury in general that lie between me and any usefulness. It's the maddest dream that I, with my bones and my money and my bringing up, all my crippling ailments, could ever, _ever_ climb those mountains and cliffs and wade through those bogs. It's mad, I say, you visionary, you man on the other side of all that, who are living, who are doing things. I never can--I never can. And yet, it's so terrible, it's so horrible, so frightening, so desperate, sometimes, to be drowning in luxury. I woke in the night last night and before my eyes had opened I had flung out my hand and cried out loud in the dark: "What shall I do with my life--Oh what shall I do with my life?" And it isn't just me--though that's the burning, close question to my simple selfishness. But it's a lot of women--a lot. We're waking all over the world. We want to help, to be worth while; to help, to count.

It won't do much longer to know French and Italian and play middling tennis and be on the Altar Society. You know what I mean. All that--yes--but beyond that the power which a real person carries into all that to make it big. The stronger you are the better your work is.

I want to be strong, to be useful, to touch things with a personality which will move them, make them go, widen them. How? How can I? What can I do, ever? Oh what _can_ I do--_what_ can I do--with my life! I thought that day in August that it was only my illness, and my tie to an unloved man, but it's more than that. You have broadened the field of my longing, my restlessness, till it covers--everything. Help me then, for you have waked me to this want, question, agony. It's not only if I may kill my life--it's what I can do if I don't kill it.

What can I do? Do you feel how that's a sharp, vital question to me?

It's out of the deep I'm calling to you--do you know that? And it's my voice, but it's the voice of thousands--_now_ you're in trouble. Now you wish you'd let me alone, for here we are at the woman question! I can see you shy at that. But I'm not going to pin you, for you only contracted to help me; I'll shake off the other thousands for the present. And, anyhow, can you help me? Oh, you have--you've delayed my--crime, I suppose it is. You've given me glimpses of vistas; you've set me reading books; widened every sort of horizon; you've even made me dream of a vague, possible work, for me. Yes, I've been dreaming that; a specific thing which I might do, even I, if I could cancel some house-parties, and a trip to France, and the hunting. But even if I could possibly give up those things, there's Uncle Ted. He's not well, and my dream would involve leaving him. And I'm all he has. We two are startlingly alone. After all, you see, it's a dream; I'm not big enough to do more than that--dream idly. Robin has a queer scheme just now. There's a bone-ologist here, the most famous one of the planet, exported from France, to cure the small son of one of the trillionaires with which this place reeks, and Robin insists that I see that bone-ologist about my bones. It's unpleasant, and I hate doctors and I don't know if I will. But Robin is very firm and insists on my telling Uncle Ted otherwise. I can't bother Uncle Ted. So I may do it. Yet, if the great man p.r.o.nounced, as he would, that the other doctors were right, it would be almost going through the first hideous shock over again. So I may _not_ do it. I must stop writing. I have a guest and must do a party for her. She's a California heiress--oh fabulously rich--much richer than I. With splendid bones. I gave her a dance last night and this morning she's off on my best hunter with my fiance--save the mark! He admires her, and she certainly is a nice girl, and lovely to look at, with eyes like those young mediaeval, brainless Madonnas. I'm so glad to have someone else play with him--with Alec. I dread him so. I hate, I _hate_ to let him--kiss me.

There. If you were a real man I couldn't have exploded into that.

You're only the spirit of a thunder-storm, you know; I'll never see you again on earth; I can say anything. I do say anything, don't I? I can say--I do say--that you have dragged me from the bottomless pit; that if any good comes of me it is your good--that you--being a shadow, a memory, an incident--are yet the central figure of this world to me.

If I fall back into the pit, that is not your affair--mine, mine only.

The light that s.h.i.+nes around you for me is the only kindly light that may save me. But it may not. I may fall back. I have the toy in the drawer yet--covered with letters. Good-by--I am yours always,

AUGUST FIRST.

WARCHESTER, St. Andrew's Parish House, October 8th.

You'll never see me again? You'll see me in three days unless you stop me with a telegram.

I have a curious feeling that all this has happened before--my sitting here in front of the fire writing to you at one o'clock in the morning.