The car stopped at the station, and a minute afterwards she followed Mrs. Timberlake across the pavement and through the door, which Blackburn held open. As she entered, he said quickly, "I will get your ticket and meet you at the gate."
"Has John got the bag?" asked Mrs. Timberlake, glancing back.
"Yes, he is coming." Caroline was looking after Blackburn, and while she did so, she was conscious of a wish that she had spoken to him in the car while she still had the opportunity. "I might at least have been kinder," she thought regretfully, "I might have shown him that I realized it was not his fault—that he was not to blame for anything from the beginning——" A tall countryman, carrying a basket of vegetables, knocked against her, and when she turned to look back again, Blackburn had disappeared. "It is too late now. I shall never see him again."
The station was crowded; there was a confused rumble of sounds, punctuated by the shrill cries of a baby, in a blue crocheted hood, that was struggling to escape from the arms of a nervous-looking mother. In front of Mrs. Timberlake, who peered straight ahead at the gate, there was a heavy man, with a grey beard, and beside him a small anxious-eyed woman, who listened,with distracted attention, to the emphatic sentences he was uttering. "Why doesn't he stop talking and let us go on," thought Caroline. "What difference does it make if the whole world is going to ruin?" Even now, if she could only go faster, there might be time for a few words with Blackburn before the train started. If only she might tell him that she was not ungrateful—that she understood, and would be his friend always. A hundred things that she wanted to say flashed through her mind, and these things appeared so urgent that she wondered how she could have forgotten them on the long drive from Briarlay. "I must tell him. It is the only chance I shall ever have," she kept saying over and over; but when at last she heard his voice, and saw him awaiting them in the crowd, she could recall none of the words that had rushed to her lips the moment before. "It is the only chance I shall ever have," she repeated, though the phrase meant nothing to her any longer.
"I tell you it's the farmers that pay for everything, and they are going to pay for the war," declared the grey-bearded man, in a harsh, polemical voice, and the anxious-eyed woman threw a frightened glance over her shoulder, as if the remark had been treasonable. Mrs. Timberlake had already passed through the gate, and was walking, with a hurried, nervous air, down the long platform. As she followed at Blackburn's side, it seemed to Caroline that she should feel like this if she were going to execution instead of back to The Cedars. She longed with all her heart to utter the regret that pervaded her thoughts, to speak some profound and memorable words that would separate this moment from every other moment that would come in the future—yet she went on in silence toward the waiting train,where the passengers were already crowding into the cars.
At the step Mrs. Timberlake kissed her, and then drew back, wiping her reddened lids.
"Good-bye, my dear, I shall write to you."
"Good-bye. I can never forget how kind you have been to me."
Raising her eyes, she saw Blackburn looking down on her, and with an effort to be casual and cheerful, she held out her hand, while a voice from somewhere within her brain kept repeating, "You must say something now that he will remember. It is the last chance you will ever have in your life."
"Good-bye." Her eyes were smiling.
"Your chair is sixteen. Good-bye."
It was over; she was on the platform, and the passengers were pushing her into the car. She had lost her last chance, and she had lost it smiling. "It doesn't matter," she whispered. "I am glad to be going home—and life cannot hurt you unless you let it."
The smile was still on her lips, but the eyes with which she sought out her chair were wet with tears.
NOone met her at the little country station, and leaving her bag for old Jonas, she started out alone to walk the two miles to The Cedars. Straight ahead the long, empty road trailed beneath the fresh young foliage of the woods, the little curled red velvet leaves of the oaks shining through the sea-green mist of the hickories and beeches; and she felt that within her soul there was only a continuation of this long, straight emptiness that led on to nothing. Overhead flocks of small fleecy clouds, as white as swans-down, drifted across the changeable April sky, while the breeze, passing through the thick woods, stirred the delicate flower-like shadows on the moist ground. "Spring is so sad," she thought. "I never understood before how much sadder spring is than autumn." This sadness of budding things, of renewing life, of fugitive scents and ephemeral colours, had become poignantly real. "It makes me want something different—something I have never had; and that is the sharpest desire on earth—the desire for a happiness that hasn't a name." A minute afterwards she concluded resolutely, "That is weakness, and I will not be weak. One must either conquer or be conquered by life—and I will not be conquered. Anybody can be miserable, but it takes courage to be happy. It takes courage and determination and intelligence to get the best out of whatever happens, andthe only way to begin is to begin by getting the best out of yourself. Now I might have been hurt, but I am not because I won't let myself be. I might be unhappy, but I am not because my life is my own, and I can make of it anything that I choose." Then suddenly she heard an inner voice saying from a great distance, "It is my last chance. I shall never see him again." With the words her memory was illuminated by a flame; and in the burning light she saw clearly the meaning of everything that had happened—of her sorrow, her dumbness, her longing to speak some splendid and memorable word at the last. It was not to Briarlay, it was not even to Letty, that her thoughts had clung at the moment of parting. She had wanted David Blackburn to remember because it was the separation from him, she knew now, that would make her unhappy. Unconsciously, before she had suspected the truth, he had become an inseparable part of her world; unconsciously she had let the very roots of her life entwine themselves about the thought of him.
Standing there in the deserted road, beneath the changeable blue of the sky, she turned to fight this secret and pitiless enemy. "I will not let it conquer me. I will conquer, as I have conquered worse things than this. I believed myself dead because I had once been disappointed. I believed myself secure because I had once been stabbed to the heart. This is the punishment for my pride—this humiliation and bitterness and longing from which I shall never be free." An unyielding cord stretched from her heart back to Briarlay, drawing stronger and tighter with every step of the distance. It would always be there. The pain would not lessen with time. The flame of memory wouldgrow brighter, not paler, with the days, months, and years.
The April wind, soft, provocative, sweet-scented, blew in her face as she looked back; and down the long road, between the rose and green of the woods, an unbroken chain of memories stretched toward her. She saw Blackburn as he had appeared on that first night at Briarlay, standing in the door of his library when she came in from the terrace; she saw him in Letty's room at midnight, sitting beside the night lamp on the candle-stand, with the book, which he did not read, open before him; she saw him in the day nursery, his face enkindled with tenderness; she saw him in the midst of the snowy landscape, when there had been rage in his look at the half-drunken Roane; and she saw him, most clearly of all, as he looked facing, on that last night, the hour that would leave its mark on him for ever. It was as if this chain of memories, beginning in the vague sunshine and shadow of the distance, grew more distinct, more vivid, as it approached, until at last the images of her mind gathered, like actual presences, in the road before her. She could not escape them, she knew. They were as inevitable as regret, and would follow her through the bitter years ahead, as they had followed her through the hours since she had left him. She must stand her ground, and fight for peace as valiantly as she had ever fought in the past.
"I cannot escape it," she said, as she turned to go on, "I must accept it and use it because that is the only way. Mine is only one among millions of aching hearts, and all this pain must leave the world either better or worse than it was—all this pain will be used on the side either of light or of darkness. Even sorrow may standin the end for the world's happiness, just as the tragedy of this war may make a greater peace in the future. If I can only keep this thought, I shall conquer—war may bring peace, and pain may bring joy—in the end."
Beyond the white gate, the old aspens glimmered silver green in the sunlight, and, half-hidden in a dusky cloud of cedars, she saw the red chimneys and the dormer-windows of the house. Home at last! And home was good however she came to it. With a smile she drew out the bar, and after replacing it, went on with an energetic and resolute step.
The door was open, and looking through the hall, she saw her mother crossing the back porch, with a yellow bowl of freshly churned butter in her hands.
Mrs Meade had grown older in the last six months, and she limped slightly from rheumatism; but her expression of sprightly cheerfulness had not changed, and her full pink face was still pretty. There was something strangely touching in the sight of her active figure, which was beginning at last to stoop, and in her brisk, springy step, which appeared to ignore, without disguising, the limp in her walk. Never, it seemed to Caroline, had she seen her so closely—with so penetrating a flash of understanding and insight. Bare and hard as life had been, she had cast light, not shadow, around her; she had stood always on the side of the world's happiness.
"Mother, dear, I've come home to see you!" cried Caroline gaily.
The old lady turned with a cry. "Why, Caroline, what on earth?" she exclaimed, and carefully set down the bowl she was carrying.
The next instant Caroline was in her arms, laughing and crying together.
"Oh, mother, I wanted to see you, so I came home!"
"Is anything wrong, dear?"
"Nothing that cannot be made right. Nothing in the world that cannot be made right."
Drawing her out on the porch, Mrs. Meade gazed earnestly into her face. "You are a little pale. Have you been ill, Caroline?"
"I never had much colour, you know, but I am perfectly well."
"And happy, darling?" The dear features, on which time was beginning to trace tender lines of anxiety, beamed on her daughter, with the invincible optimism that life had granted in place of bodily ease. As the wind stirred the silvery hair, Caroline noticed that it had grown a little thinner, though it was still as fine and light as spun flax. For the first time she realized that her mother possessed the beauty which is permanent and indestructible—the beauty of a fervent and dominant soul. Age could soften, but it could not destroy, the charm that was independent of physical change.
Caroline smiled brightly. "Happy to be with you, precious mother."
"Maud is in the hospital, you know, and Diana is in New York getting ready to sail. Only Margaret is left with me, and she hasn't been a bit well this winter. She is working hard over her garden."
"Yes, you wrote me. While I am here, I will help her. I want to work very hard."
"Can you stay long now? It will be such a comfort to have you. Home never seems just right when one of you is away, and now there will be three. You knew old Docia was sick, didn't you? We have had to put her daughter Perzelia in the kitchen, and she is only a fieldhand. The cooking isn't very good, but you won't mind. I always make the coffee and the batter bread."
"You know I shan't mind, but I must go back to work in a week or two. Somebody must keep the dear old roof mended."
Mrs. Meade laughed, and the sound was like music. "It has been leaking all winter." Then she added, while the laugh died on her lips, "Have you left Briarlay for good?"
"Yes, for good. I shall never go back."
"But you seemed so happy there?"
"I shall be still happier somewhere else—for I am going to be happy, mother, wherever I am." Though she smiled as she answered, her eyes left her mother's face, and sought the road, where the long procession of the aspens shivered like gray-green ghosts in the wind.
"I am so glad, dear, but there hasn't been anything to hurt you, has there? I hope Mr. Blackburn hasn't been disagreeable."
"Oh, no, he has been very kind. I cannot begin to tell you how kind he has been." Her voice trembled for an instant, and then went on brightly, "And so has Mrs. Timberlake. At first I didn't like her. I thought she was what Docia calls 'ficy,' but afterwards, as I wrote you so often, she turned out to be very nice and human. First impressions aren't always reliable. If they were life would be easier, and there wouldn't be so many disappointments—but do you know the most valuable lesson I've learned this winter? Well, it is not to trust my first impression—of a cat. The next time old Jonas brings me a lot of kittens and asks me what I think of them, I'm going to answer, 'I can't tell, Jonas, until I discover their hidden qualities.' It's thehidden qualities that make or mar life, and yet we accept or reject people because of something on the surface—something that doesn't really matter at all."
She was gay enough; her voice was steady; her laugh sounded natural; the upward sweep of the black brows was as charming as ever; and the old sunny glance was searching the distance. There was nothing that Mrs. Meade could point to and say "this is different"; yet the change was there, and the mother felt, with the infallible instinct of love, that the daughter who had come home to her was not the Caroline who had left The Cedars six months ago. "She is keeping something from me," thought Mrs. Meade. "For the first time in her life she is keeping something from me."
"Now I must take off my hat and go to work," said Caroline, eagerly, and she added under her breath, "It will rest me to work."
The fragrance of spring was in the air, and through the fortnight that she stayed at The Cedars, it seemed to her that this inescapable sweetness became a reminder and a torture—a reminder of the beauty and the evanescence of youth, a torture to all the sensitive nerves of her imagination, which conjured up delusive visions of happiness. In the beginning she had thought that work would be her salvation, as it had been when she was younger, that every day, every week, would soften the pain, until at last it would melt into the shadows of memory, and cease to trouble her life. But as the days went by, she realized that this emotion differed from that earlier one as maturity differs from adolescence—not in weakness, but in the sharper pang of its regret. Hour by hour, the image of Blackburn grew clearer, not dimmer, in her mind;day by day, the moments that she had spent with him appeared to draw closer instead of retreating farther away. Because he had never been to The Cedars she had believed that she could escape the sharper recollections while she was here; yet she found now that every object at which she looked—the house, the road, the fields, the garden, even the lilacs blooming beneath her window—she found now that all these dear familiar things were attended by a thronging multitude of associations. The place that he had never known was saturated with his presence. "If I could only forget him," she thought. "Caring wouldn't matter so much, if I could only stop thinking." But, through some perversity of will, the very effort that she made to forget him served merely to strengthen the power of remembrance—as if the energy of mind were condensed into some clear and sparkling medium which preserved and intensified the thought of him. After hours of work, in which she had buried the memories of Briarlay, they would awake more ardently as soon as she raised her head and released her hands from her task. The resolution which had carried her through her first tragedy failed her utterly now, for this was a situation, she found, where resolution appeared not to count.
And the bitterest part was that when she looked back now on those last months at Briarlay, she saw them, not as they were in reality, filled with minor cares and innumerable prosaic anxieties, but irradiated by the rosy light her imagination had enkindled about them. She had not known then that she was happy; but it seemed to her now that, if she could only recover the past, if she could only walk up the drive again and enter the house and see Blackburn and Letty, it would mean perfectand unalterable happiness. At night she would dream sometimes of the outside of the house and the drive and the elms, which she saw always shedding their bronze leaves in the autumn; but she never got nearer than the white columns, and the front door remained closed when she rang the bell, and even beat vainly on the knocker. These dreams invariably left her exhausted and in a panic of terror, as if she had seen the door of happiness close in her face. The day afterwards her regret would become almost unendurable, and her longing, which drowned every other interest or emotion, would overwhelm her, like a great flood which had swept away the natural boundaries of existence, and submerged alike the valleys and the peaks of her consciousness. Everything was deluged by it; everything surrendered to the torrent—even the past. Because she had once been hurt so deeply, she had believed that she could never be hurt in the same way again; but she discovered presently that what she had suffered yesterday had only taught her how to suffer more intensely to-day. Nothing had helped her—not blighted love, not disillusionment, not philosophy. All these had been swept like straws on the torrent from which she could not escape.
The days were long, but the nights were far longer, for, with the first fall of the darkness, her imagination was set free. While she was working with Margaret in the garden, or the kitchen, she could keep her mind on the object before her—she could plant or weed until her body ached from fatigue, and the soft air and the smell of earth and of lilacs, became intermingled. But it was worse in the slow, slow evenings, when the three of them sat and talked, with an interminable airychatter, before the wood-fire, or round the lamp, which still smoked. Then she would run on gaily, talking always against time, longing for the hour that would release her from the presence of the beings she loved best, while some memory of Blackburn glimmered in the fire, or in the old portraits, or through the windows, which looked, uncurtained, out on the stars. There were moments even when some quiver of expression on her mother's face or on Margaret's, some gleam of laughter or trick of gesture, would remind her of him. Then she would ask herself if it were possible that she had loved him before she had ever seen him, and afterwards at Briarlay, when she had believed herself to be so indifferent? And sitting close to her mother and sister, divided from them by an idea which was more impregnable than any physical barrier, she began to feel gradually that her soul was still left there in the house which her mind inhabited so persistently—that her real life, her vital and perpetual being, still went on there in the past, and that here, in the present, beside these dear ones, who loved her so tenderly, there was only a continuous moving shadow of herself. "But how do I know that these aren't the shadows of mother and of Margaret?" she would demand, startled out of her reverie.
At the end of a fortnight a letter came from Mrs. Timberlake, and she read it on the kitchen porch, where Perzelia, the field hand, was singing in a high falsetto, as she bent over the wash-tub.
"We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in—His—c-r-ow-n!" sang Perzelia shrilly, and changing suddenly from hymn to sermon, "Yas, Lawd, I tells de worl'. I tells de worl' dat ef'n dat nigger 'oman don' stop 'er lies on me, I'se gwine ter cut 'er heart out. I'se gwine ter kill 'erjes' de same ez I 'ould a rat. Yas, Lawd, I tells 'er dat. 'We is jew-els—pre-cious—jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n.'"
Mrs. Timberlake wrote in her fine Italian hand:
MYDEARCAROLINE,
I have thought of you very often, and wanted to write to you, but ever since you left we have been rather upset, and I have been too busy to settle down to pen and paper. For several weeks after you went away Letty was not a bit well. Nobody knew what was the matter with her, and Doctor Boland's medicine did not do her any good. She just seemed to peak and pine, and I said all along it was nothing in the world except missing you that made her sick. Now she is beginning to pick up as children will if you do not worry them too much, and I hope she will soon get her colour back and look as natural as she did while you were here. We have a new trained nurse—a Miss Bradley, from somewhere up in the Shenandoah Valley, but she is very plain and uninteresting, and, between you and me, I believe she bores Letty to death. I never see the child that she does not ask me, "When is Miss Meade coming back?"
We were very anxious to have a word from you after you went away. However, I reckon you felt as if you did not care to write, and I am sure I do not blame you. I suppose you have heard all the gossip that has been going on here—somebody must have written you, for somebody always does write when there is anything unpleasant to say. You know, of course, that Angelica left David the very day you went away, and the town has been fairly ringing with all sorts of dreadful scandals. People believe he was cruel to her, and that she bore his ill-treatment just as long as she could before leaving his house. Only you and I and Mammy Riah will ever know what really happened, and nobody would believe us if we were to come out and tell under oath—which, of course, we can never do. I cannot make out exactly what Angelica means to do, but she has gonesomewhere out West, and I reckon she intends to get a divorce and marry Alan, if he ever comes back from the war. You may not have heard that he has gone into the army, and I expect he will be among the very first to be sent to France. Roane is going, too. You cannot imagine how handsome he is in his uniform. He has not touched a drop since we went to war, and I declare he looks exactly like a picture of a crusader of the Middle Ages, which proves how deceptive the best appearances are.
David has not changed a particle through it all. You remember how taciturn he always was, and how he never let anybody even mention Angelica's name to him? Well, it is just the same now, and he is, if possible, more tight-lipped than ever. Nobody knows how he feels, or what he thinks of her behaviour—not even Colonel Ashburton, and you know what close and devoted friends they are. The Colonel told me that once, when he first saw how things were going, he tried to open the subject, and that he could never forget how Blackburn turned him off by talking about something that was way up in the air and had nothing to do with the subject. I am sure David has been cut to the heart, but he will never speak out, and everybody will believe that Angelica has been perfectly right in everything she has done. If it goes on long enough, she will even believe it herself, and that, I reckon, is the reason she is so strong, and always manages to appear sinned against instead of sinning. Nothing can shake her conviction that whatever she wants she ought to have.
Well, my dear, I must stop now and see about dinner. The house is so lonely, though, as far as I can tell, Letty hardly misses her mother at all, and this makes it so provoking when people like Daisy Colfax cry over the child in the street, and carry on about, "poor dear Angelica, who is so heartbroken." That is the way Daisy goes on whenever I see her, and it is what they are saying all over Richmond. They seem to think thatDavid is just keeping Letty out of spite, and I cannot make them believe that Angelica does not want her, and is glad to be relieved of the responsibility. When I say this they put it down as one of my peculiarities—like blinking eyes, or the habit of stuttering when I get excited.
Give my love to your mother, though I reckon she has forgotten old Matty Timberlake, and do drop me a line to let me hear how you are.
Your affectionate friend,MATTYTIMBERLAKE.
Letty sends her dearest, dearest, dearest love.
When she had finished the letter, Caroline looked over the lilacs by the kitchen porch and the broken well-house, to the road beneath the aspens, which still led somewhere—somewhere—to the unattainable. At one corner of the porch Perzelia was singing again, and the sound mingled with the words that Mrs. Timberlake had written.
"We is jew-els, pre-cious jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n."
A fever of restlessness seized Caroline while she listened. The letter, instead of quieting her, had merely sharpened the edge of her longing, and she was filled with hunger for more definite news. In an hour The Cedars had become intolerable to her. She felt that she could not endure another day of empty waiting—of waiting without hope—of the monotonous round of trivial details that led to nothing, of the perpetual, interminable effort to drug feeling with fatigue, to thrust the secondary interests and the things that did not matter into the foreground of her life. "He has never wasted a regret on me," she thought. "He never cared for a minute. I was nothing to him except a friend, a woman who could be trusted." The confession waslike the twist of a knife in her heart; and springing to her feet, she picked up the letter she had dropped, and ran into the house.
"I must go back to work, mother darling," she said. "The money I saved is all gone, and I must go back to work."
TOWARDthe close of an afternoon in November, Caroline was walking from the hospital to a boarding-house in Grace Street, where she was spending a few days between cases. All summer she had nursed in Richmond; and now that the autumn, for which she had longed, had at last come, she was beginning to feel the strain of hard work and sleepless nights. Though she still wore her air of slightly defiant courage, a close observer would have noticed the softer depths in her eyes, the little lines in her face, and the note of sadness that quivered now and then in her ready laughter. It was with an effort now that she moved with her energetic and buoyant step, for her limbs ached, and a permanent weariness pervaded her body.
A high wind was blowing, and from the scattered trees on the block, a few brown and wrinkled leaves were torn roughly, and then whirled in a cloud of dust up the street. The block ahead was deserted, except for an aged negro wheeling a handcart full of yellow chrysanthemums, but as Caroline approached the crossing, Daisy Colfax came suddenly from the corner of a church, and hesitated an instant before speaking. The last time that Caroline had seen her, old Mrs. Colfax had been in the car, and they had not spoken; but now that Daisy was alone, she pounced upon her with the manner of an affectionate and playful kitten.
"Oh, I didn't know you at first, Miss Meade! You are so much thinner. What have you been doing?"
She held out her hand, diffusing life, love, joy, with the warmth of her Southern charm; and while Caroline stood there, holding the soft, gloved hand in her own, a dart of envy pierced the armour of her suffering and her philosophy. How handsome Daisy looked! How happy! Her hat of the royal purple she favoured made her black hair gleam like velvet; her sealskin coat, with its enormous collar of ermine, wrapped her luxuriously from head to foot; her brilliant complexion had the glow of a peach that is just ready to drop. She also had had an unfortunate romance somewhere in the past; she had married a man whom she did not love; yet she shone, she scintillated, with the genuine lustre of happiness. Never had the superior advantages of a shallow nature appeared so incontestable.
"I saw you go by yesterday, Miss Meade, and I said to myself that I was going to stop and speak to you the first chance I got. I took such a fancy to you when you were out at Briarlay, and I want to tell you right now that I never believed there was anything queer in your going away like that so early in the morning, without saying a word to anybody. At first people didn't understand why you did it, and, of course, you know that somebody tried to start gossip; but as soon as Mrs. Timberlake told me your sister was ill, I went straight about telling everybody I saw. You were the last woman on earth, I always said, to want anything like a flirtation with a man, married or single, and I knew you used to sympathizesowith Angelica. I shall never forget the way you looked at David Blackburn the night you came there, when he was so dreadfullyrude to her at the table. I told mother afterwards that if a look could have killed, he would have fallen dead on the spot." She paused an instant, adjusted a loosened pin in her lace veil, and glided on smoothly again without a perceptible change in her voice, "Poor, dear Angelica! All our hearts are broken over her. I never knew David Blackburn well, but I always despised him from the beginning. A man who will sit through a whole dinner without opening his mouth, as I've known him to do, is capable of anything. That's what I always say when Robert tells me I am prejudiced. I am really not in the least prejudiced, but I just can't abide him, and there's no use trying to make me pretend that I can. Even if he hadn't ruined Angelica's life, I should feel almost as strongly about him. Everybody says that she is going to get a divorce for cruelty, though one of the most prominent lawyers in town—I don't like to mention his name, but you would know it in a minute—told me that she could get it onanygrounds that she chose. Angelica has such delicacy of feeling that she went out West, where you don't have to make everything so dreadfully public, and drag in all kinds of disgraceful evidence—but they say that David Blackburn neglected her from the very first, and that he has had affairs with other women for years and years. He must have selected those nobody had ever heard of, or he couldn't have kept it all so secret, and that only proves, as I said to Robert, that his tastes were always low——"
"Why do people like to believe these things?" demanded Caroline resentfully. "Why don't they try to find out the truth?"
"Well, how in the world are they going to find outany more than they are told? I said that to Mrs. Ashburton—you know they stand up for Mr. Blackburn through thick and thin—but even they can't find a word to say against Angelica, except that she isn't sincere, and that she doesn't really care about Letty. There isn't a word of truth in that, and nobody would believe it who had seen Angelica after she told Letty good-bye. She was heartbroken—simply heartbroken. Her face was the loveliest thing I ever looked at, and, as Alan Wythe said to me the next day—it was the very afternoon before he went off to camp—there was the soul of motherhood in it. I thought that such a beautiful way of putting it, for it suited Angelica perfectly. Didn't you always feel that she was full of soul?"
"I wonder how Letty is getting on?" asked Caroline, in the pause. "Have you heard anything of her?"
"Oh, she is all right, I think. They have a nurse there who is looking after her until they find a good governess. She must miss her mother terribly, but she doesn't show it a bit. I must say she always seemed to me to be a child of very little feeling. If I go away for a week, my children cry their eyes out, and Letty has lost her mother, and no one would ever know it to watch her."
"She is a reserved child, but I am sure she has feeling," said Caroline.
"Of course you know her better than I do, and, anyhow, you couldn't expect a child not to show the effects of the kind of home life she has had. I tell Robert that our first duty in life is to provide the memory of a happy home for our children. It means so much when you'regrown, don't you think, to look back on a pleasant childhood? As for Letty she might as well be an orphan now that David Blackburn has gone to France——"
"To France?" For a minute it seemed to Caroline that claws were tearing her heart, and the dull ache which she had felt for months changed into a sharp and unendurable pain. Then the grey sky and grey street and grey dust intermingled, and went round and round in a circle.
"You hadn't heard? Why, he went last week, or it may be that he is going next week—I can't remember which. Robert didn't know exactly what he was to do—some kind of constructive work, he said, for the Government. I never get things straight, but all I know is that everything seems to be for the Government now. I declare, I never worked so hard in my life as I have done in the last six or eight months, and Robert has been in Washington simply slaving his head off for a dollar a year. It does one good, I suppose. Mr. Courtland preached a beautiful sermon last Sunday about it, and I never realized before how wonderfully we have all grown in spirit since the war began. I said to Mrs. Mallow, as I came out, that it was so comforting to feel that we had been developing all the time without knowing it, or having to bother about it. Of course, we did know that we had been very uncomfortable, but that isn't quite the same, and now I can stand giving up things so much better when I realize that I am getting them all back, even if it's just spiritually. Don't you think that is a lovely way to feel about it?"
"I must go," said Caroline breathlessly. Her pulses were hammering in her ears, and she could scarcely hear what Daisy was saying.
"Well, good-bye. I am so glad to have seen you. Are you going to France like everybody else?"
"I hope so. I have offered my services."
"Then you are just as wild about war work as I am. I'd give anything on earth to go over with the Y. M. C. A., and I tell Robert that the only thing that keeps me back is the children."
She floated on to her car at the corner, while Caroline crossed the street, and walked slowly in the direction of the boarding-house. "It can make no possible difference to me. Why should I care?" she asked herself. Yet the clutch of pain had not relaxed in her heart, and it seemed to her that all the life and colour had gone out of the town. He was not here. He was across the world. Until this instant she had not realized how much it meant to her that he should be in the same city, even though she never saw him.
She reached the house, opened the drab iron gate, went up the short brick walk between withered weeds, and rang the bell beside the inhospitable door, from which the sallow paint was peeling in streaks. At the third ring, a frowzy coloured maid, in a soiled apron, which she was still frantically tying, opened the door; and when she saw Caroline, a sympathetic grin widened her mouth.
"You is done hed a caller, en he lef' his name over dar on de table. I axed 'im ef'n he wouldn't set down en res' his hat, but he jes' shuck his haid en walked right spang out agin."
Entering the hall, Caroline picked up the card, and passed into the shabby living-room, which was empty during the afternoon hours. In the centre of the hideous room, with its damaged Victorian furniture, itsopen stove, its sentimental engravings, and its piles of magazines long out of date—in the midst of the surroundings of a contented and tasteless period, she stared down, with incredulous eyes, at the bit of paper she was holding. So he had been there. He had come at the last moment, probably on his last day in Richmond, and she had missed him! Life had accorded her one other opportunity, and, with the relentless perversity of her fate, she had lost it by an accident, by a quarter of an hour, by a chance meeting with Daisy! It was her destiny to have the things that she desired held within reach, to watch them approach until she could almost touch them, to see them clearly and vividly for a minute, and then to have them withdrawn through some conspiracy of external events. "I didn't ask much," she thought, "only to see him once more—only the chance to let him see that I can still hold my head high and meet the future with courage." In an instant she felt that the utter futility and emptiness of the summer, of every day that she had passed since she left Briarlay, enveloped and smothered her with the thickness of ashes. "It is not fair," she cried, in rebellion, "I have had a hard life. I asked so little. It is not fair."
Going over to the window, she put the cheap curtains aside, and looked out into the street, as if searching the pavement for his vanishing figure. Nothing there except emptiness! Nothing except the wind and falling leaves and grey dust and the footsteps of a passer-by at the corner. It was like her life, that long, deserted street, filled with dead leaves and the restless sound of things that went by a little way off.
For a minute the idea stayed with her. Then, raisingher head, with a smile, she looked up at the bare trees and the sombre sky over the housetops. "Life cannot hurt you unless you let it," she repeated. "I will not let it. I will conquer, if it kills me." And, so inexplicable are the processes of the soul, the resolution arising in her thoughts became interfused not only with her point of view, but with the bleak external world at which she was looking. The will to fight endowed her with the physical power of fighting; the thought created the fact; and she knew that as long as she believed herself to be unconquered, she was unconquerable. The moment of weakness had served its purpose—for the reaction had taught her that destiny lies within, not without; that the raw material of existence does not differ; and that our individual lives depend, not upon things as they are in themselves, but upon the thought with which we have modified or enriched them. "I will not be a coward. I will not let the world cheat me of happiness," she resolved; and the next instant, as she lowered her eyes from the sky, she saw David Blackburn looking up at her from the gate.
For a moment she felt that life stopped in its courses, and then began again, joyously, exuberantly, drenched with colour and sweetness. She had asked so little. She had asked only to see him again—only the chance to show him that she could be brave—and he stood here at the gate! He was still her friend, that was enough. It was enough to have him stand there and look up at her with his grave, questioning eyes.
Turning quickly away from the window, she ran out of the house and down the brick walk to the gate.
"I thought I had missed you," she said, her eyes shining with happiness.
"It is my last day in Richmond. I wanted to say good-bye." He had touched her hand with the briefest greeting; but in his face she read his gladness at seeing her; and she felt suddenly that everything had been made right, that he would understand without words, that there was nothing she could add to the joy of the meeting. It was friendship, not love, she knew; and yet, at the moment, friendship was all that she asked—friendship satisfied her heart, and filled the universe with a miraculous beauty. After the torment of the last six months, peace had descended upon her abundantly, ineffably, out of the heavens. All the longing to explain faded now into the knowledge that explanation was futile, and when she spoke again it was to say none of the things with which she had burdened her mind.
"How is Letty?" she asked, "I think of her so often."
"She is very well, but she misses you. Will you walk a little way? We can talk better in the street."
"Yes, the house will soon be full of boarders." Weariness had left her. She felt strong, gay, instinct with energy. As she moved up the deserted street, through the autumn dust, laughter rippled on her lips, and the old buoyant grace flowed in her walk. It was only friendship, she told herself, and yet she asked nothing more. She had been born again; she had come to life in a moment.
And everything at which she looked appeared to have come to life also. The heavy clouds; the long, ugly street, with the monotonous footsteps of the few passers-by; the wind blowing the dried leaves in swirls and eddies over the brick pavement; the smell of autumn which lingered in the air and the dust—allthese things seemed not dead, but as living as spring. The inner radiance had streamed forth to brighten the outward greyness; the April bloom of her spirit was spreading over the earth.
"This is my hour," her heart told her. "Out of the whole of life I have this single short hour of happiness. I must pour into it everything that is mine, every memory of joy I shall ever have in the future. I must make it so perfect that it will shed a glow over all the drab years ahead. It is only friendship. He has never thought of me except as a friend—but I must make the memory of friendship more beautiful than the memory of love."
He looked at her in the twilight, and she felt that peace enveloped her with his glance.
"Tell me about yourself," he said gently. "What has life done to you?"
"Everything, and nothing." Her voice was light and cheerful. "I have worked hard all summer, and I am hoping to go to France if the war lasts——"
"All of us hope that. It is amazing the way the war has gripped us to the soul. Everything else becomes meaningless. The hold it has taken on me is so strong that I feel as if I were there already in part, as if only the shell of my body were left over here out of danger." He paused and looked at her closely. "I can talk to you of the things I think—impersonal things. The rest you must understand—you will understand?"
Her heart rose on wings like a bird. "Talk to me of anything," she answered, "I shall understand."
"No one, except my mother, has ever understood so completely. I shall always, whatever happens, lookback on our talks at Briarlay as the most helpful, the most beautiful of my life."
Her glance was veiled with joy as she smiled up at him. This was more than she had ever demanded even in dreams. It was the bread of life in abundance, and she felt that she could live on it through all the barren years of the future. To have the best in her recognized, to be judged, not by a momentary impulse, but by a permanent ideal—this was what she had craved, and this was accorded her.
"For the time I can see nothing but the war," he was saying in a changed voice. "The ground has been cut from under my feet. I am groping through a ruined world toward some kind of light, some kind of certainty. The things I believed in have failed me—and even the things I thought have undergone modifications. I can find but one steadfast resolve in the midst of this fog of disappointment, and that is to help fight this war to a finish. My personal life has become of no consequence. It has been absorbed into the national will, I suppose. It has become a part of America's determination to win the war, let it cost what it may."
The old light of vision and prophecy had come back to his face while she watched it; and she realized, with a rush of mental sympathy, that his ideas were still dynamic—that they possessed the vital energy of creative and constructive forces.
"Talk to me of your work—your life," she said, and she thought exultantly, "If I cannot hold him back, I can follow him. I, too, can build my home on ideas."
"You know what I have always felt about my country," he said slowly. "You know that I have alwayshoped to be of some lasting service in building a better State. As a boy I used to dream of it, and in later years, in spite of disappointments—of almost unbearable disappointments and failures—the dream has come back more vividly. For a time I believed that I could work here, as well as away, for the future of America—for the genuine democracy that is founded not on force, but on freedom. For a little while this seemed to me to be possible. Then I was pushed back again from the ranks of the fighters—I became again merely a spectator of life—until the war called me to action. As long as the war lasts it will hold me. When that is over there will be fresh fields and newer problems, and I may be useful."
"It is constructive work, not fighting now, isn't it?"
"It is the machinery of war—but, after all, what does it matter if it only helps to win?"
"And afterwards? When it is over?"
His eyes grew very gentle. "If I could only see into the future! Words may come to me some day, and I may answer you—but not now—not yet. I know nothing to-day except that there is work for my hand, and I must do it. Trust me for the rest. You do trust me?"
There was a glory in her face as she answered, "To do right always. Until death—and beyond."
"If we have trust, we have everything," he said, and a note of sadness had crept into his voice. "Life has taught me that without it the rest is only ashes."
"I am glad for your sake that you can go," she replied. "It would be harder here."
The man's part was his, and though she would not have had it otherwise, she understood that the man's part would be the easier. He would go away; he woulddo his work; his life would be crowded to the brim with incident, with practical interests; and, though she could trust him not to forget, she knew that he would not remember as she remembered in the place where she had known him.
"The work will be worth doing," he answered, "even if the record is soon lost. It will mean little in the way of ambition, but I think that ambition scarcely counts with me now. What I am seeking is an opportunity for impersonal service—a wider field in which to burn up my energy." His voice softened, and she felt, for the first time, that he was talking impersonally because he was afraid of the danger that lay in the silence and the twilight—that he was speaking in casual phrases because the real thought, the true words, were unutterable. She was sure now, she was confident; and the knowledge gave her strength to look with clear eyes on the parting—and afterwards——
He began to talk of his work, while they turned and walked slowly back to the boarding-house.
"I will write to you," he said, "but remember I shall write only of what I think. I shall write the kind of letters that I should write to a man."
"It all interests me," she answered. "Your thought is a part of you—it is yourself."
"It is the only self I dare follow for the present, and even that changes day by day. I see so many things now, if not differently—well, at least in an altered perspective. It is like travelling on a dark road, as soon as one danger is past, others spring up out of the obscurity. The war has cast a new light on every belief, on every conviction that I thought I possessed. The values of life are changing hourly—they are in a processof readjustment. Facts that appeared so steadfast, so clear, to my vision a year ago, are now out of focus. I go on, for I always sought truth, not consistency, but I go on blindly. I am trying to feel the road since I cannot see it. I am searching the distance for some glimmer of dawn—for some light I can travel by. I know, of course, that our first task is winning the war, that until the war is won there can be no security for ideas or mankind, that unless the war is won, there can be no freedom for either individual or national development."
As they reached the gate, he broke off, and held out his hand. "But I meant to write you all this. It is the only thing I can write you. You will see Letty sometimes?"
"Whenever I can. Mrs. Timberlake will bring her to see me."
"And you will think of yourself? You will keep well?"
He held her hand; her eyes were on his; and though she heard his questions and her answers, she felt that both questions and answers were as trivial as the autumn dust at her feet. What mattered was the look in his eyes, which was like a cord drawing her spirit nearer and nearer. She knew now that he loved her; but she knew it through some finer and purer medium of perception than either speech or touch. If he had said nothing in their walk together, if he had parted from her in silence, she would have understood as perfectly as she understood now. In that moment, while her hand was in his and her radiant look on his face, the pain and tragedy of the last months, the doubt, the humiliation, the haunting perplexity and suspense,the self-distrust and the bitterer distrust of life—all these things, which had so tormented her heart, were swept away by a tide of serene and ineffable peace. She was not conscious of joy. The confidence that pervaded her spirit was as far above joy as it was above pain or distress. What she felt with the profoundest conviction was that she could never really be unhappy again in the future—that she had had all of life in a moment, and that she could face whatever came with patience and fortitude.
"Stand fast, little friend," he said, "and trust me." Then, without waiting for her reply, he turned from her and walked away through the twilight.
WHENCaroline entered the house, the sound of clinking plates and rattling knives told her that the boarders had already assembled at supper; and it surprised her to discover that she was hungry for the first time in months. Happiness had made everything different, even her appetite for the commonplace fare Mrs. Dandridge provided. It was just as if an intense physical pain had suddenly ceased to throb, and the relief exhilarated her nerves, and made her eager for the ordinary details which had been so irksome a few hours before. Life was no longer distorted and abnormal. Her pride and courage had come back to her; and she understood at last that it was not the unfulfilment of love, but the doubt of its reality, that had poisoned her thoughts. Since she knew that it was real, she could bear any absence, any pain. The knowledge that genuine love had been hers for an hour, that she had not been cheated out of her heritage, that she had not given gold for sand, as she had done as a girl—the knowledge of these things was the chain of light that would bind together all the dull years before her. Already, though her pulses were still beating rapturously, she found that the personal values were gradually assuming their right position and importance in her outlook. There were greater matters, there were more significant facts in the world to-day than her own particular joy or sorrow. Shemust meet life, and she must meet it with serenity and fortitude. She must help where the immediate need was, without thought of the sacrifice, without thought even of her own suffering. How often in the past eight years had she told herself, "Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good. There are lives filled to overflowing in which love has no place." Now she realized that her love must be kept like some jewel in a secret casket, which was always there, always hidden and guarded, yet seldom brought out into the daylight and opened. "I must think of it only for a few minutes of the day," she said, "only when I am off duty, and it will not interfere with my work." And she resolved that she would keep this pledge with all the strength of her will. She would live life whole, not in parts.
Without taking off her hat, she went into the dining-room, and tried to slip unnoticed into her chair at a small table in one corner. The other seats were already occupied, and a pretty, vivacious girl she had known at the hospital, looked up and remarked, "You look so well, Miss Meade. Have you been for a walk?"
"Yes, I've been for a walk. That is why I am late."
Down the centre of the room, beneath the flickering gas chandelier and the fly-specked ceiling, there was a long, narrow table, and at the head of it, Mrs. Dandridge presided with an air as royal as if she were gracing a banquet. She was a stately, white-haired woman, who had once been beautiful and was still impressive—for adversity, which had reduced her circumstances and destroyed her comfort, had failed to penetrate the majestic armour of her manner. In the midst of drudgery and turmoil and disaster, she hadpreserved her mental poise as some persons are able to preserve their equilibrium in a rocking boat. Nothing disturbed her; she was as superior to accidents as she was to inefficiency or incompetence. Her meals were never served at the hour; the food was badly cooked; the table was seldom tidy; and yet her house was always crowded, and there was an unimpeachable tradition that she had never received a complaint from a boarder.
As she sat now at the head of her unappetizing table, eating her lukewarm potato soup as if it were terrapin, she appeared gracious, charming, supported by the romantic legends of her beauty and her aristocratic descent. If life had defeated her, it was one of those defeats which the philosopher has pronounced more triumphant than victories.
"I spent the afternoon at the Red Cross rooms," she remarked, regal, serene, and impoverished. "That is why supper was a little late to-night. Since I can give nothing else, I feel that it is my duty to give my time. I even ask myself sometimes if I have a moral right to anything we can send over to France?"
Inadvertently, or through some instinct of tact which was either divine or diabolical, she had touched a responsive cord in the heart of every man or woman at the table. There was no motive beyond impulsive sympathy in the words, for she was as incapable of deliberate design as she was of systematic economy; but her natural kindliness appeared to serve her now more effectively than any Machiavellian subtlety could have done. The discontented and dejected look vanished from the faces about her; the distinguished widow, with two sons in the army, stopped frowning at the potato soup; the hungry but polite young man, who travelled for aclothing house, put down the war bread he was in the act of passing; and the studious-looking teacher across the table lost the critical air with which she had been regarding the coloured waitress. As Caroline watched the change, she asked herself if the war, which was only a phrase to these people a few months ago, had become at last a reality? "We are in it now, body and soul," she thought, "we are in it just as France and England have been in it from the beginning. It is our war as much as theirs because it has touched our hearts. It has done what nothing has been able to do before—it has made us one people."
Into these different faces at Mrs. Dandridge's table, a single idea had passed suddenly, vitalizing and ennobling both the bright and the dull features—the idea of willing sacrifice. Something greater than selfish needs or desires had swept them out of themselves on a wave of moral passion that, for the moment, exalted them like a religious conversion. What had happened, Caroline knew, was that the patriotism in one of the most patriotic nations on earth had been stirred to the depths.
The talk she heard was the kind that was going on everywhere. She had listened to it day after day, as it echoed and re-echoed from the boarding-houses, the hospitals, and the streets—and through the long, bitter months, when coal was scarce and heatless and meatless days kept the blood down, she was aware of it, as of a persistent undercurrent of cheerful noise. There were no complaints, but there were many jests, and the characteristic Virginian habit of meeting a difficult situation with a joke, covered the fuel administration with ridicule. For weeks ice lay on the pavements, a famine incoal threatened; and as the winter went by, bread, instead of growing better, became steadily worse. But, after all, people said, these discomforts and denials were so small compared to the colossal sacrifices of Europe. Things were done badly, but what really counted was that they were done. Beneath the waste and extravagance and incompetence, a tremendous spirit was moving; and out of the general aspect of bureaucratic shiftlessness, America was gathering her strength. In the future, as inevitably as history develops from a fact into a fable, the waste would be exalted into liberality, the shiftlessness into efficiency. For it is the law of our life that the means pass, and the end remains, that the act decays, but the spirit has immortality.
For the next six months, when the calls were many and nurses were few, Caroline kept her jewel in the secret casket. She did not think of herself, because to think of herself was the beginning of weakness, and she had resolved long ago to be strong. When all was said, the final result of her life depended simply on whether she overcame obstacles or succumbed to them. It was not the event, she knew, that coloured one's mental atmosphere; it was the point of view from which one approached it. "It is just as easy to grow narrow and bitter over an unfulfilled love as it is to be happy and cheerful," she thought, "and whether it is easy or not, I am not going to let myself grow narrow and bitter. Of course, I might have had more, but, then, I might have had so much less—I might not have had that one hour—or his friendship. I am going to be thankful that I have had so much, and I am going to stop thinking about it at all. I may feel all I want to deep down in my soul, but I must stop thinking. When the wholecountry is giving up something, I can at least give up selfish regret."
The winter passed, filled with work, and not unhappily, for time that is filled with work is seldom unhappy. From Blackburn she had heard nothing, though in April a paragraph in the newspaper told her that Angelica was about to sue for a divorce in some Western state; and Daisy Colfax, whom she met one day in the waiting-room of the hospital, breezily confirmed the vague announcement.
"There really wasn't anything else that she could do, you know. We were all expecting it. Poor Angelica, she must have had to overcome all her feelings before she could make up her mind to take a step that was so public. Her delicacy is the most beautiful thing about her—except, as Robert always insists, the wonderful way she has of bringing out the best in people."
As the irony of this was obviously unconscious, Caroline responded merely with a smile; but that same afternoon, when Mrs. Timberlake paid one of her rare visits, she repeated Daisy's remark.
"Do you suppose she really believes what she says?"
"Of course she doesn't. Things don't stop long enough in her mind to get either believed or disbelieved. They just sift straight through without her knowing that they are there."
They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated cryptic phrases into the animated talk.
"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the otherday, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"
"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What did you tell him?"
"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute, and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."
She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.
"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in the child's absence.
"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter—at least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison—and a cold one at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but Isometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."
"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least five years longer."
"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a few weeks ago."
"Is it true? What the paper said?"
"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital, and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added, how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much depressed and out of sorts."
"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"
Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could get along without liking."
She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later, Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it started for Briarlay.
The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees, and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.
"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good," repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.
It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was from Blackburn.
FORthe rest of the afternoon she carried the letter hidden in her uniform, where, from time to time, she could pause in her task, and put her hand reassuringly on the edge of the envelope. Not until evening, when she had left her patient and was back in her room, did she unfold the pages, and begin slowly to read what he had written. The first sentences, as she had expected, were stiff and constrained—she had known that until he could speak freely he would speak no word of love to her—but, as soon as he had passed from the note of feeling to the discussion of impersonal issues, he wrote as earnestly and spontaneously as he had talked to Sloane on that October afternoon at Briarlay. Another woman, she realized, might have been disappointed; but the ironic past had taught her that emotion, far from being the only bond with a man like Blackburn, was perhaps the least enduring of the ties that held them together. His love, if it ever came to her, would be the flower, not of transient passion, but of the profound intellectual sympathy which had first drawn their minds, not their hearts, to each other. Both had passed through the earlier fires of racial impulse; both had been scorched, not warmed by the flames; and both had learned that the only permanent love is the love that is rooted as deeply in thought as in desire.
In France.
MY DEARCAROLINE:
I have tried to write to you many times, but always something has held me back—some obscure feeling that words would not help things or make them easier, and that your friendship could be trusted to understand all that I was obliged to leave to the silence. You will see how badly I have put this, even though I have rewritten the beginning of this letter several times. But it is just as if I were mentally tongue-tied. I can think of nothing to say that it does not seem better to leave unsaid. Then I remembered that when we parted I told you I should write of what I thought, not of what I felt, and this makes it simpler. When I relax my mental grip, the drift of things whirls like a snow-storm across my mind, and I grow confused and bewildered——
In the last year I have thought a great deal about the questions before us. I have tried to look at them from a distance and on the outside, as well as from a closer point of view. I have done my best to winnow my convictions from the ephemeral chaff of opinions; and though I am groping still, I am beginning to see more clearly the road we must travel, if we are ever to come out of the jungle of speculation into the open field of political certainty. Behind us—behind America, for it is of my own country that I am thinking—the way is strewn with experiments that have met failure, with the bones of political adventurers who have died tilting at the windmill of opportunity. For myself, I see now that, though some of my theories have survived, many of them have been modified or annulled by the war. Two years ago you heard me tell Sloane that our most urgent need was of unity—the obliteration of sectional lines. I still feel this need, but I feel it now as a necessary part of a far greater unity, of the obliteration of world boundaries of understanding and sympathy. This brings us to the vital question before us as a people—the development of theindividual citizen within the democracy, of the national life within the international. Here is the problem that America must solve for the nations, for only America, with her larger views and opportunities, can solve it. For the next generation or two this will be our work, and our chance of lasting service. Our Republic must stand as the great example of the future, as the morning star that heralds the coming of a new day. It is the cause for which our young men have died. With their lives they have secured our democracy, and the only reward that is worthy of them is a social order as fair as their loyalty and their sacrifice.
And so we approach our great problem—individuality within democracy, the national order within the world order. Already the sectional lines, which once constituted an almost insurmountable obstacle, have been partly dissolved in the common service and sacrifice. Already America is changing from a mass of divergent groups, from a gathering of alien races, into a single people, one and indivisible in form and spirit. The war has forged us into a positive entity, and this entity we must preserve as far as may be compatible with the development of individual purpose and character. Here, I confess, lies the danger; here is the political precipice over which the governments of the past have almost inevitably plunged to destruction. And it is just here, I see now, in the weakest spot of the body politic, that the South, and the individualism of the South, may become, not a national incubus, but the salvation of our Republic. The spirit that fought to the death fifty years ago for the sovereignty of the States, may act to-day as a needed check upon the opposing principle of centralization in government, the abnormal growth of Federal power; and in the end may become, like the stone which the builders rejected, the very head of the corner. As I look forward to-day, the great hope for America appears to be the interfusion of the Northern belief in solidarity with the ardent Southern faith in personal independence and responsibility. Inthis blending of ideals alone, I see the larger spirit that may redeem nationality from despotism.
I am writing as the thoughts rush through my mind, with no effort to clarify or co-ordinate my ideas. From childhood my country has been both an ideal and a passion with me; and at this hour, when it is facing new dangers, new temptations, and new occasions for sacrifice, I feel that it is the duty of every man who is born with the love of a soil in his heart and brain, to cast his will and his vision into the general plan of the future. To see America avoid alike the pitfall of arbitrary power and the morass of visionary socialism; to see her lead the nations, not in the path of selfish conquest, but, with sanity and prudence, toward the promised land of justice and liberty—this is a dream worth living for, and worth dying for, God knows, if the need should ever arise.
The form of government which will yield us this ideal union of individualism with nationalism, I confess, lies still uninvented or undiscovered. Autocracies have failed, and democracies have been merely uncompleted experiments. The republics of the past have served mainly as stepping-stones to firmer autocracies or oligarchies. Socialism as a state of mind, as a rule of conduct, as an expression of pity for the disinherited of the earth—Socialism as the embodiment of the humane idea, is wholly admirable. So far as it is an attempt to establish the reign of moral ideas, to apply to the community the command of Christ, 'Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them;' so far as it expresses the obscure longing in the human heart for justice and right in the relations of mankind—so far as it embodies the instincts of compassion and sympathy, it must win the approval of every man who has looked deeply into human affairs. The evil of Socialism lies not in these things; nor does it rest in the impracticability of its theory—in the generous injustice of "robbing the rich to pay the poor." The evil of it consists in the fact that it would lend itself in practice even more readily thandemocracy, to the formation of that outer crust of officialism which destroys the blood and fibre of a nation. Socialism obeying the law of Christ might be a perfect system—but, then, so would despotism, or democracy, or any other form of government man has invented.
But all theories, however exalted, must filter down, in application, through the brackish stream of average human nature. The State cannot rest upon a theory, any more than it can derive its true life from the empty husks of authority. The Republic of man, like the Kingdom of God, is within, or it is nowhere.
To-day, alone among the nations, the American Republic stands as the solitary example of a State that came into being, not through the predatory impulse of mankind, but, like its Constitution, as an act of intellectual creation. In this sense alone it did not grow, it was made; in this sense it was founded, not upon force, but upon moral ideas, upon everlasting and unchanging principles. It sprang to life in the sunrise of liberty, with its gaze on the future—on the long day of promise. It is the heir of all the ages of political experiment; and yet from the past, it has learned little except the things that it must avoid.
There was never a people that began so gloriously, that started with such high hearts and clear eyes toward an ideal social contract. Since then we have wandered far into the desert. We have followed mirage after mirage. We have listened to the voice of the false prophet and the demagogue. Yet our Republic is still firm, embedded, as in a rock, in the moral sense of its citizens. For a democracy, my reason tells me, there can be no other basis. When the State seeks other authority than the conscience of its citizens, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes either an oligarchy or a bureaucracy. Then the empty forms of hereditary right, or established officialdom, usurp the sovereignty of moral ideas, and the State decays gradually because the reservoir of its life has run dry.