THE LEGACY OF RICHARD HUGHES
BY MARGARET LYNN
I
Rachel Marquis paused a moment with her hand on the library-door. She had had John placed in here because it was the room she herself loved best, and she knew that it was here she would prefer to sit beside him in these last hours of waiting. Yet she had hesitated to come down, and even now, with her hand on the door-knob, she lingered again to re-strengthen herself before entering. The very unusualness of an unfamiliar sight in the familiar room would add, she knew, to the sharp strangeness of the whole event. She almost hoped, as she waited this moment, for another practical duty of some sort, which would postpone again her entrance to the room.
But no sound came from any part of the silenced house, and she opened the door and entered. The long casket stood awkwardly across the blank fireplace, for she had chosen to give no direction to the undertaker and he had followed his own professional judgment. Everything was arranged, however, with a sort of intention which indicated the intrusion of the professional into the private. In spite of the stronger feeling of the moment, Rachel Marquis noticed this, with sharp disapproval. But she went directly to the chair which had been placed beside the casket and seated herself, bowing her head long on her folded arms before she looked on the familiar face beside her.
It was now only twenty-four hours since the strange accident had happened, and she had not yet adjusted herself, even so far as to determine her fundamental emotion. It was grief, of course, but the kind or degree of that grief was still undefined. The hours since they had brought him home had been so full of the unfamiliar practical things which arise at such a time, of the sudden necessities and small perplexities which muddle and chafe sorrow, that there had been scarcely a moment for her to look consciously at the great fact. Even now, as she covered her eyes, to be the more alone with herself, she felt rather a welcoming of momentary inactivity, than the relaxation of grief. She realized, with a sort of pang of disapproval, that she did not need to relax from any tension of anguish. She did not know what she wished to say to herself in this communion. She was sorry, bitterly sorry; but what elements went into the making of that grief?—She could not yet tell.
So she leaned with covered eyes, almost as if she were waiting for something outside of herself to give her a cue. As the minutes passed, however, the great simple fact that John was dead and that his place beside her would now be empty, engrossed all supplementary feelings, and her genuine regret had its way. She wept long, and ever more bitterly, absorbed, as one may be, in a mere physical expression of grief. The activity of sorrow overcame thought for the time, and left her no energy for analysis of feeling. Death alone seemed enough to weep over, and her tears still fell.
At last, as if having reached a natural period, she rose and moved away to the window and sat down there, in a quiet reverie of sadness. She was sorry for the life cut off, shocked at the abruptness and completeness of the tragedy,—John himself, she was sure, the assertive, energizing John, would have hated this sudden subduing of himself, and she sympathized with such revolt,—sorry, sorry for it all.
As she thought, she looked gravely out across the garden, the gay stretch to which John had given so much time. She had never understood his devotion to that garden. He had not been ready to spend money on things to give æsthetic pleasure in the house, although in practical matters he had been willing enough to make outlays, ever since his business had been secure. She thought of their new car, of the signs of prosperity in their living. 'Poor John!' she said at last with a deep sigh, when, aware of the nodding line of rare dahlias on which her eyes were resting, she thought of all the pains he had taken in the propagation and selection of them. She had come to recognize this lavishness of care and money as a sort of blind expression of the one æsthetic element in his nature, and had felt a quiet approval of it. 'Poor John!' she sighed again, and turned from the window to go.
But even as she did so, the simplicity of her mood passed, and the old complexity of feeling returned with a keenness which was for the moment bewildering. As she left the window, the long black shape across the fireplace confronted her again, and she paused, startled anew; it was so strange and so tremendous a thing in her room.
For the library was, above everything else in the world, hers. It was such a room as shows it has been taking on character through succeeding decades, cumulative of its type, slowly drawing to itself an atmosphere of fineness and greatness. The credit of it belonged only remotely to Rachel Marquis. She was the possessor, but not the maker of it. She had kept it and loved it, but her own contribution to it had been slight. A few shelves of new books not yet mellowed down to the tone of the others, standing as if waiting to be proved, and a bit of renewing of texture here and there, whose freshness showed need of the softening of time, were the only marks of her hand or taste. But it was such a room as any lover of the long effects of books would cherish.
In the midst of its harmonies, the heavy black box undoubtedly looked harsh and intrusive. Rachel recognized, as a sort of confidence with herself, that bringing it here was an invasion. Because she loved the room herself she had placed John here, without thought of the inappropriateness of the act. But now the incongruity of the choice struck her. Why should he be brought here, she thought pitifully, to the room he never frequented, where she scarcely welcomed him, she acknowledged? Why should she sit beside him here, when she had so seldom done so before? She remembered very well the manner with which he occasionally sought her here, tentative, unfamiliar, and yet assertive. She had resented every element of that manner. Anywhere else in the house he was more nearly himself; here everything she did not desire in him was accentuated.
It had been, she thought, with an instinctive desire to do the best for him in every way, that she had directed that he should be placed here; just as she had ordered everything of the choicest and had given her most careful attention and taste to every detail. But this thought had been a failure.
'Poor John!' she said gently once more, with a pity in her thought all the greater for this very incongruity, as she came over and stood beside him. But as her eyes rested on his face, she felt almost compelled to withdraw the phrase. The dead man seemed to allow no such pity. The unfamiliar in the familiar, which is stranger than a new thing, held her startled attention as she looked. She had thought that she knew John Marquis to the last shred of his character, but death seemed to have laid a fineness she had never known over the stubbornness and taciturnity of the face. The dignity of the last great experience of his life seemed to mark him. He seemed to be gathering himself away from her pitying kindness. Very soon she went out again and closed the door.
II
When Richard Hughes, the last of his family, left his mother's old home to John and Rachel Marquis, no one had wondered. Rachel was a sort of cousin and John, too, a distant connection by somebody's marriage. And they lived in the town and nothing was more natural than that he should give them a home there, and whatever else he had to leave.
What no one knew but Rachel was that Richard Hughes had wished to marry her, and that she had refused him and chosen John Marquis instead. Richard Hughes, fifteen years her senior, quiet and inexpressive, shut in with books and remote from life, was far less to her mind than John Marquis, who was of her own generation, with whom she went to parties and talked the light talk of youth, and had a thousand things in common, as she thought. John was bright and jolly, and played tennis and danced with her and took her out in a canoe, and was sweet-tempered and loved to laugh, and between times talked seriously about the business he was starting and the money he expected to make. John belonged to the whole format of her life at that time, and it was perfectly natural to choose to marry him, with the expectation that life would go on as she and John had both known it and liked it in other homes, comfortable, sensible, ambitious of practical things, real, as their kind would call it. It seemed an impossible thing for her not to marry John.
In the first years of their marriage she was proud of coming quickly to understand John's business. She was proud of her management and her well-timed economies, proud that John could talk affairs over with her with satisfaction, that she was beginning to take the place her mother and other successful women had taken in practical life. But after two or three years had passed, the space taken by practical things in her life began to shrink; her familiarity with them detracted from their interest and allowed her to dispose of them more readily. She began to feel a restlessness which called for new interests.
At the same time John's affairs were not prospering. Difficulties he could not manage hampered him. All Rachel's advice and economies were of little help among the inevitable conditions of the time. She was becoming tired of the continual effort to acquire, and impatient of the atmosphere of practical things. But she made a show of readiness when he suggested that they give up the cheerful modern home they had fitted about themselves, with the conventions of comfort and the furnishings and decorations to which they had been adapted.
It was just at this time that Richard Hughes left them his home and the little money he owned. Nothing could have been more opportune for them. Whatever other feelings John may have had were absorbed in sheer relief at the assistance the bequest brought him. The money, with that from the sale of their own house, tided him over his difficulties and even helped to develop his business further. Rachel concealed her reluctance at moving into the out-of-date old house with its antiquated furnishings, and made a show of welcoming their fortune as a good partner should.
She could hardly tell when her consciousness of the house began to have its influence upon her. From the first, John, absorbed in business, left all practical things to her, feeling that the house was more hers than his anyway. She, in a mood of vague compunction and desire to compensate for she hardly knew what, made it a point of honor to dispose of all their own furniture, chosen with such satisfaction and complacency, and settled among the dull tones and quiet spaces of the old house.
'Gay old place, isn't it?' said John, walking through the house after they were established.
Rachel assented with a cheerful smile.
'Oh, well,' he went on, settling down with his trade-journals, which looked sadly out of place in the dim library, 'we can stand it for a while. Some time we can have what we want again.'
It was months before he recurred to the subject directly. Then, one Sunday, he looked about him as he sat stretched in an old easy-chair, and said abruptly, 'We are getting pretty well settled down here. I didn't think the old place would be so comfortable.'
'It is more than comfortable,' said Rachel quietly.
'I wonder why Richard ever left it to us. Have you ever figured it out?'
'Oh, he had no nearer relatives that he knew.' Rachel tried to speak in a matter-of-fact way, but instead she hesitated and flushed a little.
John looked at her closely. 'Do you know any other reason?' he asked curiously.
Rachel hesitated again. Mere reticence on past affairs was one thing; positively keeping a secret from her husband was another. 'Richard wanted to marry me once,' she said. 'But I don't think that had anything to do with it,' she added hastily.
'When was that?'
'Oh—before I was engaged to you,' said Rachel, and smiled at him.
John said nothing more, but sat tapping his knee with his folded newspaper, as was his habit when in thought. Presently he rose and strolled away.
Rachel could not help resenting his silence, which left her in discomfort. When so much had been said he should have said more, if only to put her at her ease. For days afterwards she expected him to return to the subject, and when he did not do so, she continued to resent the implication he seemed to be making.
At this time the house itself had already begun to have its effect upon her. Rachel could hardly tell when she stopped looking wistfully at the sectional bookcases and mission furniture of her acquaintances. But soon after she moved into it, the house had ceased to be to her merely a house. With her conventionally modern notions of beauty in furnishings, she had first been surprised to find how at rest and how satisfied she was in this house, which had met in a generous way the needs and tastes of another generation, but met few of those to which she had been trained. She had not known that it was in her to find a charm in such a house. But from the time when she first became aware of a positive quality in the place, she became more and more awake to its existence; she wondered at it, but it held her attention constantly more firmly.
At last she found that behind the entity of the house lay that which had made it—the personality of the generations gone and especially of its last owner. The quality of the whole place, with its solidity of walls and generosity of room, along with its plain sincerity in every detail, seemed to indicate praiseworthiness, not only in the first builder, but in all later possessors. It became a meritorious thing to have and to keep a house like this. She remembered something of the sacrifices that Richard Hughes had made to retain it, and warmed with pride of him at the recollection.
The whole place reflected him and the people who had made him. Gradually Rachel grew in pride of the house and of her heritage. As she lived there month by month she found herself enveloped in its atmosphere and growing toward its proportions. At first she entered the library with timidity and an uncomfortable strangeness. Even one who had only very superficial intellectual tastes must have felt a sort of awe before its accumulation of books and their accompaniments. When Rachel and John had first begun to make a home, they had placed the making of a library among their ambitions, for it, and had taken pleasure in adding a few gayly bound novels each year to the small united collection with which they had begun. They had enjoyed seeing their few shelves grow, and knowing that they had so many of the popular books of which their friends talked. When they came to the Hughes home, Rachel had crowded their parti-colored collection into the shelves of the library there, weeding out others to make room for their own.
But on a later day, as she reëntered the room, she felt a shock at the incongruity presented and, to John's puzzlement, gathered their own books into a corner by themselves where a curtain safely hid them. Their garish triviality had no place among these mellowed, long-tried volumes. John, however, had looked the old volumes over and pronounced them a dry lot—give him something fresher.
But Rachel perceived that there had been something in the choosing of these books which she had never really known. To her, books had been an accessory, an incidental thing, hypothetically an enrichment of life, but not an essential. She had thought of intellectual exercise as an intermittent thing, to be taken up or laid down as suited the mood of the time. But here was a people who chose books not merely as a desirable possession, an ornamental furnishing, but as an unquestioned necessity.
Gradually, as she continued to handle and to know their books, she evoked for herself the earlier presences of the house, most of all Richard Hughes. In the long hours which she now spent alone about the house, she found herself living more constantly in a companionship with those minds. They were not only an atmosphere, but sometimes almost a positive presence. It entertained her to go over the books one by one, sometimes, deciding who had chosen this one and that one, and for what reason, and picturing the occasion of its coming to his hand. As her knowledge of the library grew, she took more and more pleasure in this, tracing the taste of one owner or another in the recurrence of a subject or in successive accretions. She, as she learned, glowed over her collection of first editions of modern works, since they had been chosen, not as first editions, but, in their own time, as works for which an appreciative hand was eagerly waiting.
And since Richard Hughes was the only one of her predecessors in the library whom she had known, she found herself embodying all the others in him. She knew him now better than she had ever known him. She could detect his additions to the treasures of the house, and, as her own knowledge increased, could trace his using of the resources which had been handed down to him. She began to take pleasure in following what she thought had been his path in taste and knowledge, gradually matching her mind to his own.
Her pride in the room went through successive stages. In her first days of satisfaction in mere proprietorship of so respectable and worthy a possession, she took pleasure in unostentatious exhibition of it. She liked to take guests there, in a natural sort of way, and to be found sitting there, by unexpected callers. She liked the eminently admirable background of the rows of books, for social episodes. But as her knowledge of the library grew, that stage passed. As she went from familiarity to intimacy, she began to desire that it should be an exclusive intimacy. She no longer took callers to the room, and when familiar acquaintances found their way there, she was uneasy at their handling of the books and impatient of their discussion of them. She now seldom spontaneously took strangers there. In time she had come to group John with all the others. The only companionship that she desired in the library was an imagined one.
John's attitude had more and more set her apart in this companionship. His dislike for the house had grown steadily more obvious as the months and years passed. It showed itself in a lack of home-pride, in open contempt for the old-fashioned elements of the place, in reluctance to make even necessary expenditure upon it.
But Rachel herself had hardly guessed the strength of his feeling until one day when she discovered among Richard Hughes's papers what seemed to be a memorandum for a codicil to his will, which would make a gift of a thousand dollars to the little public library of the town.
She took the note directly to John. 'I think we ought to do this,' she said.
John looked at the paper and laid it down. 'I don't see that we are obliged to,' he answered shortly.
'It is what he intended to do—and we got the money,' she said, with too patient a manner, as if explaining the moral point to him. 'We should give it in his name.'
'It is enough to have to live in Richard Hughes's house. I don't care to set up a memorial for him besides.'
'But John,' she urged herself to argue, 'is it honest?'
'There is more than one kind of honesty,' said John shortly, in a tone which checked further answer. 'I can't afford it,' he added after a moment, as the final word.
She left him in an anger which it seemed to her she would feel all her life. But gradually it became less an active feeling than a part of all her unformulated opinion of him. He had not followed her a single step in the development which had resulted from her awakening to the spirit of the house. In time he came to ignore the library altogether as part of the house, and by degrees fitted up an incongruous little lounging-place upstairs. Rachel came to regard his whole attitude toward the place and the man who had owned it as belonging to his mental and æsthetic plane; his jealous ingratitude seemed not a separate feeling, but only an element in his character.
Richard Hughes, she now understood very well, had known her very little, and had loved only her prettiness and light girlishness, charms which were different from anything in his own life. The recollection of that episode did not flatter her now, or even afford her any special gratification. But she loved to live side by side with the embodiment she had re-created for herself, and was proud to feel her spirit matching its spirit. She sometimes felt, with her growing imagination, that she was living in the house, not with John, but with these presences of the past—most of all with Richard Hughes.
But in the mean time the matter of the bequest assumed for her constantly greater proportions. After some time had passed she ventured to mention it again. He answered as before, 'I can't afford it!' She knew that he could afford it. About the same time he bought a strip of ground lying beside them and began his garden. Rachel suggested that he take a piece of their own grounds, but he bluntly rejected the proposal. A growing taciturnity marked his manner, and often a willful crudeness of phrase and speech, which annoyed her almost to the point of reproof. So far as was possible, however, she kept the recognition of all this far in the background of her thought and forebore any conscious criticism of him, even to herself. But her warmest feeling for him was tinged with pity.
Yesterday he had been taken. This accident, sudden as a lightning-flash and more unforeseen, had ended the relation between them—though not the puzzle. Rachel had never been one to revise her opinion of a man because he was dead. Her tears had fallen now, but she had no compunctious self-deception, and her long-framed feelings were only complicated, not really altered. She saw as clearly as ever the incongruity of her husband's presence in this room where Richard Hughes had had his life, and where she now had her own.
III
All waited for the coming of John's brother, David Marquis. David was an elder brother, retired from business on some pretext or other, now loitering his way profitably and pleasantly through the later half of his life. It had been his custom to visit them frequently, spending weeks at a time idling about the house, quiet, keen of look, ready to talk with interest on any general topic, but incommunicative of opinion on any personal matter. Rachel had always felt, as she saw his observant eye first upon John and then upon her, that he saw the difference between them and sympathized with her. For this reason, although she had never criticized John to him, she had sometimes spoken freely of herself and of her own tastes and wishes; and he had listened, quietly as ever, but responsively.
She had a sort of feeling now that she would find her poise through him when he came. A sympathetic eye would help her to adjust the degree of her grief to the limits of her previous feeling.
It was eight o'clock when he arrived. The pretext of dinner in the house was over, and even the neighborly and professional attentions of the day were withdrawn. Rachel descended from her room in the quiet house at the sound of his entrance, and met gratefully the brotherly kindliness of his manner. They sat a few minutes in the hall, in question and answer of his journey and of the accident and all the circumstantial things which cluster about death itself. Rachel answered freely and fully, discovering a relief in breaking the instinctive repression of the day, and finding the sort of rest she had hoped for from his presence. David listened to her quietly, as he had always done, with his ready eye upon her.
At last he rose, turning away from her with a comprehensive look about him.
'Where is he?' he asked abruptly.
'In the library,' said Rachel, with a movement to lead the way for him.
'In there?' exclaimed David, with the emphasis of surprise. Then he closed his lips again and followed her, without meeting her questioning look.
But inside the door he paused again. Rachel had, constrained by long habit, looked first at the room, as she entered, and then at the casket, as a separate thing. The room had so long served to give her poise that she felt a sort of appeal to it even now. David's eyes rested first on the casket and then swept the room in a disapproving look.
'Why is he here?' he asked, with a curtness in his easy voice which Rachel had never heard from him before.
'Why—' she began hesitatingly, and then added vaguely, 'It seemed best.'
'Best for him?' responded David with the same curtness.
Then he turned and dropped his head slowly over the figure in the coffin, and Rachel slipped away. David's manner seemed to put her entirely outside of the occasion.
Later he joined her where she waited in the dim parlor. The still chilliness of the room was stiffening and depressing, but she had not made a fire because its open cheerfulness would not have seemed appropriate. David walked up and down the long room a few minutes in a silence which Rachel, not knowing his mood, did not break.
Then he said, as abruptly as before, 'Can you have him moved in the morning?'
'Moved?—Where?'
Rachel had not supposed that her brother-in-law would have the same feeling of incongruity that she had.
'Anywhere but there. Here—I don't know—there is no place in the house that seems to belong to him. The hall might do—at least he went through there every day,' he finished with an irony none too subtle.
He began to walk up and down the length of the room, alternately facing her with a challenging air, and turning abruptly away again when he had neared her seat. But Rachel, absorbed still in her mood, was unappreciative of his manner.
'John never fitted into the house very well, anywhere,' she said, with reserved regret.
'Fitted into it!' exclaimed David, as he turned toward her at the end of the room. 'My—Did the house ever fit into him? It is the business of a house to suit the people that live in it,' he flung over his shoulder as he wheeled away again.
Rachel was silent, puzzled at this surprising change of manner in David, and not knowing how much of his emotion was merely the impatience of grief.
'Is there a corner of the house where it is appropriate for him to lie now, except that little cubby-hole of his upstairs?' demanded David, continuing, but as one who knows that an answer is impossible.
He suddenly abandoned his walk and came over and sat down opposite her, in front of the empty fireplace. He sat silent a moment, his gray figure drooping in a big chair. Rachel, looking carefully at him for the first time, noted with a kind of surprise the mark of brokenness and relaxation upon him, of submission to tremendous grief. It had not occurred to her that John could be mourned in that way. After a moment he said quietly, 'This house has never been a home for John.'
'I was always hoping,' said Rachel, as if this subject were one which they had discussed before and agreed upon, 'that he would feel more at home here in time.'
'What would have been necessary to bring that about?' asked David quietly.
'Well,' said Rachel, with reluctance in criticism even greater than usual, 'he would have had to change in many ways.'
'In what ways?' persisted David.
Rachel hesitated again. The thing, when baldly said, seemed so much harsher than when it was merely held in thought.
'John's taste was different from that of the people who made the house,' she said.
'Yes, I know. These pictures, and the old books in the library, and so on. Is that what you mean?'
'Well, the insides of the books, and other pictures which we don't have—and so on,' she finished indefinitely.
'Yes. You thought John was crude and rather coarse in feeling.'
'Oh, no—not that indeed!'
'You wouldn't call it just that, of course. But the difference between you was the same, whether it put you up high or him down low. Isn't that so? You were sorry for yourself because John was not on your level?'
'Yes,' admitted Rachel, reluctantly voicing the word.
'Were you ever sorry enough for John because you were not on his level?—There are different kinds of lonesomeness,' he added after a pause. 'I never saw a worse case than John's.'
Rachel sat upright, looking at him in a sort of amazement, as much at himself as at the idea. She had never dreamed that behind his apparently sympathetic observation of her lay any condemnation of her attitude.
He met her look with one as direct, and asked, in a way which made the question a sort of arraignment, 'Did it ever occur to you what a tragedy John's life was?'
Rachel merely shook her head slowly as she tried to connect, in an impersonal sort of way, the notion of tragedy with John—John the successful, the obstinate, the simple in desire, the objective. There had been no real disappointment in all his life. She looked back half-indignantly at David, rejecting the suggestion.
David rose and took a turn up and down the parlor again, pausing in the shadows at the farther end of the room. Then he came back to his seat and faced her determinedly.
'What I had always hoped was that you would come to understand John without any outside interference. I came back over and over to see, but I always kept from butting in.' He paused again. 'I wouldn't say anything now, only your tone, your "Poor John" way, shows you are just the same as ever. I won't have him buried without your knowing something more about him—if I can show you,' he added more gently.
'Please tell me,' said Rachel quietly. Her mind was still half as much on David as on what he was going to say.
'There is nothing to tell that you should not have seen for yourself. You were his wife and you lived with him. From the time you came to this house one side of John's life ended. In a way he had no home and no—wife. A man wants a companion.'
Rachel almost spoke, in startled contradiction. It was she who had been uncompanioned.
'You were proud, I know, of never finding fault with John. Don't you know that he would have been glad if you had openly found fault with him? As it was, it seemed as if you thought him hopeless. When he said things about the house or anything in it, he really wanted you to contradict him and argue with him, and give him a way to come to the same place where you were—don't you see?'
'Did he tell you?'
'No. But of course I used to sit round with him a good deal. And I had always been used to understanding him,' he added, with a drop in his voice. 'John had a lot of imagination,' he went on.
Rachel looked up in real surprise.
'I could see every year how the house was getting more on his nerves. Sometimes when he was feeling it more than usual he would say little things that I understood. For him it was like living with some one who didn't want him round. But he might have liked it.'
'You don't understand,' said Rachel, as if pricked into coming to her own defense. 'John didn't like the way the house came to us in the first place. You didn't know—'
'Yes, I did,' he responded as she hesitated, 'I found out.'
'And yet,' she went on, 'we used the house and the money—'
'You haven't known much about the business for several years, have you? Of course you do know that the house has been in your name from the beginning, almost. But you don't know that the few thousands Richard Hughes left have been invested for you ever since two years after he died. It crippled John for a while after he took it out of the business. But he always took good care of that money—it amounts to quite a little now.'
'John didn't like it because Richard—' Rachel hesitated again.
'You thought he was jealous. He did that after one day when you weeded out a lot of his books and put them away in some corner. And it was after he had those New York electric men here that evening and you seemed not to want to have them in the library, that he bought that corner of ground over there and made his garden. Don't you understand?'
Rachel dropped her face upon her hands, partly for relief from David's serious face, which forebore to rebuke her and yet of necessity did so, partly to close herself in with her own bewilderment. To reconstruct John's life meant to take a new view of her own also.
David leaned suddenly toward her. 'If John had been jealous, wouldn't he have had reason, Rachel? I know you weren't—untrue to him. But still—' He felt the formulation of the thought with her.
'I haven't judged you harshly, Rachel,' he went on in a moment, 'but it is not right that a man's brother should know him better than his wife does. I had to make you know, even at the last.'
Then, as if he were compelled to say the final hard thing, he added, 'Wasn't there something you had already thought you should do when everything was in your hands?'
Rachel, startled and flushing, faced him again, in involuntary confession. 'I had always thought it would be right to carry out a plan of Richard Hughes's.'
'Yes, I know. I am sure that was only a momentary notion of his. He had a great habit of making notes of things. His will was made only a few days before he died, and that idea was probably earlier. I was an executor, you remember. But anyway, several years ago John made a large gift to the library of Richard's college, in Richard's name. He took no chances on being unfair. He should have told you,' he added, 'but John had a hard sort of pride to manage, and I suppose he never did.'
'No,' said Rachel, 'he never did.'
She rose, with a sudden dropping of her hands at her sides, as if relinquishing something they had held, and moved vaguely toward the door.
'Don't you think,' pursued David, 'that he might be brought in here—or somewhere?'
Rachel hesitated, her hand faltering on the door-frame. 'No,' she said at last, 'let him stay there now.' And she herself went out through the dim chill hall. She lingered a moment at the closed library door, and then went slowly on up to her own empty room.
OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT[8]
BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE
'I WANT to tell you—I must tell you all about it.'
With a kind of grave finality, the little woman in the deck chair next to mine snapped together the collapsible drinking-cup with which she had been playing, and sat up, laying a small eager hand on my arm. It was as if her groping thoughts had suddenly pushed open a door into action. I wondered if she guessed that I had been peeping at her from under dropped lids. She had the colorless make-up of a small middle-aged mouse, but her expression was amazing. It startled and arrested one. All the old lines of the face were set to small ambitions and sordid desires, but the look which should have accompanied these lines was clean gone—wiped into something big and still and simple—and her manner was that of an earnest child.
'I was in Belgium when it commenced,' she began. 'But I guess I better go back and tell it all right from the beginning,' she broke off.
'Please do,' I begged.
I did my best to speak naturally, but my voice seemed to break some spell, for her face blurred suddenly to self-consciousness.
'I—I reckon I ought to apologize for speaking to a stranger,' she stammered primly. And now her words exactly matched all the old small lines of her face. It was as if her little self, aware of something big and overwhelming that threatened to sweep her out of her depth, made a desperate clutch at conventionality.
'But I want to hear,' I protested eagerly. 'Please tell me.'
She must have seen that I was in earnest, for the little conventional self disappeared at that, and she answered simply, 'And I want to tell you—it seems like I've just got to tell you.'
It was September, 1914. We homing Americans were churning through an extraordinarily blue ocean toward New York and peace, while back there, just over our shoulders, a mad world was running red.
'It was like bein' torn all to pieces and put together again different,' she said. 'But I'll go back like I said, and start right from the beginning.'
For a moment she was silent, staring thoughtfully down at the cheap little metal cup, screwing the rings softly round and round, and drawing, as it were, inspiration from the sight of it.
'I come from Johnson's Falls,' she began at length. 'You wouldn't know where that is. It's just a little place down in West Virginia, but it's right close to the Virginia state line, and we have some mighty nice people in town. Why,' she exclaimed, 'I reckon we have some of the very best blood in the South there! But—but that isn't what I set out to tell you,' she caught herself up.
She fell into such a prolonged silence, turning the little cup, and looking at it, that at last I ventured a question to start her again.
'And I suppose,' I said, 'you belong to one of the oldest families there.'
I was sorry as soon as I had said it.
'No, I don't,' she answered simply, looking straight up at me. 'That was how it all commenced. My father kept the livery stable. But of course it wouldn't matter—keepin' a livery, I mean—if your family was all right. Jeff Randolph kept the grocery. Being a Randolph, of course he could. But my name's Smithson—Sadie Virginia Smithson—and my grandfather was a carpenter. I'm a dressmaker myself. That's the reason they didn't elect me to the Laurel Literary Society.' She paused a moment. 'I reckon you wouldn't understand about the Laurel Literary Society?' she questioned a trifle wistfully.
'Perhaps not,' I admitted.
'Well, it's a literary society, of course. The members read papers, and all like that, but it's a heap more'n that. Belonging to it kind of marks a person out in Johnson's Falls and gives 'em the—the—well, I reckon you'd call it the entray to all the best homes in town. If you don't belong—well, I reckon it came kinder harder on me, not belonging, than it did on some of the others. Why, I'd have said the girls that started it were my very best friends. We'd played together as children, and I called 'em all by their first names, and they knew I was just as smart, an' liked readin' an' all that just as well as any of 'em did. So when I wasn't asked to join—well, it just seemed to knock me right out. I wasn't but nineteen then, an' when you're young things hurt more, I reckon. Anyhow the slight of it got just fixed in my mind, an' I made a kind of a vow that I'd belong to that society some day if I died for it. And then, after a while it came to me, maybe if I could just save money enough to go abroad, they'd ask me to read a paper before the society when I got back, 'cause mighty few people have traveled much from our town.—Well,' she looked thoughtfully away at the blue water, many an' many a night I've put myself to sleep thinking how it would be when I read that paper. You know, when you're young and kind of unhappy and slighted, how you make up things to sort of comfort yourself?'
'Well, I could just see the whole thing, me standing there reading an' all, and when I'd get through I could almost hear the applause. They'd some of 'em have on gloves, you know, so it would sound softer an' more genteel-like than just common bare-hand clapping. Well, it takes time for a country dressmaker to save. It took me twenty years. I did have most enough once, but then my sister was taken sick an' what I'd saved had to go for her. But I just gritted my teeth an' commenced again, and at last this spring I had enough, an' I joined a party and went. Ours wasn't a regular party. It was just a professor an' his wife who were goin' anyhow, an' would take a couple of ladies with them, so there were just the four of us. Well, we traveled for a month or more, an' you better b'lieve I stretched my eyes to see all there was to see. An' then, all at once, the world just tipped itself right over an' went crazy.
'We were in Brussels when it came. The professor was sure everything would quiet down in a little bit, an' he said we'd better stay right there. And anyhow, it wasn't easy to get away. It was all just awful, with one country after another slipping in. Only things came so quick a person didn't hardly have time to catch their breath an' think "how awful," 'fore something worse was jumping right on top of it. Well, we stayed and stayed, till at last the Germans came. It certainly was a sight to see 'em—but I ain't goin' to tell about that, I'm just goin' to skip right along to what I set out to tell.
'The professor and his wife had left their only child, a mighty sickly little thing, with her grandmother in Paris, and when things got so bad they were pretty near distracted to get to her. Well, one morning the professor came in and told us he'd run across a young American, a Mr. Grenville, who was being sent to Paris on some special diplomatic business. He had a big automobile, and he thought maybe he could get it fixed to take us all, too. It looked like a mighty crazy thing to do, but there wasn't any holdin' the professor an' his wife on account of their child, and me and the other lady, we was afraid to be left behind. Well, after a lot of runnin' around from one official to another, they did finally get it all fixed for us to go, an' the next day we started out with an American flag on the front of our car. Of course we were stopped a lot of times and all our papers gone through and everything, but each time they let us go on account of Mr. Grenville bein' a United States official. We'd started early, an' by noon we'd come a right smart piece, an' about that time we began to hear firing on in front. Did you ever hear them big guns?' she broke off to ask, her childlike eyes questioning me.
I shook my head.
'Well, you needn't never want to hear 'em,' she said. 'When they commenced we all kind of looked at one another, an' I reckon we was all scared. Anyhow, I know I was. Why, at home I'm 'fraid of a thunderstorm. But still we kept on. The sound of the firin' got louder an' louder, but it was never very close, and along late in the afternoon it sort of died off, an' we commenced to draw breath again, and think everything was goin' to be all right. I'm 'most sure now we must have missed the way, for just about that time we ran upon a piece of road that was all tore up. There were big holes in it from the shells, an' those tall poplars alongside were all snapped off, an' their branches stripped down like a child peels a switch. You could smell the fresh sap like you can in lumber camps at home. Well, we had to slow up an' kind of pick our way, and on round the very next turn we ran right up on them.'
'On the fighting!' I gasped.
'No—no; the fightin' was all over then. Just for a flash, comin' on 'em so quick like, I didn't know what they were. They looked like little sprawled brown heaps. But in the second I was wonderin', one of 'em flung up an arm and groaned.'
'How awful!' I cried aghast.
'Yes,' she assented simply, 'it certainly was awful. My words ain't big enough to tell you how awful. Runnin' up on 'em so unexpected like that, kind of cut my breath right off an' choked me. There they were, layin' all about acrost the road, an' in a wheat-field alongside, with the sun just shining down like it was any kind of a summer day. A good many of 'em were dead, but there were a plenty that weren't. They blocked the road so we had to stop, an' right where we stopped there was a young man layin' flung over on his back. He'd snatched his shirt open at the breast, an' the blood had all dripped down into the dust of the road. He opened his eyes, an' stared right up in my face, an' cried, "Water, for God's sake!" He said it over an' over in the awfullest voice, an' like it was one word—"Water-for-God's-sake, water-for-God's-sake"—like that. I had this little drinkin' cup, an' there was a good-sized creek just a piece across the field, so I grabbed my hand-bag an' jumped out. Well, at that all of 'em in the car commenced to holler an' scream at me to get back, that we couldn't stop—it wouldn't be safe—an' we couldn't do anything, an' anyhow the stretcher-bearers would be along d'rectly. But I just said, "He wants water, an' I've got my cup here, an' there's the branch, an' anyhow," I says, "he looks kind of like my sister's oldest boy," an' with that I started on to the creek.
'Well, the professor an' Mr. Grenville jumped out of the car an' came runnin' after me, but I just turned 'round an' looked at 'em. "You all go on," I says. "He asked me for water for God's sake, an' if you try to put me back in that car I'll fight you like a wildcat." I never did anything like that,—fightin', I mean,'—she broke off to explain earnestly, 'but I would have, an' I reckon they knew it. The professor tried to argue. "You'll be a raving maniac if you stay here," he says. "Well," I says, "look what's here now—what difference does it make if I am?" Somehow that was the way I felt. Everything was so awful it didn't seem to matter whether anything awful happened to me or not. So I just kept on to the creek, and Mr. Grenville said, "For Heaven's sake, let her stay if she can do anything. I wish to God I could stay too." But he couldn't, he was carryin' some mighty important dispatches that he just had to get on with. An' then he calls out to me, "Good luck and God bless you, Miss Smithson!" An' when I looked back he was standin' with his hat off. He was a mighty nice young man. But all the time the other ladies in the car was screamin' an' hollerin' for them to come on, so they had to go.'
'They left you all alone!' I cried.
'They had to,' she returned. 'Mr. Grenville had to get on with his dispatches, an' it was the last chance the professor an' his wife had of gettin' through to their child. An' the other lady—Well, she couldn't do nothin' but scream anyhow. By the time I was comin' back from the creek the car was just pullin' out of sight. Somehow, to see it go like that gave me a kind of funny feelin'. I was scared, I reckon, but all the same I felt kind of still too. It seemed like for the last few weeks I'd been hustled along in a wild kind of a torrent, but now I'd touched bottom an' got my feet under me. I reckon a woman does touch bottom when there's anything she can do—anyhow, one raised to work like I've been does. But, oh, my Lord!' she cried suddenly, dropping her face to her hands, 'I wish I could keep from seein' it all still—an' hearin' it too! Did you ever hear a man scream?' she demanded. 'Not just groan, but shriek, an' scream?'
'In hospitals,' I said, uncertainly, 'I've heard people screaming when they were coming out of ether.'
She shook her head. 'That's different. You knew there were people, nurses and doctors, to do things for 'em; but out there there wasn't anything but the trampled wheat, an' the big empty sky. There was plenty of 'em who wanted water, an' begged an' cried for it; but I just said, "I'll be back to you all presently," an' went on to the first one. He was kind of delirious, but he could drink the water, an' was mighty glad to get it. I brushed the flies all away, an' spread a clean handkerchief over his wound,—he was too far gone to try an' do anything else for him,—an' went on back to the creek. Water, that was the main thing they wanted. The most of 'em that could be were bandaged already. Some of the medical outfit had been around an' got 'em tied up, but after that, I reckon the fightin' must of changed an' cut 'em off from their friends, for the stretcher-bearers didn't come, an' didn't come.
'It was all so strange an' kind of shut away there, like destruction had lit for a spell an' then flown on to the next place. The wheat was all laid over an' tramped, and lumpy with khaki bodies, an' with caps an' guns an' things flung around in it, an' the red sun sailin' down an' down in the West, an' every here an' there awful splatters of blood in the wheat. But I didn't have time to look an' think too much—an' it was mighty lucky I didn't have. They were all English an' had run upon a German battery an' been shot to pieces 'fore they hardly knew what was happenin.' I guess some of 'em must have got away, but there was a plenty that didn't. They'd been layin' there since dawn, an'—an' they were hungry—' her voice broke. 'An' I didn't have anything to give 'em,' she whispered.
'They say after a while you get kind of numb to things,' she went on presently, with her grave simplicity. 'I don't know how that is, but I know the things I saw made me stop every now an' then down by the creek out of sight, an' just wring an' wring my hands together in a kind of rage of pity. Once, goin' through the wheat, I tramped on something soft, an' when I looked, it was—it was just a piece of a man. I thought I'd lay right down then an' die, but I says to myself, "They want water, they want water"—an' that way I kind of drove myself on. But all the time I could see my heart under my waist just jumpin' up an' down, like it was fightin' to jump out an' run away. An' then another time—' But she broke off. 'No,' she said, 'I won't tell about that. It's so peaceful here with that blue water an' sunshine an' all, I reckon I oughtn't to tell what it's like underneath when Hell takes the lid off. An' maybe some day the Lord'll let me forget.
'But it's funny,' she went on again presently, 'how your mind grabs ahold of any foolish thing to steady you.' She paused, staring down at the little cup as though she drew remembrance from it. 'I recollect as I went back and forth, back and forth, weaving out paths through the wheat, a silly song that we used to sing to a game at school kept runnin' in my head:—
| I don't want none of your weevily wheat, |
| An' I don't want none of your barley; |
| An' I don't want none of your weevily wheat |
| To bake a cake for Charley. |
'I was mighty glad it did. For all it was so silly, it kept me from flyin' right off the handle. An' so I kept on an' on, carryin' 'em water. Some of the men thought it was funny I should be there, an' they wanted to talk an' ask me questions; but the most of 'em were sufferin' too bad to care, an' some of 'em were busy goin' along into the next world, an' were done with bein' surprised over anything in this. Most of 'em called me "Nurse" or "Sister," an' some way I liked to have 'em do it. Some of 'em certainly were brave, too. Why, I saw one young fella jump straight up to his feet an' fling his arms out wide, an' holler right up at the sky, "Are we downhearted?—No!" an' pitch over dead. You know,' she paused to explain simply, her extraordinarily childlike eyes lifted to mine for understanding and sympathy, 'it just seems to snatch the heart right out of you to see a person stand up to death like that—'specially when they're so young, like that little fella.'
'Of course,' she went on after a moment, 'I didn't just give 'em water. I'd do any other little thing I could besides. An' every time I could do anything, I certainly was glad. Doing things seemed to ease up a little that terrible rage of pity I felt. I took my skirt off an 'rolled it up for a pillow for a little fella who couldn't move an' was layin' with his head in a kind of a sink-hole. He tried to thank me but he couldn't,—he just sobbed,—but he caught ahold of my hand an' kissed it. That made me cry. It was so sort of young an' pretty of him. After that I went on for a spell with the tears just pourin' down my cheeks. But presently I found the one who couldn't drink the water, an' I quit cryin' then. My tears weren't big enough; only God's would have been big enough for that.
'The man's face was all gone,—eyes, mouth, everything,—an' still he was alive. He must have heard me an' known somebody was there, for he commenced to scream an' moan, tryin' to say things down in his throat, an' to reach out his hands an' flop about—O my God! It was like a chicken with its head off! I thought I'd have to run. But I didn't. I just sort of fell down beside him, an' caught ahold of his hands, an' patted them an' talked to him like you do to a child in a nightmare. I don't know what I said at first. Just a crazy jumble of pity, I reckon; but after a little bit I found I was prayin'. I know I needed it, an' it seemed to help him too, for after a little bit, he stopped that awful tryin' to speak down in his throat, an' lay still just grippin' my hands. I was so crazy I couldn't think of a thing to say but "God bless us an' keep us an' make his face to shine upon us an' be merciful unto us." An' I just said that over an' over.
'I guess it wasn't the words that he wanted, it was the feelin' of havin' God there in all that awful dark and blood, an' some human bein' beside him who was sorry. Anyhow, every time I'd stop he'd snatch at my wrists so hard it would hurt; look.' She broke off to push up her gray sleeve, and there on her thin wrist, still vividly black and blue, were the bruised prints of fingers. 'But I was glad to be hurt—I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to have a share in all the sufferin'. It just seemed like my heart would break. An',' she added with great simplicity, 'I reckon that's just what it did do, for I know I broke through into something bigger than I ever had been.
'Well, after a while, God did have mercy on that poor soul, for he quit pullin' at my hands, and began to die, an' when I came 'round again to him he was gone. But that got me started, an' I left off sayin' that foolishness about the weevily wheat, an' said the little prayer instead. I said it to myself first, but after a little bit, I found I was sayin' it out loud. I don't know why, but it seemed like I had to say it every time I gave one of 'em water. Just "God bless us an' keep us an' make his face to shine upon us and be merciful unto us." It was somehow like a child's game—like havin' to touch every tree-box goin' along the street, or steppin' over every crack. Each one of 'em had to have the water an' the little prayer, an' then on to the next, or back down to the creek for more. Most of 'em didn't seem to notice, but some of 'em laughed, an' some stared like I was crazy,—an' maybe I was a little,—an' again some of 'em were glad of it.
'So I kep' on an' on, an' the sun went down, an' the dark came, an' it seemed like a kind of a lid had shut us away from all the world. It wasn't right dark, for the stars were shinin'. It was about that time that I found the little officer. He was dyin', off in the wheat all to himself, an' he got me to take down some messages for his folks. I wrote 'em in my diary. I had a pocket flashlight in my bag, an' it made a round eye of light that stared out at every word I wrote. They were the simplest kind of words. Just love, love to mother, and love to father, and Snippy and Peg, an' good-bye to 'em all, an' how he was glad to die for England. But they look mighty strange jumpin' out there in my diary alongside of travel notes about Brussels. It's like something big an' terrible had smashed its fist right through all the little fancy things.
'But it was funny,' she went on after a minute, 'how sort of like children so many of the men were, so trusting an' helpless. There was one little fella always said the same thing to me every time I came 'round. "They'll sure be around for us soon now, won't they, sister?" he'd say. An' I'd always answer, "Oh, yes, just in a little bit now." An' he'd settle back again, so trusting an' satisfied, an' like I really knew. That was the way they all seemed to me—just children. Even the ones that cursed an' screamed at me. An' another funny thing,' she added lifting her grave child's eyes to mine: 'I've never been married—never known what it was to have children—but that night all those men were my children, even the biggest an' roughest of 'em. I felt 'em all here'—She held her hands tight against her breast. 'An' I b'lieve I would have died for any one of 'em. I reckon bein' so crazy with pity had stretched me up out of bein' a scary old maid into bein' a mother.
'I recollect there was two loose horses gallopin' about. They were wild with fear, an' they'd gallop as hard as ever they could in one direction, an' then they'd wheel 'round an' come to a stand with their heads up, an' their tails cocked, an' nicker, an' snort over what they smelt, an' then take out again. Well, once they came chargin' right down on us, an' I thought sure they were goin' right over the men. I never stopped to think: I ran straight out in front of 'em wavin' my arms an' hollerin'. They just missed gallopin' right over me. But I didn't care; I b'lieve I'd almost have been glad. It was like I said—I wanted to be hurt too. That was because it was all so lonesome for 'em. Death an' sufferin' is a lonesome thing,' she stated gravely. 'When they'd scream, I felt like I'd tear my heart out to help 'em. But all I could do was just to stand on the outside like, an' watch 'em sufferin' an' maybe dryin' inside there all alone. That's why it seemed like bein' hurt too would make it easier.
'Well, along late in the night, the guns broke out again awful loud, an' presently off against the sky I saw red streaks of flame go up in two places, an' I knew they were towns on fire. I just stopped still an' looked, an' thought what it was like with the folks scurryin' 'round like rats, an' the fire an' the shells rainin' down on 'em. "That's Hell—right over there," I says out loud to myself, an' then I went on down to the creek faster than ever. Maybe I was gettin' kind of lightheaded then, an' God knows it was enough to make anybody so; anyhow, I felt like I had to hold Hell back. It was loose right over there, an' the only thing that held it off was the cup of water an' the little prayer. So I kept on back an' forth, back an' forth from the creek, faster an' faster. I thought if I missed one of 'em it would let Hell in on all the rest, so I kept on an' on. The guns were boomin', an' the flames goin' up into the sky, an' all Hell was loose, but the little prayer an' the cup of water was holdin' it back. An' then at last, when it commenced to freshen for dawn, I knew I'd won.'
She drew a deep breath, and paused, looking up at me with clear, far-away eyes.
'That was because I knew He was there,' she said.
'He?' I questioned, awestruck by her tone.
She nodded. 'Yes, God,' she answered simply. 'An' after that, that terrible lonesomeness melted all away. I knew that though I had to stand outside an' see 'em suffer, He was inside there with 'em—closer to 'em even than they was to themselves. So I knew it wasn't really lonesome for 'em, even if they were sufferin' an' dyin'. An' I'm right sure that a good many of 'em got to know that, too—anyhow, the faces of some of the ones that had died looked that way when I saw 'em in the mornin'. Maybe it was because I cared so much myself that I kind of broke through into knowin' how much more God cared. Folks always talk like He was a father 'way off in the sky, but I got to know that night that what was really God was something big an' close right in your own heart, that was a heap more like a big mother.
'An' it was all bigger an' sort of simpler than I'd ever thought it would be. Right over there was Hell an' big guns, an' men killin' each other, but here where we were, were just stars overhead, an' folks that you could do things for, an' God. I reckon that's the way,' she said with her grave simplicity, 'when things get too awful you suffer through to God, an' He turns you back to the simplest things—just the little prayer, an' the cup of water for men that were like sick children. This is the cup,' she added, holding it out for my inspection. 'An'—an' that's all, I reckon,' she concluded. 'When daylight came, the stretcher-bearers did get through to us. There was a sort of doctor officer with them, an' I never in my life saw any one look so tired.
'"Who are you, an' what in thunder are you doing here?" he stormed out at me—only I don't say it as strong as he did.
'I reckon I must have looked like a wild woman. I had lost my hat and my hair was all falling down, an' I only had on my short alpaca underskirt, 'cause I'd taken off my dress skirt to make a pillow like I said; but I just stood right up in the midst of all those poor bodies, an' says, "I'm Miss Smithson—Sadie Virginia Smithson—an' I've been holdin' Hell back all night."
'I knew I was talkin' crazy but I didn't care—like the way you do comin' out of ether.
'He stared at me for a spell, an' then he says, kind of funny, "Well, Miss Sadie Virginia, I'm glad you held some of it back, for everybody else in the world was letting it loose last night."
'He was mighty kind to me, though, an' helped get me to one of the base hospitals, an' from there over to England. But I don't know what happened to the professor an' his party.'
'Well,' I ventured after a long pause, and not knowing quite what to say, 'the Laurel Literary Society will be glad enough to have you belong to it now.'
She flashed bolt upright at that, her eyes staring at me.
'But—but you don't understand,' she cried breathlessly. 'I've been face to face with war an' death an' Hell an' God,—I've been born again,—do you reckon any of them little old things matter now?'
I was stunned by the white look of her face.
'What does matter—now?' I whispered at last.
'Nothin',' she answered, 'nothin' but God an' love an' doin' things for folks. That was why I had to tell you.'
MR. SQUEM
BY ARTHUR RUSSELL TAYLOR
'WHY do we go on perpetuating an uncomfortable breed?'
The man who was shaving at the mirror-paneled door of the Pullman smoking compartment looked at his questioner on the leather seat opposite.
'Give it up,' he answered. 'Why is a hen?'
The first man rapped his pipe empty on the edge of a cuspidor.
'You answer the question,' he said, 'in the only possible way—by asking another.'
'Right,' answered the shaver; and began to run the hot water.
A closely built man, in a suit so heavily striped as to seem stripes before it was a suit, lurched into the compartment and settled himself to his paper and cigar.
'That monkey-on-a-stick,' he presently broke out, 'is still taking good money away from the asses who go to hear him rant about God and Hell and all the rest, up in Boston. I am so damn tired of him, and of that rich rough-neck Freeze. It's the limit.'
'Pretty much,' said the man with the pipe. 'I was reading about the Belgians just before you came in, and when I jumped away from them I lit on some things about Poland. Then I wondered aloud to this gentleman why we go on multiplying—increasing such an uncomfortable breed. Modoc gods and degenerate millionaires make one wonder more.'
'What is your line, may I ask?' inquired the stripe-suited man.
'Religion.'
'The hell—I beg your pardon. If you mean that you're a preacher or something like that, all I've got to say is, you're a funny one. It's your job, isn't it, to be dead sure that everything's all right, or somehow going to be all right—no matter about all the mussed-upness? Yes, that's certainly your job. Yet here you are, asking why we go on stocking the world with kids. I might ask that,—I'm in rubber tires,—but not you. Yes, I might—only I don't.'
The man who had been shaving had resumed his tie, collar, and coat, and now lighted a cigarette.
'I lay my money,' he said, 'on one thing: that, if men let themselves go, they wind up shortly with God—or with what would be God if there were any. You've come to it early—through the Ledger. You'd have got to it sooner or later, though, if you'd been talking about hunting-dogs—provided you'd have let yourselves go.'
'Well, now,' asked the closely built man, 'what is your line?'
'Education.'
'High-brow company! Seems to me the pair of you ought to be silencers for a plain business man like me. Rubber is my line—not how the world is run. My opinion on that is small change, sure. Yet I think it ought to be run,—the world, I mean,—even if it's mussed-up to the limit, and I think it's up to us to keep it running. The parson here—if he is a parson—asks why we should; that is, if I get him. And then I think there's a manager of it all in the central office—a manager, understand, though he never seems to show up around the works, and certainly does seem to have some of the darnedest ways. The professor here—if he is a professor—doesn't sense any manager; that is, if I get him straight, with his "if there were any." That was what you said, wasn't it? I'm a picked chicken on religion and education, but, honest, both those ideas would mean soft tires for me—yes, sir, soft tires.'
'Broad Street, gentlemen,' said the porter at the door.
The Reverend Allan Dare walked away from the train and down the street. He was Episcopally faced and Episcopally trim, and he was having considerable difficulty in holding his universe together. This is not pleasant at forty-two, when you want your universe held together and things settled and calm. He had an uncomfortable sense that this difficulty had jolted into plain sight on the car.
'Ass!' he addressed himself briefly. 'To let your sag and unsettlement loose in that way! To say such a thing as you said, and in such a place! To parade your momentary distrust of life! Ass—oh, ass!'
He said—or thought—a Prayer-Book collect, one which seemed rather suited to asses, and continued,—
'I suppose I'm three-tenths sag—no more; and "He knoweth whereof we are made," and what a devil of a world it is to be in just now. But that rubber man on the car—he isn't sag at all. Heavens, his crudeness! His beastly clothes, and the bare shaved welt around the back of his neck, and that awful seal ring! But he's fastened. Life is worth pushing at and cheering for—and there's a manager, if he has "the darnedest ways." I'd give something for an every-minute mood like that—a carrying night-and-day sureness like that. He's not illuminated—lucky dog!'
Professor William Emory Browne had changed cars and was continuing his journey. In his lap lay a volume of essays just put forth by a member of his craft, a college professor. He opened it,—it chanced at page 27,—and his eye was caught by the name of his own specialty. He read:—
'Philosophy is the science which proves that we can know nothing of the soul. Medicine is the science which tells that we know nothing of the body. Political Economy is that which teaches that we know nothing of the laws of wealth; and Theology the critical history of those errors from which we deduce our ignorance of God.'
'Confound it!' ejaculated Professor Browne, and closed the book.
'Room for one more?' inquired a voice, and the rubber-tire man slid into the seat.
'I just pulled off a little thing out here,' he said, 'that ought to put a small star in my crown. A down-and-out—a tough looker—says to me, "Please, mister, give me a dime. I'm hungry." And I says to him, "Get out! What you want is a good drink—go get it," and slips him a quarter. Talk about gratitude! To think there are men—you know it and I know it and he was afraid of it—who'd have steered him to a quick-lunch and put him against soft-boiled eggs!'
'"Man's inhumanity to man"'—
'Sure! Nothing but that ever makes me any trouble about things. Tear ninety, George,'—this to the conductor,—'and burn this panetella some time. You said you were in education,' he went on. 'I've just blown myself to a Universal History—five big volumes, with lots of maps and pictures and flags of all nations and hanging gardens of Babylon and such things. Gave down thirty-five for it, and my name is printed—Peter B. Squem—on the first page of every book. Now,'—Mr. Squem grew quite earnest,—'you'd say, wouldn't you, that if a man could take those books down,—chew them up, you understand, and take them down,—he'd have an education? Not the same, of course, as normal school or college, and yet an education.'
'I think, if you know what's good for you, you will steer clear of what you call an education. I think I should stick to rubber tires, and a few comfortable certainties—and peace.'
Mr. Squem stared. 'How's that?' he inquired. 'Education is your line, you were saying, and yet you queer your stuff. I'd get quick word from the house, if I handled Mercury tires that way.'
'But you wouldn't,' rejoined Professor Browne, 'you wouldn't, because tires mean something. Tires are your life-preserver—they are shaped like life-preservers, aren't they?'
'You've got me going,' said Mr. Squem, 'and no mistake. I don't mind telling you I'd hoped to get some hunch from you—on education. You see, my clothes are right, I always have a room with bath, and I get two hundred a month and fifty on the side. I read the papers—and the magazine section on Sunday—and I got through four books last year. And yet there's something not there—by Keefer, not there! I'd give something to get it there—to slide it under, somehow, and bring the rest of me up to regular manicuring and ice-cream forks and the way my clothes fit!'
Mr. Squem was interrupted in the expression of this craving. There was a tremendous jar; the car tore and bumped with an immense pounding over the ties, then careened and sprawled down a short bank and settled on its side. People who have been through such an experience will require no description. To others none can be given. In the bedlam chaos and jumble, and chorus of shrieks and smashing glass, Professor Browne, struggling up through the bodies which had been hurled upon him, was conscious of a pain almost intolerably sharp in his leg, and then of a sort of striped whirlwind which seemed to be everywhere at once, extricating, calming, ordering, comforting—and swearing. It was like a machine-gun:—
'Keep your clothes on, nothing's going to bite you—just a little shake-up—Yes, chick, we'll find your ma—No, you don't climb over those people; sit down or I'll help you—To hell with your valise, pick up that child!—There go the axes; everybody quiet now, just where he is—You with the side-whiskers get back, back, hear me!—Now, children first, hand 'em along—women next, so—men last—Why didn't you say you was a doctor? Get out there quick; some of those people have got broke and need you!'