THE Sexton Avenue Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, with wide windows and a tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the Avenue in a block of bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house from the corner. Aidee rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, but his study was in the Assembly building. The house belonged to one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote articles forThe Chronicle, and verses which were military at one time, nay, even ferocious, which afterward reflected her pensioned widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She hoped her drawing-room might be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. She was tall, thin, grey-haired, and impressive.
The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, but some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule. Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. There was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted for excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large, good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her trail, Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling mills.
T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded from his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission into Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set forever on higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and held conversation.
Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature by the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with natural gas and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern, intensely modern.”
Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and “Lolly,” on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on the same small farm.
The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces. Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out.
“Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!”
“We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.”
But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men.
“You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric youth,” said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!”
There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart.
“By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell, do you? Got any idea where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Ho! You have!”
“Some hot chunks of it in this town.”
“You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof off. What church are you, anyhow?”
“I'm no church. I'm a freak.”
“Ho! You don't say!”
“I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.”
But they did not find him.
Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee.
But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and good may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,” says the penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of unuse, if they came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse there was, and irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt.
“The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become a tyranny.”
In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near the beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have mainly given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, has known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker becoming a larger glow,—the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better moments than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The other has seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and brooding and pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. Two lamps—the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.”
So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier and more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still.
“Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an elemental unit.”
If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and to care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, Port Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing the Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in opposition next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth and nail on local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the mystery.
“T. M.'s got a hawk-eye for excitement,” it remarked, and went its way. Secor built the hall for Aidee, and built it handsomely. The Seton Avenue Assembly became an accepted element in the hurrying city. Port Argent concluded that Aidee was rather worth while. A black-eyed, pallid man it found him, concentrated, sharp, decided, with an instinct for rhetorical speech, a gift for vivid, understandable language. It counted him a definite object, a something ponderable. But off the platform it found him rather repellent.
The Assembly was an incorporated organisation, whose creed in early days had been Aidee's latest speech, whose activity in municipal politics started the Independent Reform Party; which party was backed by one newspaper,The Chronicle, and sometimes elected a few councilmen, sometimes a good many. The cynical in Port Argent said that the Independent Reform Party was dying of indigestion, brought on by over-eating of a diet of too many ideas, too highly seasoned and disagreeing; that the Assembly was a sort of tintinabular tin can tied to a rapid and eloquent canine. The cynical perhaps overstated it. They generally do.
Of the throng which faced Aidee from week to week some faces became familiar, but most of them seemed to him indistinct and changing. He walked much about the city, watching faces—dingy and blurred faces, hurried and anxious faces, open and clear-eyed faces. “There's no equality among men, but there's a family likeness,” he said. It grew to be a kind of emotional luxury, yet he made few friends among them. Personally, he was rather solitary. When he tested his feelings about other men by too much direct contact with them, they put him out. He looked at them hungrily from a distance. Port Argent did not find him companionable. His solitude suited his temperament, but troubled his conscience.
Mrs. Tillotson found him the key to her social aspirations. Her aspirations sometimes drove him to think well of a tower of clamouring bells for a place of residence.
He fancied himself settled. Here was his work, his big brick hall with its platform, and opening off its narrow side entrance was his wide-windowed study. Here he would write his books and speak his mind, scatter his seed, and let the wind and sun take care of it. A man could do no more than throw his personality into the welter of things, and leave the worth of it to other decisions than his own. Here his travels were ended, except as one's soul travelled onward, spaceless and timeless.
In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner Republic,” might be called signboards, or statements of condition. Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations, showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written “Allen.”
“Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but human,—and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.”
The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen, present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was no jest in that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern.
The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll glittered with malice.
“Say, that man's name was Hicks.”
“What of it?”
“Why, he's one of your heelers.”
“Don't know him.”
“Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in Muscadine Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way back under your gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and drinking eloquence like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.”
“Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?”
Carroll shook his head.
“Don't know how it is. Down with the devil! Hicks, go shoot Wood! Never saw a man like you to make a general remark sound so blanked particular. No, but I'm going to soak you six to-morrow, you bet.”
Carroll laughed and flitted away.
Aidee sat brooding and troubled in his study that afternoon. Nobody cared what Carroll said. Carroll could not hurt him. A man was not his brother's keeper any further than he could keep him. It was his business to do his best, and not cultivate an invalid conscience. Wood had been a likeable man. Whatever his qualities, he had a right to his life. Aidee had seen men drop and die in Nevada of sudden holes through the chest. If somebody from the Third Ward undertook to emphasize Carroll's paragraphs by applying a club to Alcott Aidee, it would be no business of Carroll's either, whose business was with his paragraphs, and with seeing that they said what he meant, or that he meant what he caused them to say.
But the thing tasted badly.
He would see this Hicks, and discover at what point of discipleship a man translated “Down with the devil!” into “Go shoot Wood!” and became ready to take another's life and give over his own in exchange.
He stood at the window and saw Alberta Keys enter the Tillotson door, followed by Ted Secor, later by Ralbeck and Berry. They would be sipping Mrs. Tillotson's coffee presently, and discussing the Wood murder, and giving voluble opinions. They were driftwood people. Berry's “brotherly love” was a personal luxury he indulged himself with, a billowy divan that his soul reclined on. He had both brains and education, and played dolls with his sympathies. Ralbeck cursed the “Standard Oil” by way of relaxation, his earnest business in this world being connected with thorough-bass. Mrs. Tillotson's pretence was only a little more evident. A lot of zig-zag waterflies! That poor muddy humanity which had no opinions, except they came directly out of its sins and pains, was better than these, whose opinions were their mental entertainments. And who were the bulk of those who listened to him weekly? What real men followed him now or believed in him utterly, except some poor madman like the murderer, Hicks? The masses of men in Port Argent did not care for him, Aidee. They liked Marve Wood better, and young Hennion. He knew of no one person in Port Argent who loved Alcott Aidee. The Assembly was a collection of the half-curious, the half-sincere, the half-educated, the drunken with a little philosophy; some driftwood from the churches, and a percentage of socialists from the shops, with opinions like Scotch plaids. What dedication was there in any of them?
What was there in them that was genuine, as a mother with her child is genuine, or a man at his set task and knowledge of instant need? It was one of Aidee's dark hours. The Wood murder was a jarring discord. One could not deny that.
Ah, there came times to every man, he thought, whatever his success, when he looked on his success with a dull dislike. He remembered one day in Nevada, when he had sat unnoticed hours on water-dribbled rocks on the edge of his claim—which was paying at that time—and felt the same mental nausea. Another time was at Allen's prison door in St. Louis.
Disillusion was no more rational than illusion. Sometimes the morning stars sang discordantly, and knew not why, any more than they knew why at other times their voices were effortless and sweet.
On that day of the water-dribbled rocks of Nevada, it was the loss of Allen which had caused the mood, and the thought that the loss was final, and that the yellow fleck ore in the pit paid back no minutest percentage of the loss. Then the discovery that he could speak and move men had come, and brought with it the longing to move them to certain ends, and he had thought:
“All men are brothers. But some are lost and some are seeking. One is afraid and is condemned; one is not afraid and is called righteous; but neither of them can save himself alone; he can only do it because of the other. He can't do it without the other, for salvation is not the solitary issue they say it is. Salvation is a commonwealth. This is my message.” Then he had lifted himself from the rocks and the ore pit, and had faith.
Now, if faith in his ends should fail, and the springs dry up! Faith and doubt were three-fourths irrational. Someone would be proving them bacteria. They passed from man to man—they floated in the air—one caught them from events and objects as one caught the cholera—they were apt to be epidemic.
And yet faith in ends and purposes was health, and doubt of them disease. The one we must have, the other we must be rid of.
So ran Aidee's thoughts while he stood at the window and looked out gloomily at Seton Avenue, at its block pavement, and the shadows thrown by the pale young maple leaves. He saw nothing coming but a street car, a headlong rattling mechanism. He thought how all over Port Argent people were talking of the Wood murder—some gabbling about it like Mrs. Tillotson's guests, others saying, decently enough: “Wood always treated me right,” or, “Well, the old scamp's gone!”
The Wood murder seemed an abrupt and challenging event thrust across his life—harsh, discordant, repellent, like that clanging mechanism in the street, which stopped, however, almost before Mrs. Tillotson's door, and Camilla Champney stepped down from it. Aidee watched her enter the house, and then fell to pacing the floor restlessly. After half an hour he took his hat and went across the street to the Tillotson drawing-room.
WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder.
“Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will put it in music, the schema thus—The wronged cry for justice! They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! Allegro-mezzoforte!”
And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs. Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.”
And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring herself either to countenance crime.
“This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist to Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People will ask our position.”
Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about Wood and Hicks, really?”
“My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked.
“Scrumptious!” said Alberta.
Mrs. Tillotson hesitated.
“I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.”
It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, a reference furnished her by Berry.
“Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.”
Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider.
“Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.”
“Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the breach of necessary laws.”
“Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself. “But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.”
“G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks——”
“Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed and smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.”
“G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to be erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here than he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, whose knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless as possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson scared him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, and he knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson posed, that Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive pocket, and finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were rather good.
The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried:
“Camilla Champney! She's coming in!”
While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent and familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, and then nearly a year before.
When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. Tillotson appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of rituals; they tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he said, in the place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who substituted ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence followed anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, therefore peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought Mrs. Tillotson might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted his scorn. Mrs. Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his scorn.
Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted and Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large houses and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin Street. The crowds increased as they drew nearer the business section—late afternoon crowds hurrying home.
“I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's your gift.”
Camilla was radiant for a moment.
“It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr. Hennion was right.”
“Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be men's conventions.”
“Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.”
“Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. Hecouldn't!” She was radiant again.
“Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“But I like Alberta!”
She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood.
The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked into its black secrecy.
“Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't matter, and besides—I don't know how to ask you—but there's something I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The Inner Republic'!”
She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now.
“I thought it was different—from the other books—that is—I thought there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.”
“The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?”
“Not more, but besides.”
“And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask for are extensive.”
Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently.
They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space.
Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in asking for explanatory notes.
A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some quarrelling children.
Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the rebuff.
“I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me—because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life—because I thought,—you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.”
Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly.
Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her.
“I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”
“I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to believe. And perhaps she would understand.”
“Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you understand? This is what I mean.”
“But you do understand now!” said Camilla.
“Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore me in two.
“I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's hysteric.”
“I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank admiration.
The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them.
“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered and foolish as you like.”
Camilla laughed happily.
“Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.”
He glowered a little.
“Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality. The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you, because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin? Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably no less so. Wood was a likeable——”
“The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they would look apart.”
Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or, “confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him—a man new, at least, and original—conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen, poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about. Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks to flying signals of excitement.
Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney!
“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have been a lyric poet.”
He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street.
“No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but she always thrashes him.”
“How dreadful!”
“Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things found not altogether worshipful—egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other.
The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person then.
Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.
Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges.
“Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked.
“I love it.”
“Reason enough for its cheerfulness.”
“I've loved it for ages.”
“But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee.
“You needn't insist on it.”
“Not if I think it important?”
“Oh, never at all!”
“But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.”
“Better owe it than pay it in small coin.”
“Then I offer a promissory note.”
“You mean—you will tell me more about——” Camilla paused and dropped her voice.
“Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.”
It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in the springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, and small tinklings of wit are thought poetical.
Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him.
“Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.”
“'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully.
“Can't help it.”
Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed.
“I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.”
He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions.
“What is it, Dick? What have you done?”
Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting.
“Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder with his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we forget about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.”
Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla went up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the gangs of workmen.
“You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm not quite clear how you were right, but you were.”
“Right about the whole business?”
“No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm adopting your scruples.”
Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on.
“Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh. “I'm a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. Would it be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?”
“Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.”
“Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.”
“Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?” implying that he knew what the paragraphs would be.
“Never saw him that I know of.”
“Well—I don't see where you're concerned.”
Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what Aidee meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity of dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else.
Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about the place. Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their open window.