Fallows even asked himself if he did not have his own desperate pursuits among women in too close consideration.... It would be easy to withdraw. So often he had faltered before the harder way, and found afterward that the easy one was evil.... He left it this way: If he could gain audience with Betty Berry alone this evening he would speak; if Morning were with her, he would find an excuse for joining them and quickly depart. Last night Morning had returned to the cabin early; the night before by the last car. It was less than an even chance.... Fallows crossed the river, thinking, if the woman were common it would be easy. The way it turned out left no doubt as to what he must do. Approaching the number, on the street named on the corner of the envelope, he passed John Morning, head down in contemplation. He was admitted to the house. Betty Berry appeared, led him to a small upper parlor, and excused herself for a moment.
Fallows sat back and closed his eyes. He was suffering. All his fancied hostility was gone. He saw a woman very real, and to him magical; he saw that this was bloody business.... She came back, the full terror of him in her eyes. She did not need to be so sensitive to know that he had not come as a cup-bearer.... He was saying to himself, “I will not struggle with her....”
“Have I time to tell my story?”
“I was going out.... John Morning just went away because I was to meet old friends. But, if this is so very important, of course——”
“It is about him.”
“I think you must tell your story.”
Fallows talked of Morning’s work, of what he hadfirst seen from Luzon, and of the man he found in Tokyo. He spoke of the days and nights in Liaoyang, as he had watched Morning at his work.
“He’s at his best at the type-writer. When the work is really coming right for him, he seems to be used by a larger, finer force than he shows at other times.... It is good to talk to you, Miss Berry. You are a real listener. You seem to know what I am to say next——”
“Go on,” she said.
“When a man with a developed power of expression stops writing what the world is saying, and learns to listen to that larger, finer force within him—indeed, when he has a natural genius for such listening, and cultivates a better receptivity, always a finer and more sensitive surface for its messages—such a man becomes in time the medium between man and the energy that drives the world——”
“Yes——”
“Some call this energy that drives the world the Holy Spirit, and some call it the Absolute. I call it love of God. A few powerful men of every race are prepared to express it. These individuals come up like the others through the dark, often through viler darkness. They suffer as others cannot dream of suffering. They are put in terrible places—each of which leaves its impress upon the instrument—the mind. You have read part of John Morning’s story. Perhaps he has told you other parts. His mind is furrowed and transcribed with terrible miseries.
“Until recently his capacity was stretched by the furious passion of ambition. It seemed in Asia as if he couldn’t die, unexpressed; as if the world couldn’t kill him. You saw him at the Armory just after he had passed through thirty days hard enough to slay six men. Ambition held him up—and hate and all the powers of the ego.
“This is what I want to tell you: ‘When the love ofGod fills that furious capacity which ambition has made ready; when the love of God floods over the broadened surfaces of his mind, furrowed and sensitized by suffering, filling the matrix which the dreadful experiences have marked so deeply—John Morning will be a wonderful instrument of interpretation between God and his race.’
“I can make my story very short for you, Miss Berry. Your listening makes it clearer than ever to me. I see what men mean when they say they can write to women. Yes, I see it.... John Morning has made ready his cup. It will be filled with the water of life—to be carried to men. But John Morning must feel first the torture of the thirst of men.
“Every misery he has known has brought him nearer to this realization; days here among the dregs of the city; days of hideous light and shadow; days on the China Sea, sitting with coolies crowded so they could not move; days afield, and the perils; days alone in his little cabin on the hill; sickness, failures, hatreds from men, the answering hatred of his fleshly heart—all these have knit him with men and brought him understanding.
“He has been down among men. Suffering has graven his mind with the mysteries of the fallen. You must have understanding to have compassion. In John Morning, the love of God will pass through human deeps to men. Deep calls to deep. He will meet the lowest face to face. He will bring to the deepest down man the only authority such a man can recognize—that of having been there in the body. And the thrill of rising will be told. Those who listen and read will know that he has been there, and see that he is risen. He will tell how the water of life came to him—and flooded over him, and healed his miseries and his pains. The splendid shining authority of it will rise from his face and from his book.
“And men won’t be the same after reading and listening;(nor women who receive more quickly and passionately)—women won’t be the same. Women will see that those who suffer most are the real elect of this world. It’s wonderful to make women listen, Miss Berry, for their children bring back the story.
“It isn’t that John Morning must turn to love God. I don’t mean that. He must love men. He must receive the love of God—and give it to men. To be able to listen and to receive with a trained instrument of expression, and then to turn the message to the service of men—that’s a World-Man’s work. John Morning will do it—if he loves humanity enough. He’s the only living man I know who has a chance. He will achieve almost perfect instrumentation. He will express what men need most to know in terms of art and action. The love of God must have man to manifest it, and that’s John Morning’s work—if he loves humanity enough to make her his bride.”
Fallows was conscious now of really seeing her. She had not risen, but seemed nearer—as if the chair, in which she slowly rocked, had crept nearer as he talked. Her palms resting upon her knees were turned upward toward him:
“And you think John Morning is nearly ready for that crown of Compassion?”
“Yes——”
“You think he will receive the Compassion—and give it to men in terms of art and action?”
“Yes——”
“You think if he loves me—if he turns his love to me, as he is doing—he cannot receive that greater love which he must give men?”
“Yes——”
“And you think it would be a good woman’s part to turn him from her?”
“Yes——”
“And you came to tell me this?”
“Yes.”
“I think it is true——”
“Oh, listen—listen——” he cried, rising and bending over her—“a good woman’s part—it would be that! It would be something more—something greater than even he could ever do.... What a vision you have given me!”
She stood before him, her face half-turned to the window. Yet she seemed everywhere in the room—her presence filling it. He could not speak again. He turned to go. Her words reached him as he neared the door.
“Oh, if I only had my little baby—to take away!”
15
Fallowsstood forward on the ferry that night and considered the whole New York episode. He had done his work. He had told thePloughmanstory five times. It was just the sowing. He might possibly come back for the harvest.... He had another story to tell now. Could he ever tell it without breaking?... He had tortured his brain to make things clear for Morning and for men. He realized that a man who implants a complete concept in another intelligence and prevents it from withering until roots are formed and fruitage is assured, performs a miracle, no less; because, if the soil were ready, the concept would come of itself. He had driven his brain by every torment to make words perform this miracle on a large scale.
And this little listening creature he had just left—she had taken his idea, finished it for him, and involved it in action. To her it was the Cross. She had carried it to Golgotha, and sunk upon it with outstretched palms.... There was an excellence about Betty Berry that amazed him, in that it was in the world.... He had not called such women to him, becausesuch women were not the answer to his desires. He realized with shame that a man only knows the women who answer in part the desires of his life. Those who had come to him were fitted to the plane of sensation upon which he had lived so many years. He had condemned all women because, in the weariness of the flesh, he had suddenly risen to perceive the falsity of his affinities of the flesh. “What boys we are!” he whispered, “in war and women and work—what boys!”
Betty Berry had taught him a lesson, quite as enormous to his nature as thePloughman’s. A man who thinks of women only in sensuousness encounters but half-women. He had learned it late, but well, that a man in this world may rise to heights far above his fellows in understanding, but that groups of women are waiting on all the higher slopes of consciousness for their sons and brothers and lovers to come up. They pass their time weaving laurel-leaves for the brows of delayed valiants....
Duke thought of the men he had seen afield, the gravity with which these men did their great fighting business, the world talking about them. Then he thought of the little visionary in her room accepting her tragedy....
Even now, in the hush and back-swing of the pendulum, it seemed very true what he had said. She had seen it. It is dangerous business to venture to change the current of other lives; no one knew it better than Fallows. But he considered Morning. Morning, as it were, had been left on his door-step. Morning would be alone now—alone to listen and receive his powers.... Fallows looked up from the black water to the far-apart pickets of the wintry night. He was going home.
The cabin was lit. Fallows climbed the hill wearily. There was a certain sharpness as of treachery from hisnight’s work, but to that larger region of mind, open to selfishness and the passion to serve men, peace had come. He was going home, first to San Francisco—then to the Bosks and the little boy.
Morning arose quickly at the sound of the step on the hard ground, and opened the door wide. He had been reading her letter, which Fallows had left upon the table. The letter had been like an added hour with her. It was full of shy joy, full of their perfect accord, remote from the world—its road and stone-piles and evasions.... Fallows saw that he looked white and wasted. The red of the firelight did not mislead his eye. Its glow was not Morning’s and did not blend with the pallor.
“I’m going on to-morrow, John,” he said.
“’Frisco?”
“Yes—and then——”
“You’ll come back here?”
“No, I’ll keep on into the west tomycabin——”
“It would be nearer this way. I planned to see you after ’Frisco.”
“I’ll come back,” Fallows’ thought repeated, “for the harvest.”
“And so you are going to make the big circle again?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t finished this first one, until you reach Noyes and your desk in theWestern States.”
“The next journey won’t take so long.”
“You’ve been the good angel to me again, Duke. It’s quite a wonder, how you turn up in disaster of mine.... I wonder if I shall ever come to you—but you won’t get down. You wouldn’t even stay ill.”
“You won’t get down again, John, at least, in none of the ways you know about——”
Both men seemed spent beyond words.... Morning saw in the other’s departure the last bit of resistance lifted from his heart’s quest. Betty Berry hadcome between them. Morning’s conviction had never faltered on the point that Fallows was structurally weak on this one matter.... And so he was going. All that was illustrious in their friendship returned. They needed few words, but sat late before turning in. The cabin cooled and freshened. Each had the thought, before finally falling asleep, that they were at sea again.... And in the morning the thing that lived from their parting was this, from Duke Fallows:
“Whatever you do, John—don’t forget your own—the deepest down man. He is yours—go after him—get him!”
... She was at the top of the stairs when he called the next morning; and he was only half-way up when he saw that she had on her hat and coat and gloves. The day was bitter like the others. He had thought of her fire, and the quiet of her presence. He meant to tell her all about Duke Fallows and the going. It was his thought—that she might find in this (not through words, but through his sense of release from Duke’s antagonism) a certain quickening toward their actual life together. He wanted to talk of bringing her to the cabin—at least, for her to come for a day.
“You will go with me to get the tickets and things. I must start west at once.”
It was quite dark in the upper hallway. Morning reached out and turned her by the elbow, back toward the door of her room. There in the light, he looked into her face. She was calm, her eyes bright. Whatever the night had brought—if weakness it was mastered, if exaltation it was controlled. But she was holding very hard. There was a tightness about her mouth that terrified him. It was not as it had been with them; he was not one with her.
“You mean that you are going away—for some time?”
“Yes.... Oh, you must not mind. We are road people. We have been wonderfully happy. You must not look so tragic——”
It wasn’t like her at all. “We are not road people,” he thought.... “You must not look so tragic,”—that was just like a thing road people might say.
He sat down. The weakness of his limbs held his mind. It seemed to him, if he could forget his body, words might come. At first the thought of her going away was intolerable, but that had dwindled. It was the change in her—the something that had happened—the flippancy of her words.... He looked up suddenly. It seemed as if her arms had been stretched toward him, her face ineffably tender. So quickly it had happened that he could not be sure. He wanted this very thing so much that his mind might have formed the illusion. He let it pass. He did not want her to say it was not so.
Words of her letter came back to him. Neither the letter nor yesterday had anything to do with this day.... “You are drawing closer all the time. I have been so happy to-day that I had to write. You must know that I sent you away because I could not bear more happiness....”
Where was it? What had happened? He was fevered. Something was destroying him.... Betty Berry did not suffer for herself—it was with pity for him. The mother in her was tortured. It was her own life—this love of his for her—the only child she would ever have. She had loved its awakenings, its diffidences, the faltering steps of its expression. The man was not hers, but his love for her was her very own.... She had not thought of its death, when Fallows talked the night before. She had thought ofhergiving up for his sake, but not of the anguish and the slaying of his love for her. And this was taking place now.
“You will let me write to you?” he said, still thinking of the letter.
“Oh, yes.”
“And you will write to me?”
She remembered now what she had written.... The fullness of her heart had gone into that. She could not write like that again. Yet he was asking for her letters, as a child might ask for a drink.... She could not refuse. It wasn’t in nature to see his face, and refuse.... Surely if she remained apart it was all any one could ask.
“Yes, I will write sometimes.”
He stood in the center of the room, his head bowed slightly, his eyes upon the wall. He was ill, bewildered, his mind turning here and there only to find fresh distress.... Suddenly he remembered that he had not told her of his drinking.... That must be it. Some one else had told her, and she was hurt and broken.
“I meant always to tell you,” he said. “Only it really did not seem to signify by the time you came back. And when I was with you—oh, I seemed very far from that. I don’t understand it now——”
She did not know what he meant; did not care, could not ask. It was something he clutched—in the disintegration.... He looked less death-like in his thinking of it.
“It doesn’t greatly matter,” she said. “I have to go west.... Won’t you come with me to get the tickets?”
“I can’t go out into the street yet. If there is anything more I have done—won’t you let me know?”
Suddenly he realized her side, that he was detaining her; that it wasn’t easy for her to speak. It was not his way to impose his will upon anyone; his natural shyness now arose, and he fingered his hat.
“Dear John Morning—you haven’t done anything. You have made me happy. I must go away to my work—andyou, to yours.... It is hard for me, but I see it as the way. I have promised to write——”
The words came forth like birds escaping—thin, evasive, vain words. That which she had seen so clearly the night before, (and which she seemed utterly to have lost the meaning of) was a lock upon every real utterance now. She had not counted upon this tragedy of her mother instinct—this slaying of the perfect thing in him, which she had loved to life.
He arose, and sat down; he swallowed, started to speak, but could not. He was like a boy—this man who had seen so much, just a bewildered boy, his suffering too deep for words—the sweetest part of him to her, dying before her eyes. And the dream of their service together, their hand-in-hand going out to the world, their poverty and purity and compassion together—these were lost jewels.... It was all madness, the world—all madness and devilishness. Beauty and virtue and loving kindness were gone, the world turned insane.... The thought came to tellhimshe was insane; a better lie still, that she was not a pure woman. She started to speak, but his eyes came up to her.... She tried it again, but his eyes came up to her. He fingered his hat boyishly. The mother in her breast could not.
Their dreadful night. The winter darkness was coming on swiftly. Her train was leaving.
“But you said you were not going to work for the present. You have been working so hard all winter——”
He had said it all before.
“Yes—but there is much for me to do—days of study and practice—and thinking. You will understand.... Everything will come clear and you will understand. You see, to-day—this isn’t a day for words with us.... One must have one’s own secret place.You must say of me, ‘She suddenly remembered something—and had to go away.’...”
“‘She suddenly remembered something and had to hurry away,’” he repeated, trying to smile. “But she will write to me. I will work—work—and when you let me, I will come to you——”
“Yes——”
He had to leave.... He kissed her again. There was something like death about it.
“If wewereonly dead,” she said, “and were going away together——”
... A man stepped up to him, regarded him intently. Morning realized that he must get alone. He had been shaking his head wearily, and unseeingly—standing in the main corridor of the station in Jersey—shaking his head.... It was full night outside. He forgot that he did not have to recross the river—and was on the ferry back to New York before he remembered....
He gained the hill to his cabin long afterward. That reminded him that Duke Fallows had gone, too—and that very morning.
It seemed farther back in his life than Liaoyang.
16
Betty Berry’sjourney was ten hours west by the limited trains—straight to the heart of her one tried friend, Helen Quiston, a city music teacher. Her first thought, and the one buoy, was that she would be able to tell everything.... She could not make Helen Quiston feel the pressure that his Guardian Spirit (she always thought of Duke Fallows so) invoked in that half-hour of his call, but with a day or a night she could make her friend know what had happened, and[Pg 203]something of the extent of force which had led to her sacrifice. Helen would tell her if she were mad. All through that night she prayed that her friend would call her mad—would force her to see that the thing she had done was viciously insane.
She was engulfed. For the first time, her spirit failed to right itself in any way. She was more dependent upon Helen Quiston than she had conceived possible, since the little girl had fought out the different cruel presentations of the days, during the early life with her father.
Throughout the nighten routeshe thought of the letter she had promised to write to John Morning. The day with him had brought the letter from a vague promise to an immediate duty upon her reaching the studio.... She was to write first, and at once. Already she was making trials in her mind, but none would do. He would penetrate every affectation. The wonder and dreadfulness of it—was that she must not tell the truth, for he would be upon her, furiously human, disavowing all separateness from the race, as one with a message must be; disavowing the last vestige of the dream of compassion which his Guardian Spirit had pictured.... She knew his love for her. She had seen it suffer. Would Helen Quiston show her that she must bring it back—that the Guardian Spirit was evil? There was a fixture about it, a whispering of the negative deep within.
She could not write of the memories. Not the least linger of perfume from that night at the theatre must touch her communication. Yet it was the arch of all. As she knew her soul and his, they had been as pure as children that night—even before a word was spoken. It had been so natural—such a rest and joy.... She had learned well to put love away, before he came. From the few who approached, she had laughed and withdrawn. The world had daubed them. In her heart towardother men, she was as a consecrated nun. And this was like her Lord who had come.... She had made her way in the world among men. She knew them, worked among them, pitied them. Her father had been as weak, as evil, as passionate, as pitiable. In the beginning she had learned the world through him—all its bitter, brutal lessons. As she knew the ’cello and its literature, she knew the world and the cheap artifices it would call arts.... She had even put away judgments; she had covered her eyes; accustomed her ears to patterings; made her essential happiness of little things; she had labored truly, and lived on, wondering why. And he had come at last with understanding. She had seen in Morning potentially all that a woman loves, and cannot be. He had made her mind and heart fruitful and flourishing again. Then his Guardian Spirit had appeared and spoken. As of old there had been talk of a serpent. As of old the serpent was of woman.
Helen Quiston was just leaving for a forenoon’s work away from the studio. She sat down for a moment holding the other in her arms; then she made tea and toast, and hastened off to return as quickly as possible.... For a long time Betty Berry stood by the piano. The day was gray and cold, but the studio was softly shining. All the woods of it were dark, approximately the black of the grand piano; floors and walls and picture frames were dark, but the openings were broad, and naked trees stirred outside the back windows.... She did not look the illness that was upon her. She was a veteran in suffering.... She forgot to breathe, until the need of air suddenly caught and shook her throat. It was often so when the hidden beauty of certain music unfolded to her for the first time.
She went to the rear windows, gradually realizingthat it would soon be spring-time. There was a swift, tangible hurt in this that brought tears. There had been no tears for the inner desolation.... “Poor dear John Morning,” she whispered.
The reproduction of a wonderful painting of the meeting of Beatrice and Dante held her eye for a long time.... The blight was upon her as she tried a last time to write. It spread over her hand and the table, the room, the day. There was a hurt for him in everything she wanted to say. She was hot and ill—her back, her brain, her eyes, from trying. She could not hurt him any more. He had done nothing but give her healing and visions. His Guardian had done nothing but tell the truth, which she had seen at the time. This agony of hers had existed. It was like everything else in the world.
She wrote at last of their service in the world. They needed, she said, the strong air of solitude to think out the perfect way. It was very hard for her, who had fared so long on dreams and denials and loneliness. He must remember that. “Great things come to those who love at a distance,” she wrote bravely. Tears started when she saw the sentence standing so dauntlessly upon the page of her torture.... It would make them kinder, make their ideals live—and how young they were!... She said that she was afraid to be so happy as he had made her in certain moments. Often she found herself staring at the picture of Beatrice and Dante.
The thought that broke in upon this brave writing was that she was denied the thrill of great doing, as it had come to her while Fallows had spoken.... It would have lived on, had she gone that night, without seeing Morning again. Moreover, her way was different from that which she had pictured, as his Guardian talked. She did not see then that her action made a kind of lie of all her giving up to that hour; and that therecould be no united sacrifice. It was pure, voiceless sacrifice for her—and blind murdering for him....
From the choke of this, her mind would turn to the song of triumph her spirit had sung as his Guardian told the story.... She had seemed to live in a vast eternal life, as she listened; and this which she was asked to do—was just to attend a temporary flesh sickness. She had the strange blessedness that comes with the conviction that immortality is here and now, as those few men and women of the world have known in their highest moments.
She could get back nothing of that exaltation. It would never come again. The spirit it had played upon was broken.... She had been rushing away on her thoughts. It was afternoon, the letter unfinished, the ’cello staring at her from the corner. It had stood by her in all her sorrows of the years, but was empty as a fugue now—endless variations upon the one theme of misery.... Happiness does not come back to the little things—after one has once known the breath of life.... She closed the narrow way of the letter, which she had filled with words—no past nor future, only the darkness that had come in to mingle with the dark hangings of the room of her friend.... She kissed the pages and sent them back the way she had come in the night.
The qualities that had brought her the friend, Helen Quiston, and which had made the friendship so real, were the qualities of Betty Berry. She had come to the last woman to be told of her madness, or to find admonition toward breaking down the thing she had begun.... They had talked for hours that night.
“I know it is lovely, dear Betty. Why, you look lovelier this instant than I ever dreamed you could be. Loving a man seems to do that to a woman—but the privilege of the greater thing! Oh, youareprivileged.That’s the way of the great love. I should like sometime to know that Guardian. How did mere man grasp the beauty and mystery of service like that?... Stay with me. I will serve you, hands and feet. It is enough for me to touch the garment’s hem.... You are already gone from us, dearest. You have loved a man. You do love a man. He is worthy. You have not found him wanting. What matters getting him—when you have found your faith? Think of us—think of the gray sisterhood you once belonged to—nuns of the world—who go about their work helping, and who say softly to each other as they pass, ‘No, I have not been able to find him yet.’”
17
Morningawoke in the gray of the winter morning. The place was cold and impure. He had fallen asleep without the accustomed blasts of hill-sweeping wind from window to window. He had not started the fire the night before; had merely dropped upon his cot, dazed with suffering and not knowing his weariness. He was reminded of places he had awakened in other times when he could not remember how he got to bed. Beyond the chairs and table lay the open fire-place, the ashes hooded in white.
The blackness of yesterday returned, but with a hot resentment against himself that he had not known before. He had followed Betty Berry about for hours, and had not penetrated the hollow darkness with a single ray of intelligence. This dreadful business was his, yet he had been stricken; had scarcely found his speech. There was no doubt of Betty Berry now, though a dozen evasions of hers during the day returned. She was doing something hard, but something she thought best to do. The real truth, however, was rightly his property.... To-day she would write. To-morrow her letterwould come. If it did not contain some reality upon which he might stand through the present desolation, he would go to her.... Yes, he would go to her.
His side was hurting. He was used to that; it had no new relation now. Everything was flat and wretched. Distaste for himself and this nest in which he had lain, was but another of the miserable adjuncts of the morning. He stood forth shivering from the cot; struck a match and held it to some waste paper. Kindling was ready in the fire-place, but the paper flared out and fell to ashes, as he watched his left hand. He went to the window and examined his hand closer. The nails were broken and dry; there were whitish spots on the joints. He had seen something of this before, but his physical reactions had been so various and peculiar, in the past six weeks, that he had refused to be disturbed.
Just now his mind was clamoring with memories. He had the sense that as soon as an opening was forced in his mind, a torrent would rush in. He felt his heart striking hard and with rapidity. The floor heaved windily, or was it the lightness of his limbs? He went about the things to do with strange zeal, as if to keep his brain from a contemplation so hideous that it could not be borne.
He lit another paper, placed kindling upon it, poked the charred stubs of wood free from the thick covering of white, and brought fresh fuel. Then, as the fire kindled, he opened the door and windows, and swept and swept.... But it encroached upon him.... The open wound was no longer a mystery.... His dream of the river and the boat that was not allowed to land; his dream of the cliff, and looking down into the life of earth through the tree-tops ... the ferry-man of the Hun ... and now yesterday with its two relations to the old cause.
His whole nature was prepared for the revelation; yet it seemed to require years in coming. Like the lossof the manuscript in the Liao ravine, it was done before he knew.
“Of course, they had to rush away, when they found out,” he mumbled. “Of course, they couldn’t stay. Of course, they couldn’t be the ones to tell me.”
It might have been anywhere in China; the ferryman on the Hun ... during the deck-passage.... It did not greatly matter. Some contact of the Orient had started the slow virus on its long course in his veins. He knew that it required from three to five years to reach the stage of revealing itself as now. He saw it as the source of his various recent indispositions, and realized that he could not remain in his cabin indefinitely. It would be well for a while. Neither Duke Fallows nor Betty Berry would tell. He could keep his secret, and then—to die in some island quarantine? None of that. This was his life. He was master of it. He should die when he pleased, and where.
... Yes, she had her gloves on, when he came. She had not removed them all day, not even at the very last.... How strange and frightened she had been—how pitiful and hard for her! She could not have told him. She had loved him—and had suddenly learned.... She had seen that he did not know.... It must have come to her in the night—after the last day of happiness. Perhaps the processes of its coming to her were like his. He was sorry for Betty Berry.
And he could not see her again; he could not see her again. He passed the rest of the day with this repetition.... His life was over. That’s what it amounted to. Of course, he would not let them segregate him. His cabin would do for a while, until the secret threatened to reveal itself, and then he would finish the business.... The two great issues leaned on each other: The discovery of his mortal taint took the stress from the tragedy of yesterday; and that hecould not see Betty Berry again kept madness away from the abominable death.... The worst of it all was that the love-mating was ended. This brought him to the end of the first day, when he began to think of the Play.
The literary instinct, of almost equal disorder with dramatic instinct, and which he had come to despise during the past year, returned with the easy conformity of an undesirable acquaintance—that reportorial sentence-making faculty, strong as death, and as uncentering to the soul of man. Morning saw himself searching libraries for data on leprosy, being caught by officials—the subject of nation-wide newspaper articles and magazine specials, the pathos of his case variously appearing—Liaoyang recalled—his own story—Reever Kennard relating afresh the story of the stealing ofMio Amigo. What a back-wash from days of commonness! The ego and the public eye—two Dromios—equal in monkey-mindedness and rapacity.
Morning was too shattered to cope with this ancient dissipation at first.
After the warring and onrushing of different faculties, a sort of coma fell upon the evil part, and the ways of the woman came back to him. He sat by his fire that night, the wound in his side forgotten, the essence of Asia’s foulness in his veins, forgotten—and meditated upon the sweetness of Betty Berry. He approached her image with a good humility. He saw her with something of the child upon her—as if he had suddenly become full of years. “How beautiful she was!” he would whisper; and then he would smile sadly at the poor blind boy he had been, not to see her beautiful at first.... To think, only three days before, she had sent him away, because she could not endure, except alone, the visitation of happiness that came to her. People of such inner strength must have their secret times and places, for their strength comes to them alone. Tothink that he had not understood this at once.... He had been eloquent and did not know it.
“Hell,” he said, “that’s the only way one can say the right thing—when he doesn’t plan it.”
... If his illness had been any common thing she would not have been frightened away. He was sure of this. It took Asia’s horror—to frighten her away. He saw her now, how she must have fought with it. He shuddered for her suffering on that day.... That day—why it was only the day before yesterday.... He never realized before how the illusion, Time, is only measurable by man’s feeling.... He was a little surprised at Duke Fallows. He himself wouldn’t have been driven off, if Duke had suddenly uncovered a leprous condition. He had been driven off by Duke’s ideas, but no fear of contagion could do it. Yet Duke was the bravest man he had ever known—in such deep and astonishing ways courageous. Yet he had been brought up soft. He wasn’t naturally a man-mingler. It had been too much for him. It was a staggerer—this. Fallows was a Prince anyway. Every man to his own fear.... This was the second morning.
Old Jethro, the rural delivery carrier, drove by that morning without stopping. She could not have mailed her letter until last night—another day to wait for it. Morning tried to put away the misery. Women never think of mail-closing times. They put a letter in the box and consider it delivered.... He puzzled on, regarding the action of Duke Fallows, in the light of what he would have done. No understanding came.
All thoughts returned in the course of the hours, his mind milling over and over again the different phases, but each day had its especial theme. The first was that he would not see Betty Berry again; that Duke Fallows had been frightened away, the second; and on the thirdmorning, before dawn, he began to reckon with physical death, as if this day’s topic had been assigned to him.
Sister Death—she had been in the shadows before. Occasionally he had shivered afterward, when he thought of some close brush with her. She was all right, only he had thought of her as an alien before. It really wasn’t so—a blood sister now.... He recalled scenes in the walled cities of China.... She had certainly put over a tough one on him.... It would be in this room. He wouldn’t wait until his appearance was a revelation.... He would do the play. Something that he could take, would free him from the present inertia, so he could work for a while, a few hours a day. When the play was done—the Sister would come at his bidding.... He had always thought of her as feminine. A line from somewhere seemed to seize upon her very image—this time not sister, but——
Dark mother, always gliding near, with soft feet——
He faced her out on that third morning. Physically there was but a tremor about the coming. Not the suffering, but a certain touch and shake of the heart, heaved him a little—the tough little pump stopped, its fine incentive and its life business broken.... But that was only the rattle of the door-knob of death.
It was all right. He wasn’t afraid. The devil, Ambition, was pretty well strangled. There must be something that lasts, in his late-found sense of the utter unimportance of anything the world can give—the world which appreciates only the boyish part of a real man’s work. So he would take out with him a reality of the emptiness of the voice of the crowd. Then the unclean desire for drink was finished—none of that would cling to him; moreover, no fighting passion to live on wouldhold him down to the body of things.... But he would pass the door with the love of Betty Berry—strong, young, imperious, almost untried.... Would that come back with him? Does a matter of such dimension die? Does one come back at all?...
Probably in this room....
Then he thought of the play that must be done in this room; and curiously with it, identifying itself with the play and the re-forming part of it, was the favorite word of Duke Fallows’—Compassion. What a title for the play! Duke’s word and Duke’s idea.... All this brought him to the thought of Service, as he had pictured it for Betty Berry—a life together doing things for men—loving each other so much that there were volumes to spare for the world—down among men—to the deepest down man.
His throat tightened suddenly. He arose. A sob came from him.... His control broke all at once.... How a little run of thoughts could tear down a man’s will! It wasn’t fear at all—but the same depiction running in his mind that had so affected Betty Berry when she begged to be alone....
“The deepest down man—the deepest down man.... It is I, Duke!... Surely you must have meant me all the time!”
But it passed quickly, properly whipped and put away with other matters—all but a certain relating together of the strange trinity, Death, Service, and Betty Berry—which he did not venture to play with, for fear of relapse.... He had been eating nothing. He must go to Hackensack. The little glass showed him a haggard and unshaven John Morning, but there was nothing of the uncleanness about the face in reflection.... He heard the “giddap” of Jethro far on the road. The old rig was coming.... It stopped at his box. He hurried down the hill.
18
Twoletters; one from Duke Fallows. Morning opened this on the way up the slope. He was afraid of the other. He wanted to be in the cabin with the door shut—when that other was opened.... Fallows was joyous and tender—just a few lines written on the way west: “... I won’t be long in ’Frisco. I know that already. TheWestern Statesdoes very well without me.... Soon on the long road to Asia and Russia. I must look up Lowenkampf again before going home. He was good to us, wasn’t he, John?... And you, this old heart thrills for you. You are coming on. I don’t know anything more you need. I say you are coming on. You’ll do the Play and the Book.... John, you ought to write the book of the world’s heart.... And then you will get so full of the passion to serve men that writing won’t be enough. You will have to go down among them again—and labor and lift among men. Things have formed about you for this.... We are friends.... I am coming back for the harvest.”
The sun had come out. Morning was standing in the doorway as he finished. The lemon-colored light fell upon the paper.... It wasn’t like Duke to write in this vein—after running away. He repeated aloud a sentence to this effect. Then he went in, shut the door, and, almost suffocating from the tension, read the letter of Betty Berry.
It was just such a letter as would have sent him to her, before his realization of the illness.... He saw her torture to be kind, and yet not to lift his hopes. It was different from Fallows’, in that it fitted exactly to what he now knew about himself. And he had to believe from the pages that she loved him. There was an eternal equality to that.... The air seemed full of service. Two letters from his finest human relations,each stirring him to service. He did not see this just now with the touch of bitterness that might have flavored it all another time.... What was there about him that made them think of him so? If they only knew how meager and tainted so much of his thinking was. Some men can never make the world see how little they are.
He wrote to Betty Berry. Calm came to him, and much the best moments that he had known in the three days. He was apt to be a bit lyrical as a letter-lover—he whose words were so faltering face to face with the woman. Thoughts of the play came to his writing. He was really in touch with himself again. He would never lose that. He would work every day. When a man’s work comes well—he can face anything.... The play was begun the fourth day, and, on the fifth, another letter from Betty Berry. This was almost all about his work. She had seized upon this subject, and her letters lifted his inspiration. She could share his work. There was real union in that....
He was forgetting his devil for an hour at a time. There were moments of actual peace and well-being. He did not suffer more than the pain he had been accustomed to so long. And then, a real spring day breathed over the hill.
That morning, without any heat of producing, and without any elation from a fresh letter from the woman, he found that in his mind to say aloud:
“I’m ready for what comes.”
By a really dramatic coincidence, within ten minutes after this fruitage of fine spirit, John Morning found an old unopened envelope from Nevin, the little doctor of theSickles. He had recalled some data on Liaoyang while inspecting the morning—something that might prove valuable for the play, in the old wallet he had carried afield. Looking for this in the moulded leather, he found the letter Nevin had left in the Armory, beforedeparting—just a little before Betty Berry came that day.... Nevin had not come back. But Noyes and Field had come.
Morning remembered that Nevin had spoken that morning of finding something for the wound that would not heal.... The remedy was Chinese. The Doctor knew of its existence, but had procured the name with great difficulty in the Chinese quarter.... Morning was to fast ten days while taking the treatment.
He went about it with a laugh. The message had renewed his deep affection for Nevin. It had come forth from the hidden place where Nevin now toiled, (secretly trying, doubtless, to cover every appearance of his humanity).... He remembered how Nevin had studied the wound that refused to heal. The last thing had been his report on that. When there was nothing more to be offered but felicities—he had vanished.
Morning did not leap into any expectancy that he was to be healed, but thoughts of Nevin gave him another desire after the play and the book—to trace the great-hearted little man before the end. Nevin would be found somewhere out among the excessive desolations. If it may be understood, the idea of mortal sickness remained in Morning’s mind at this time, mainly as a barrier between him and Betty Berry.
Nevin’s drug was procured in New York. Hackensack failed utterly in this.... On the third day, Morning suffered keenly for the need of food. A paragraph from Betty Berry on the subject of the fasting at this time completely astonished him; indeed, shook the basic conviction as to the meaning of her departure:
“... I have often thought you did not seem so well after I returned from Europe, as you were when we parted. But the ten days will do for you, something that makes whatever might happen in the body seem solittle and unavailing.... Don’t you see, you are doing what every one, destined to be a world-teacher, has done?... What amazes me continually, is that you seem to be brought, one by one, to these things by exterior processes, rather than through any will of your own.... The Hebrew prophets were all called upon to do this in order to listen better. Recall, too, the coming forth from the Wilderness of the Baptist, and the forty days in the wilderness of the Master Himself. Why, it is part of the formula! You will do more than improve the physical health; you will hear your message more clearly.... I sit and think—in the very hush of expectancy for you.”
As the evidences came, so they vanished. She could not have fled from him in the fear of leprosy and written in this way; nor could Duke Fallows, who was first of all unafraid of fleshly things. The conviction of his taint, and of its incurableness, daily weakened. Before the ten days passed, the last vestige of the horror was cleaned away. Illusion—and yet the mental battle through which he had passed, and which, through three terrible days, had shaken him body and soul, was just as real in the graving of its experience upon the fabric of his being as was the journey to Koupangtse, done hand and foot and horse. He perceived that man, farther advanced in the complications of self-consciousness, covers ground in three days and masters a lesson that would require a life to learn in the dimness and leisure of simple consciousness.
There was no way of missing this added fact: He, John Morning, was not designed to lean. He had been whipped and spurred through another dark hollow in the valley of the shadow, to show him again, and finally, that he was not intended for leaning upon others, yet must have an instant appreciation of the suffering of others. He had been forced to fight his own way to a certain poise, through what was to him, at the time,actual abandonment in distress, by the woman and the friend he loved. Moreover, he had accepted death; resignation to death in its most horrible form had been driven into his soul—an important life lesson, which whole races of men have died to learn.
He was seeing very clearly.... He bathed continually both in water and sunlight, lying in the open doorway as the Spring took root on his hill and below. Often he mused away the hours, with Betty Berry’s letters in his hand—too weak almost to stir at last, but filled with ease and well-being, such as he had never known. Water from the Spring was all he needed, and the activity of mind was pure and unerring, as if he were lifted above the enveloping mists of the senses, through which he had formerly regarded life.
Everything now was large and clear. Life was like a coast of splendid altitude, from which he viewed the mighty distances of gilded and cloud-shadowed sea, birds sailing vast-pinioned and pure, the breakers sounding a part of the majestic harmony of granite and sea and sky; the sun God-like, and the stars vast and pure like the birds.
When he actually looked with his eyes, it was as if he had come back, a man, to some haunt of childhood. The little hill was just as lovely, a human delight in the unbudded elms, a soft and childish familiarity in the new greens of the sun-slope grass. The yellow primrose was first to come, for yellow answers the thinnest, farthest sunlight. The little cabin was like a cocoon. He was but half-out. Soon the stronger sunlight would set him free—then to the wings.... One afternoon he stared across to the haze of the great city. His eyes smarted with the thought of the Charleys and the sisters, of theBoabdilsand the slums.... Then, at last, he thought of Betty Berry waiting and thinking of him ... “in the very hush of expectancy.” Theworld was very dear and wonderful, and his love for her was in it all.
It was the ninth day that the bandage slipped from him, as clean as when he put it on the day before, and when he opened the door of the cabin he heard the first robin.... There was a sweeping finality in the way it had come from Nevin, and the quality of the man lived in Morning’s appreciation. His friends were always gone before he knew how fine they were.
He was slow to realize that the days of earth-life were plentiful for him, in the usual course. A man is never the same after he has accepted death.... And it had all come in order.... He could look into her eyes and say, “Betty Berry, whatever you want, is right for me, but I think it would be best for you to tell me everything. We are strong—and if we are not to be one together, we should talk it over and understand perfectly.”...
How strange he had missed this straight way. There had been so much illusion before. His body was utterly weak, but his mind saw more clearly and powerfully than ever.
The Play was conceived as a whole that ninth day. The sun came warmly in, while he wrote at length of the work, as he finally saw it.... On the tenth day he drank a little milk and slept in his chair by the doorway.... There was one difficult run that the robin went over a hundred and fifty times, at least.
19
Betty Berrywatched the progress of the fasting with a mothering intensity. She saw that which had been lyrical and impassioned give way to the workman, the deeper-seeing artist. He was not less[Pg 220]human; his humanity was broadened. From one of his pages, she read how he had looked across at the higher lights of New York one clear March night. His mind had been suddenly startled by a swift picture of the fighting fool he had been, and of the millions there, beating themselves and each other to death for vain things.... She saw his Play come on in the days that followed the fasting. There was freshness in his voice. She did not know that he had accepted death, but she saw that he was beginning to accept her will in their separation.
And this is what she had tried to bring about, but her heart was breaking. Dully she wondered if her whole life were not breaking. The something implacable which she had always felt in being a woman, held her like a matrix of iron now. Her life story had been a classic of suffering, yet she had never suffered before.
A letter from him, (frequently twice a day, they came) and it was her instant impulse to answer, almost as if he had spoken. And when she wrote—all the woman’s life of her had to be cut from it—cut again and again—until was left only what another might say.... She was forced to learn the terrible process of elimination which only the greater artists realize, and which they learn only through years of travail—that selection of the naked absolute, according to their vision, all the senses chiseled away. His work, his health, especially the clear-seeing that came from purifying of the body, the detachment of his thoughts from physical emotions—of these, which were clear to her as the impulses of instinct—she allowed herself to write. But the woman’s heart of flesh, which had fasted so long for love, so often found its way to her pages, and forced them to be done again.... Certain of his paragraphs dismayed her, as:
“Does it astonish you,” he asked, almost joyously, “when I say there is something about Betty Berry beyondquestion—such a luxurious sense of truth?... I feel your silences and your listenings between every sentence. It is not what you say, though in words you seem to know what I am to-day, and what I shall be to-morrow—but all about the words, areyou—those perfect hesitations, the things which I seemed to know at first, but could not express. They were much too fine for a medium of expression which knew only wars, horses, and the reporting of words and deeds of men.... Why, the best thing in my heart is its trust for you, Betty Berry. Looking back upon our hours together, I can see now that all the misunderstandings were mine and all the truth yours. When it seems to me that we should be together, and the memories come piling back—those perfect hours—I say, because of this trust, ‘Though it is not as I would have it, her way is better. And I know I shall come to see it, because she cannot be wrong.’”
So she could not hide her heart from him, even though she put down what seemed to her unworthiness and evasion, and decided through actual brain-process what was best to say. A new conduct of life was not carrying Betty Berry up into the coolness beyond the senses. Fasting would never bring that to her. Fasting of the body was so simple compared to the fasting of the heart which had been her whole life. Nor could she ever rise long from the sense of the serpent in woman which she had realized from the words of his Guardian—not a serpent to the usual man, but to the man who was destined to love the many instead of one.... She loved him as a woman loves—the boy, the lover, the man of him—the kisses, the whispers, the arms of strength, the rapture of nearness....
He must have been close to the spirit of that night at the theatre, when this was written:
“The letter to-day, with the plaintive note in it, has brought you even closer. I never think of you as onewho can be tried seriously; always as one finished, with infinite patience, and no regard at all for the encompassing common. Of course, I know differently, know that you must suffer, you who are so keenly and exquisitely animate—but you have an un-American poise.... You played amazingly. I loved that at once. There was a gleam about it. Betty Berry’s gleaming. I faced you from the wings that night. I wanted to come up behind you. You were all music.... But I love even better the instrument of emotions you have become. That must be what music is for—to sensitize one’s life, to make it more and more responsive....”
Then in a different vein:
“... The long forenoons, wherein we grow.... Yes, I knew you were a tree-lover; that the sound of running water was dear to you ... and the things you dream of ... work and play and forest scents and the wind in the branches.... Sometimes it seems to me—is it a saying of lovers?—that we should be boy and girl together.... Why, I’ve only just now learned to be a boy. There was so much of crudity and desire and anguish-to-do-greatly-at-any-cost—until just a little ago. But I’ve never had a boyhood that could have known you. I wasn’t ready for such loveliness in the beginning.... I’ve wanted terribly to go to you, but that is put away for the time.”
These lines wrung her heart. “Oh, no,” she cried, “you have not learned how to become a boy. There was never a time you were not ready—until now! You are becoming a man—and the little girl—oh, she is a little girl in her heart....”
Everything his Guardian had promised was coming to be. He was changing into a man. That would take him from her at the last—even letters, this torrent of his thoughts of life and work. She saw the first process of it—as the Play grasped him finally—the old tragedy of a man turning from a woman to his work....
She built the play from the flying sparks.... He was thronged with illusions of production. How badly he had done it before, he said, and how perfect had proved the necessity to wait, and to do it a second time.... Even the most unimaginative audience must build the great battle picture from the headquarters scene; then the trampled arena of the Ploughman, deep in the hollow of that valley, and his coming forth through the millet....
“... It’s so simple,” he wrote in fierce haste. “You see, I remember how hard it was for me to grasp that first night, when Fallows brought in the story to the Russian headquarters.... I have remembered that. I have made itso that I could see it then. And I was woven in and fibred over with coarseness, from months of life in Liaoyang and from the day’s hideous brutality. I have measured my slowness and written to quicken such slowness as that. The mystery is, it is not spoiled by such clearness. It is better—it never lets you alone. It won’t let you lie to yourself. You can’t be the same after reading it.... And it goes after the deepest down man.... Every line is involved in action.
“The third act—sometime we’ll see it together—how the main character leaves the field and goes out in search of the Ploughman’s hut, across Asia and Europe; how he reaches there—the old father and mother, the six children, the one little boy, who has the particular answer for the man’s lonely love—the mother of the six, common, silent, angular, her skirt hanging square, as Duke put it—but she is big enough for every one to get into her heart. You will see the fear of her man’s death, which the stranger’s presence brings to her, though he leaves it to Russia to inform the family. You will see the beautiful mystery of compassion that he brings, too. That’s the whole shine of the piece. And it came from the ministry of pain.
... “I’m not praisingmyPlay—it isn’t. It’s Duke’s almost every word of it—every thought, the work of Duke’s disciple. I have merely felt it all and made it clear—clear. You see it all. Many thousands must see, and see what the name means. It’s the most wonderful word in the world to me,Compassion.”
Then came the break for a day, and the flash that his work on the Play was finished. “The cabin will be harder for me now. The new work is only a dream so far—and this goes to Markheim to-day.... It is very queer that I should go back to Markheim, but somehow I want to pick up that failure. There are other reasons.... I shall tell him that he can have five days. I’m just getting ready to go across the River.... My health was almost never better. I’m not tired. The work has seemed to replenish me, as your letters do. But that last letter—yesterday’s—it seems to come from behind a screen, where other voices were—the loved tones troubled and crowded out by others. It left me restless and more than ever longing to see you. It is as if there were centuries all unintelligible, to be made clear only by being with you. The world and the other voices drown yours——”
She felt the instinct of centuries to hold out her arms to him—arms of the woman, after man’s task in the world—home at evening with the prize of the hunt and battle. The world for the day, the woman for the night—that is man’s way. She seemed to know it now from past eternity. And for woman—day and night the man of her thoughts.... She was afraid of her every written word now. Her heart answered every thrill of his; the murmuring and wrestling resistance of his against the miles, was hers ten-fold.... The days of the fasting had not been like this, nor the two weeks that followed in which he had completed the play.... April had come. She was ill. Her music was neglected altogether. Her friend, Helen Quiston, neverfaltered in her conception of the beauty and the mystery of the separation. With all her will, Helen sustained her against the relinquishing of the lofty ideal of sacrifice, and tried to distract her impassioned turning to the east.... She would hold to the death; Betty Berry knew this.
“It’s harder now that the play is done,” Betty repeated. “He can’t be driven instantly to work again. I can’t lie to him. He doesn’t fight me—he thinks I’m right—that’s the unspeakable part of it. There is nothing for me to write about except his work....”
And Helen Quiston found her, a half-hour afterward, staring out of the window, exactly as she had left—her hands in her lap exactly the same.... Betty Berry was thinking unutterable things, having to do with adorable meetings in the theatre-wings—of wonderful night journeys, all night talking—of waiting in a little room, and at the head of the stairs. There was an invariable coming back to the first kiss in the wings of the theatre.
“We were real—we were true to each other that night—true as little children. We needed no words,” this was her secret story.... “Oh, I waited so long for him ... and we could have gone out together and served in a little way. But they would not let us alone.”
He had been across to New York.... The second morning after the play was finished, she received a letter with a rather indescribable ending. He told her of fears and strangeness, of intolerable longing for something to happen that would bring them together.... The rest is here:
“I’m a bit excited by the thought that just came to me. And another, but I won’t tell you yet, for fear.... I don’t quite understand myself. I seem afraid. I think I would ask more of myself than I would of another man just now. There seem all about me invisible restraints. Something deep within recognizes thegreatness and finality of your meaning to me.... It is true, you do not leave the strength to me. Did you ever—? No, I won’t ask that.... This letter isn’t kind to you—unsettling, strange, full of an intensity to see and be with you....”
Moments afterwards, as she was standing at the piano—the letter trailing from her hand—the telephone in the inner room startled her like a human cry.
20
Itwas Morning. She did not remember his words nor her answers—only that she had told him he might come up-town to her. He had dropped the receiver then, as if it burned him.
So, it was a matter of minutes. Nothing was ready. Least of all, was she ready. She could hardly stand. She had forgotten at first, and it had required courage, of late, to look in the mirror. She would have given up, before what she saw now, but a robin was singing in the foliage by the rear windows. She went out to open the studio door into the hall, then retired to the inner room again.... “He can heal you, and bring back the music,” her heart whispered, but her mind cowered before herself, and this mate of herself, Helen Quiston, and before his Guardian.... She heard his step on the stair ... called to him to wait in the studio. He was pacing to and fro.
Morning felt the light resistance in her arms. His kiss fell upon her cheek. He held her at arm’s length, looking into her face.
She laughed, repeating that she was not ill.... She was always thinner in summer, she said. In her withholding, there was destructiveness for the zeal he had brought; and that which she set herself resolutely to impart—the sense of their separateness—found itslodgment in his nature. It would always be there now, she thought; it would augment, like ice about a spring in early winter, until the frost sealed the running altogether. The lover was stayed, though his mind would not yet believe.
“Is it really possible,” he said, sitting before her restlessly, “that I am here in your house, and that I can stay, and talk with you, and see you and hear you play? I have thought about it so much that it’s hard to realize.”
“It is quite what a lover would say,” she thought.... She had to watch her words. Her heart went out to him, but her mind remembered the work to do.... Self-consciousness, and a weighing of words—how horrible betweenthem!
“And what made you come? I had just read your letter, when the telephone rang——”
“I shouldn’t have sent that letter,” he answered. “I must have sent it because of the things I thought, and didn’t write.... The night before, I had come home to the cabin—after Markheim and the city. It was dreadful—with the work gone. Yesterday was too much for me—the Spring day—alone—not ready to begin again—you here.... I got to thinking about you so fast—and the shame of it, for us to be apart—that I couldn’t endure it.... I thought of going to you in a month—in a week; and then when the letter was mailed, I thought of it being with you this morning.... A thousand things poured into my mind. It seemed finally as if everything was wrong between us; as if I had already remained too long from you. It was like fighting devils.... And then I tried to beat the letter to you, but it got here by an earlier train this morning.”
He was like a child to her, telling about something that had frightened him.
Their silences were strained. His eyes had a sleepless look. Betty saw it working upon him—the repulsionthat had gone from her. She wished she might go to his arms and die. It suddenly came over her—the uselessness of it all—the uselessness of being a woman, of waiting, of final comprehension—all for this rending.... Yet she saw what would happen if she followed her heart. He would take her. There would be a radiant season, for the lover within him was not less because his work was for other men. But there was also within him (his Guardian had made her believe it) her rival, a solitary stranger come to the world for service, who would not delay long to show him how he had betrayed his real work, how he had caged his greater self, his splendid pinions useless.... Morning would hear the world calling for work he could not do.
“There seem all about me invisible restraints.”
This from the letter of the morning—alone remained with her. It expressed it all. The sentence uprose in her mind. It was more dominant to her than if a father had forbade his coming, or even if by his coming another was violated.
All the forbiddings that Society can bring against desire are but symbols compared to the invisible restraints of a full man’s nature. Men who are held by symbols, ruled by exterior voices and fears, are not finished enough to be a law unto themselves.... It wasn’t the terror of these thoughts, but tenderness in answer to his hurried tumble of explanation regarding his coming, that had filled Betty’s eyes. He caught the sparkle of a tear in profile, and came to her.
“It’s like creating—visibly, without hands, but with thoughts—creating a masterpiece—to see the tears come like that——”
He drew a chair to the bench where she sat, her back to the piano. Helen Quiston was away, as usual, for the forenoon.
“It is creating—another world,” she answered steadily.
He stared at her. She saw again that sleepless look.
“You’ve been a whole month on a lofty ridge—just think of it—fasting and pure expression of self—spiritual self-revelation——”
It seemed to him there was a suggestion in what she said for the new book.
“And now you are down in the meadows again,” she finished.
“The earth-sweet meadows—with you.”
He could not know what the words meant to her; that there was no quarter in them for her. She did not belong to his ascents.
“Somehow I always think of you as belonging best to the evenings, the hushed earth, the sweetness of the rest-time. You make me remember what to do, and how to do it well. Why, just now you made me see clearly for a second what I must do next. You make me love people better—when I am close to you.”