CHAPTER XTHE FAITH OF A TREE

CHAPTER XTHE FAITH OF A TREE

Earlythe next morning Mrs. Wells appeared as usual on deck and, with apparently the same imposing mien as of old, watched the docking of the S.S.Victoria. Externally she had altered little, but in a moment of conversation with her it was clear both to Geraldine and to Richard that she had “suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange.” Had she packed her bags? Had she locked up the steamer-trunks, paid off the various stewards, arranged for the porterage of trunks in the hold? Not at all. Why should she bother about all that? What were husky young folks for? And what was age for if not to levy tribute upon youth?

Never before had she permitted anyone to do for her. Now she shifted to the other extreme. She would do nothing. And it was not at all unreasonable, she assured Geraldine. Nor was it weakness, but rather the result of strong decision. She willed now to have others take charge of things, she said.

And so she fooled herself into a pleasant attitude of mind. Indeed she joked about it. Sitting snugly in a deck-chair she watched Geraldine and Richard as they superintended the bringing of luggage to the surface and having it stacked properly, labelled and lettered.

“Now I shall begin to be appreciated,” she announcedcheerfully. Geraldine had dropped beside her, spent from the exertion. “When I did everything, nobody knew what it cost me. I could worry over every hair-pin, but nobody cared. That’s because nobody knew the price I paid for their comfort. That was a mistake, I see. I did too much. Now I’m going to take a rest for awhile and collect. What a fool I was to slave the way I did! And the blessed relief, now that I’ve passed it over to you, Geraldine! I never remember feeling so lazy and comfortable and—beatific!”

No doubt it really was a blessed relief to give up the fight. Many dominant persons are like that; they spend three-quarters of their lives bullying their families into nervous servility, and suddenly plop down on the said families for the remaining one-quarter and invite themselves to be taken care of.

About Walter she said nothing. One never would think that only the evening before she had been literally struck down by the news of the horrible method Walter had taken to rid himself of her constant espionage. The shock had been terrific, for her confidence in the eternal rightness of her judgments had given her no preparation for the revelation when it came; but the very severity of the shock served a good purpose: it drove the whole incident into the depths of her mind. It was now something far away, a grief that distance and time had assuaged; something to be aware of, of course, to ponder over sadly, but whose sting was gone.

When Geraldine had told Richard of the graphic description of the struggle as related by the quiet Englishman, and then made clear the surprising manner in which Mrs. Wells had abdicated, he said it was quite normal so to act.

“Of course the shock did its work,” he said. “It knocked her out completely. She may recover, but I doubt it. She has held a mild despotism for the strong years of her life. This is like a successful revolution breaking out against her. Otherwise she acts in quite a natural human way. In his lectures, James used to enjoy telling about these freak shifts of character. When we give up an ideal or an ambition it is really a great relief. Instead of disappointment we actually have happiness. James used to be fond of describing the lady of thirty-five who at nine-fifteen of a certain evening decides that she no longer cares to be thin. That will be her first night’s perfect sleep. The struggle is over. She tosses the dietary to the winds, lets out her waistband, and takes to a rocking chair and sets loose the springs of laughter. Your mother, it seems to me, has been living on a strain; she really carried herself a notch or two above her strength. It will be a great joy to her to let down and be natural. I predict you will find her a much more agreeable companion after this.”

For the present at least Richard’s prediction was verified every hour. Instead of the semi-querulous person who checked off every article of personal belonging and bossed stewards, porters, and even customs officials, she walked down the gang-plank with only a slender handbag and cheerfully sat on a trunk and permitted Richard to superintend the irritating job of going through the customs. She offered no advice, but she was not slow to see the humour of the situation and to proffer broadly satiric suggestions to the workers.

Walter, too, was in splendid spirits, splendid for Walter. He tagged along with Richard and showed a sort of weak interest in the formalities of customs inspection.The fact that the mother had given her word that she would let him alone made the day seem to him like the first day of vacation. He was almost cheerful.

He followed Richard willingly enough because, he assured himself, he had that man in his power. An assumed name is not taken up without a lot back of it. And Richard permitted him to think so, even going so far as to take him aside more than once and have him pledge all over again his vow of secrecy. Walter, too, was fooling himself, pretending to himself that he was a clever man, but all the while he was mortally afraid of jail, and the unexpressed thought of it was the controlling power in his attachment to Richard. No one had ever suggested jail before. Like an irresponsible child he had always been allowed to work his little game for money. Of course they had scolded, but always they had let him off.

When Freneau had come along to help he discovered Richard in full charge of the Wells’ affairs.

“You run along, Professor,” Richard laughed him aside. “You’ve done your job, but I’m looking out for the two ladies and the boy now. No! I won’t have you even find a customs man for me. I’m enjoying this. It’s the first time I’ve ever really handled a family. I’m feeling delightfully domestic—a brand-new experience—and I want to get the last morsel of enjoyment out of it.”

“Oh, very well,” Freneau had agreed with his adversary quickly; “that will be a great help, and I will toddle off and see to the other members of the party. Thank you so much.”

When all had been done that could be done the group sat about on trunks and bundles of rugs to await the heavier baggage, which was now being derricked out ofthe hold. Mrs. Wells on a pile of rugs spent the time chattering her farewells with the two other ladies who had made up the Freneau “party.” Walter sprawled beside Richard on a trunk, and watched the derrick pull up trunk after trunk. Geraldine had found a more or less comfortable suitcase. They could see the heavy baggage as it was being lifted out of the hold. Richard had managed his trip on a commodious handbag, which he had not permitted to go below in the hold. It was Walter’s job to watch for Wells’ trunks, black with an enormous white “W.”

A noisy insincere set of farewells were going off directly beside them. Richard and Geraldine exchanged glances which showed that they appreciated the banality of every effusive phrase.

“It’s might cosy,” she said, “to have you going right along with us to ‘Red Jacket.’”

The quietness of her tone and the sincerity of her straightforward gaze was in contrast to the noisy group breaking up beside them. And she not only meant it to convey a contrast but a sign also that she had given up her disapproval of his coming along.

“You don’t have to say that,” he said; “I know it.”

“How?”

“I sense it; you know I have cultivated all the senses in order to extract the last drop of elixir of life. I sensed you from the very beginning—not very well, I admit. I made some blunders there, but I got you essentially, nevertheless.”

“Got me? Sensed me?” she smiled up at him. “Excuse me for being amused. You talk as if you were a hound and I—a pheasant!”

“I am a hound—I cavort around with my nose in the air, eager to search out things.”

“But how did you sense me from the beginning?” she came back.

“I knew you were the kind of woman you have turned out to be. I did not judge you to be simply an astonishingly healthy animal—your health is uproarious; it shouts at one!—vivacious, gabbly, frothy——”

“Thank you; oh, thank you!”

“I thought you had a mind,” he went on. “I sensed it. Your broad forehead showed it; the eyes wide apart and large; the way you held your head on your neck; the judgment and taste in your clothes; the inflection of your voice; your choice even of slang; your laugh; your frown; the care you spent on your body (no woman is better than her hair!); your forced volubility; your woman’s smile which belied the girlish chatter—and so on and so on. That’s what I call sensing you. Most persons go on words, but speech is of very little use in judging persons. That’s why the legal witness-box is so absurd.”

“I’m trying to think of that quotation—‘Twelfth Night,’ isn’t it?—where Olivia gives an inventory of herself; item, one nose; item, two eyes; item, one mouth.... You gave me no impression you were taking an inventory of my charms. But you are right about words. I often mean the opposite of what I say.”

“Yes! Speech is not natural. It’s an acquired skill and a poor exponent of the self within. We are always being fooled by it; and yet words are causing all the trouble and misunderstanding in the world. We should be able to look beyond words. That’s how I came to give up being insulted.”

“How did you manage? I’m very sensitive to a snub.”

“I got to looking beyond the words to the real person speaking. Do you remember Tittbottom’s spectacles?”

“No.”

“It’s inPrue and I.”

“Never read it; thought it was sentimental.”

“It is, but in a good sense. Tittbottom’s spectacles are the best thing in it. He had only to put them on and he saw the inner-self of anyone on whom he looked. Well, I have cultivated the Tittbottom habit. I see the impatience, the illness, the ignorance, the misunderstanding, back of the words, and then I can’t be hurt. Might as well be insulted because a leaf turns brown.”

“I believe you would forgive a criminal for being bad!”

“Quite so. I would even forgive a good man for being good!”

The racket about them was most persistent: the rattling of hand-trucks, the bumping of trunks, the roaring conversation of hundreds of embarking passengers—more than one steamer had arrived that morning—and the shouts and whistles that gave direction to machinery. But the noise instead of interfering with the dialogue cut the two off from the rest of the world, isolated them, as it were, in their own private room with invisible walls.

“Well,” she said, “whatever you are, I’m glad now that you are coming with us.”

“I knew you wanted me to come with you to ‘Red Jacket’ even when you said you didn’t.”

“You ‘sensed’ right then. I did. But I was fearfully afraid of exposure. I am yet. That’s why I’m going to ask you to be very nice to mother on the train, and then when you ‘sense’ the proper moment tell herthe whole story of our trip to the top of the hill in Naples, your real name and everything.”

“But——”

“Oh, you must. I can’t stand the deception. You can do it beautifully. Make her laugh: I can’t do that.”

“Oh, very well. All right. If you wish it, but—Jove! I was enjoying my incognito! I’ve taken on a sort of new soul. All my instincts say to keep it.”

He looked at her for permission to go on keeping it.

“No,” she shook her head. “My instinct says, no.”

At that moment Walter slid off the trunk and stared hard at a black trunk marked with a prodigious white letter, swirling around in mid-air. The letter turned out to be “M,” but it took him a moment or two to decide.

“Jove!” Richard exclaimed again; “I must! It’s part of the cure.” He nodded towards Walter. “The only reason he listens to me is because he thinks I’m a bad man like himself. I’m travelling about under analias,” he lowered his voice; “he thinks he has me in his power. We talked it all over and swore each other to secrecy. He’ll be talking about a percentage of the swag soon! Oh, it wouldn’t do! We must leave things as they are. Don’t you see my point?”

She did, but reluctantly. Walter came back to his perch before she could reply; and a banging trunk, turned end over end by the American system of porterage, stopped all conversation temporarily.

The incident at Naples was a trivial thing, now that she could look back upon it. Why had she not told the mother the whole episode, omitting nothing, on the very evening of the happening? Why had she feared to own up? Here was another of those “mental facts”which Richard was so curious about. Mother would have looked at her with mild disapproval and then, probably, would have laughed at the whole affair. But instead of being frank, Geraldine had been secretive; she had literally created a situation that had had no real existence. She had made a mountain out of a little Neapolitan mole-hill. The evil lay not in tripping off with an unintroduced male but in the careful and prolonged system of concealment. It is easy to see life in review; why cannot we be equally wise in the midst of events?

When she propounded this mental obtuseness to Richard he was full of illustrations to show how common is that human experience. But he was glad it had happened. It gave him a medley of new sensations; and here he was, finding his greatest adventure at the end of his adventure-seeking journey! Of that she was glad too, she said. And he was glad she was glad; for he admitted that he had become attached to the Wells family like a mongrel dog.

“First you are a hound and now you are a mongrel dog!”

“We’re very much alike, dogs and us. The skeletons are strikingly similar—don’t you think—especially when you set them up on end. Oh, we’re near cousins! But I’m really mongrel. I go here and there. I have no fixed home. I attach myself to all sorts of persons, and—alas!—leave them for other persons. Like the mongrel, I go where my spirit moves me.”

“You really are a sort of Quaker.”

“Oh, I am very sensitive to the call of the Spirit—I spell it with a capital because I believe we’re all part of the same mysterious Impulse—I spell that with a capital, too. We’re like good microbes in the blood,working out our selfish ends, but all for the unknown glory of something greater of which we are the unconscious molecules.”

She accused him of being a pantheist. He admitted it. Then she labelled him an old-school Presbyterian, but he admitted that.

“The main point in the old Bluestocking,” he explained, “is that as God had arranged it all, why worry? They didn’t always stick to the main point, because they were artistic creatures and loved the sensation of startling pictures—infants broiling for ever in hell, and the elect, who had done their darndest on earth, safe in heaven be-harped and be-winged with the fright of the pit still in their faces. But their main point is unassailable. You can’t argue it away. Predestination? Why not? We are observers, merely: it is only an allusion that we act. I have no more choice in going along with you to ‘Red Jacket’ than I have in liking you immensely or being a biped or sitting on this trunk.”

“Oh, we can do some things of our own free will.”

“Name one.”

“We can do what we want to do, certainly.”

“That’s all.”

“Don’t you ever do something you don’t want to do?”

“Never; although I fool myself into thinking that I am making a decision. Do you think, for instance, that you could stand on that trunk and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the top of your lungs?”

She shuddered at the thought.

“I could if I wanted to.”

“Ah! But you can’t want to! I won’t ask you tosing; but I defy you towantto.... There! You can’t want to. It is predestined that you couldn’t want to.... Now, what next am I?”

“Do you mean to say,” Geraldine was intent on this old problem of free-will versus determinism; “do you mean to tell me that I cannot choose between, say, simpering at a man—like that fool of a girl over there—oh, she knows what she is doing, all right, and why she is doing it!—or being just myself?”

“I tell you simply that you cannot choose but be just yourself. Vain persons choose vanity; greedy persons choose to be greedy; simpering female adolescents”—he turned to look at the young girl who was flashing herself at the young man—“do their best to choose a healthy male. And Easter lilies choose to grow tall and slender and water chooses to run downhill. Oh, Presbyterianism is a great faith for an indolent chap like me—you cease to worry about the whirligig of time; you didn’t make it nor set it agoing; and you can’t direct it nor stop it. You leave it to the Maker and go about your blessed selfish business free of all responsibility.”

“I don’t believe you half believe all your beliefs.”

At some hour in the day or week, he assured her, he believed many of them. He wobbled about a lot and had a good time wobbling. The only fixed belief he had was the belief that he should always be open to a new belief.

Walter leaped to his feet; he had discovered a Wells trunk, and was as delighted as a child.

“’At’s one!” he shouted.

“One what?” Mrs. Wells was startled.

“Trunks!” cried Walter.

“Goodness! I thought it was a fire!”

“’Ere’s ’nother!” cried Walter again. “’Ere they come. All of ’em!”

“Good work!” Richard slapped him on the back. “You’re the boy! Now let’s rustle up a stevedore and a customs gentleman and put them through.”

Mrs. Wells had given Geraldine the family purse, and she in turn had passed it over to Richard. Like a veteran tourist-guide, he paid small duties, fee’d the draymen, arranged for expressage, called taxis, bought train tickets and established his party in the rear seats of an observation car. Not until they were speeding out of the Lackawanna Station did he realize that he had not telephoned Galloway. “Well,” he thought, “he has my letter mailed on shipboard. He’ll find us, all right.”

Then a ridiculous thought seized him. He took a seat beside Geraldine and pulled from his pocket a thin wallet, the one he had shown her on that first day at Naples; from it he produced a solitary five-dollar bill.

“Look!” he waved it.

She did not comprehend until he had brought the family purse from another pocket and dangled the two before her.

“I’ve bought my ticket out of your money!” he cried. “Now wasn’t that clever of me! I still have my five dollars to windward and good free meals ahead! Oh, it’s a wonderful thing to have faith. The Lord will provide.”

“Did you say ‘faith’ or ‘nerve’?” Geraldine knew her man thoroughly now.

He looked at her with mock incredulity. “Woman,” he said, “don’t you know that to have faith requires the greatest nerve on earth? Nerve! Phew! Justyou try to live in this world on faith alone. Then’s when miracles begin to happen—they just have to!”

“I believe our part of the country will just suit you—the country you are now being predestined to on our predestined money.”

“‘Your reason, most excellent wench! Your exquisite reason!’ That’s almost Shakespeare; so it’s all right.”

“Penn Yan was first settled by a Quakeress, Jemimah Wilkinson, who called herself the Universal Friend. She believed in faith, just as you do——”

“All right; I’ll be a Universal Friend, too.”

“But she put her faith to a severe test,” Geraldine continued; “she announced a day when she would walk on the waters of Lake Keuka as an exhibition to her many disciples. And when they had crowded the shores of the Lake and she had offered a silent prayer and walked to the water’s edge, she turned to her followers and asked them to renew publicly their confession of faith in faith. As a test she asked them to assure her before she should step out on the surface of the water, that they had faith that she could do all she professed in the name of the Lord. They all had absolute faith, they cried. ‘Then,’ said Jemimah, ‘I need not prove aught to ye who believe.’ Having said, she turned from the Lake and went home.”

“Good for Jemimah!” said Richard. “I wager she was a keen one. That was a bully rebuke to all that side-show crowd. But my faith is different. I don’t ask for miracles, since every breath I draw is a miracle. I don’t think about it at all. I have the faith of a dog——”

“What sort of a dog this time?”

The train spun suddenly around a curve, throwing him quite over against the lady.

“Almost a lap-dog,” he laughed. “But I’ve been working that dog too much lately. So we’ll change the figure. My faith is the faith of a tree.”

“That’s a very beautiful picture,” she contemplated the thought, “the faith of a tree—I wish I had it. That’s what gives you your serenity—just like a great, strong, shady tree.”

He was pleased and told her he was pleased; and then defended himself from the charge of vanity by admitting it and proving from his favourite Whitman, not only the joy of vanity but the universal practice of it.

And so they “pow-wowed,” as he called it, for many a mile. On shipboard it was Mrs. Wells and he who had displayed to each other the eloquent wares of their minds. Only once or twice had he and Geraldine talked together, and then but for short intervals. The strong-minded mother had seized on this man like a mental vampire. But after Walter’s crazy adventure, the spring had gone out of her mind; it no longer snapped at ideas. On this journey she was content to doze in the chair car, or drowsily read.

Mrs. Wells had claimed the attention of Richard after the change of cars at Elmira which had broken into one bit of conversation begun on the observation-platform.

“We’re going to have good times together at Keuka,” Geraldine had said; “better times than you dream of. We have a big roomy place at ‘Red Jacket,’ with horses and good riding roads; we swim, canoe, tennis, and sail; there’s fair trout fishing and a bully good summer climate. Later there is good pheasant shooting and fine skating. And we’re absolutely secluded among the hills. I live in a bathing suit until October. You’ll enjoy tramping over the hills; and you can be alone to your heart’s desire.”

“Oh, I’m going to like it! I sense it all.” He pretended to sniff the joy in advance.

“Do you know what I like about you most of all?” she suddenly confessed.

“No! Tell me. My egotism needs feeding.”

“You treat me like a human being.”

“Well,” he looked her over with great care, “aren’t you?”

“You treat me like a human being, not like a woman.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I’m grateful because you don’t seem to make any difference. I like to talk to men—some of them; they do so many interesting things. But all that I ever get is a lot of—fluttering. They won’t talk to me as you do. They twitter and fly away.”

“Birds of passage, eh?”

“Worse,” she pondered, as if out of deep experience; “vultures.”

“Exactly,” he dropped the bantering tone; “I understand precisely what you mean. You’re right; I’m not that sort. Do you know, I have a suspicion that I am sexless. I always treat women as if they were men.... But they won’t have it that way,” he shook his head ruefully, “even the old ones. I’m tremendously interested in many women, but sooner or later they misunderstand my interest. Sooner or later they shame me to the core. Are my ears burning?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. The very remembrance is awful. Sooner or later they begin ... making eyes at me, or they write me outrageous confessions and then—I decamp! Of course I understand the law of the thing, and if I could reciprocate I suppose it would be all right and natural. Lord! I am interested only intheir minds! You know Shakespeare advocated the ‘marriage of true minds’; but I haven’t found a woman yet who took to it for long.... I can’t afford to marry.... I won’t let the thought get in my mind. I have closed my life to the things that tie me. ‘I celebrate myself’ with good old Walt and decline to attach myself to anything. Detachment—that’s the only means of happiness. One must be an observer, never a participant. That’s the artist’s point of view. With wife and children would come a sort of pleasant, altruistic slavery. Thank the Lord ‘Jawn’ Galloway is a gentleman—I never need fear that some day he will fall in love with me.”

At this point the break in the journey had begun. For some unaccountable reason this speech had inflamed Geraldine with anger. It was seemingly so pointed, so carefully aimed at her. It was, as she took it, a notice in advance not to trespass; indeed a hint that inevitably she would trespass. Make eyes at him? Write him confessions? Egoist? Egotist, rather! The colossal vanity of the man! Well, she would show him. She would prove an exception to his experience. And so she fumed, but kept her outward calm.

As they stepped out of the train at Penn Yan and moved towards black George Alexander, who stood grinning and bowing before the door of the Wells’ family carriage, she managed to draw Richard aside for a moment to say:

“You need have no fear, my dear charmer, about this woman. She has no intention of falling in love with you, exquisite sir.”

The smile that came to his face puzzled her. His mild eyes seemed to be looking into her very “subliminal.”

“How can you be sure?” he asked searchingly.

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