XVTHE LADY OF THE INTERRUPTION
SHE wrote to him at regular intervals, and he answered dutifully. To him they were the little letters of a lost child; not entirely lost, for much of the child was in her scrawling notes. With many persons the written word is much more intelligent than the oral; but with Gorgas Levering, who in a chat would easily give the impression of the grown woman, letter-writing exhibited a youngster still in the teens.
She did not seem to know what to say; one wonders why she wrote; indeed, half of the letter would be announcements of why she could not write. And the spelling! For a young lady who spoke and read fluently in four languages, that spelling was inexplicable.
Once Blynn sent back a letter with all the misspelled words underscored in red ink, and with the fatherly suggestion that she look them up and send him a re-written copy.
Her answer was a shocker; every word was purposely put out of gear.
“Deer Proffessorr,” it ran. “Eye kannott korresspponndd eney longerr wwithh U.“Wun: U R 2 smarrt,“Too: Ewer minde iz teecher-krazy an kant C anything butt lettres an semi-coalons.“Thre: Eye kan beet U left handed inn tennes“Ewers,“Goargass.”
“Deer Proffessorr,” it ran. “Eye kannott korresspponndd eney longerr wwithh U.
“Wun: U R 2 smarrt,
“Too: Ewer minde iz teecher-krazy an kant C anything butt lettres an semi-coalons.
“Thre: Eye kan beet U left handed inn tennes
“Ewers,“Goargass.”
But she tried. Evidence was abundant enough. All suspicious words were left either totally blank or half-begun, to be finished out laboriously later via a small dictionary. The dictionary was not always employed immediately—her letters were regularly written at the sleepiest hour of the night; so that Blynn had the greatest joy in seeing dozens of hard words, like “disappoint” and “necessary,” flaring at him in two different kinds of ink, black for the first half and pale blue for the tails. His prize-letter—which he did not dare twit her about, for fear the supply would suddenly cease—was a mysterious thing, full of beginnings and no tails at all! Evidently sleep had overtaken the dictionary benediction.
In their correspondence during the first college terms at Holden, while she was growing from sixteen to almost eighteen, there was hardly a personal note struck. One would not suspect that they had ever been acquainted. Hers resembled school exercises more than anything else, full of incoherent announcements of local news. His, on the other hand, were short stories of Holden life; gathered together they might have been published as the personal impressions of Professor Blynn on the manners and customs of Holdonians. They were brisk,sprightly narratives, rather longish, for he dictated them to a by-the-hour stenographer, but rich in personal flavor and really interesting. The Levering family read them in turn as they might have passed on the numbers of a serial story.
From Gorgas, Allen knew that his letters were public property. That may have had some effect upon their construction and style; certainly, they grew in finished form and came to lend themselves easily to public family reading.
But none of the matters that troubled him, nor any of his pedagogic dreams or literary ambitions found their way into these chatty epistles. It was a selected, semi-impersonal college world that he sorted out and presented to the Levering family; but a real one, for all that.
Through these newsletters Gorgas knew that he had been lured by the siren of the lecture platform—always lying in wait for talkative young professors. Diccon saw to it that every public utterance of the distinguished young scholar who had been called to the chair of English in Holden College should be properly placed before the readers of the city newspapers. It worried Blynn, to be sure, to find his casual illustration made the subject of “small-heads”—there is nothing more frightful to sincere teachers than this sort of up-side-down publicity—but he solaced himself by hoping no one would see it.
In Mount Airy Gorgas Levering was searching every page for such notices and was happy to get even athree-line flyer just above the obituaries; and she cut them out and pasted them in a scrap-book. She felt responsible for his going to Holden, she assured herself, and she developed an I-told-you-so spirit with every discovery of what she believed to be proper fame. “Professor Allen Blynn, head of the division of English of Holden College, also spoke,” was often sufficient proof to her of her wisdom in advising him to go up to the larger work.
She learned, too, of other matters, his phenomenal success in teaching his young children by way of correspondence, his pedagogic reforms in the administration at Holden, all of which she mused over with something akin to maternal calm; but one day his letter broke forth with the discovery of a “lady,” and Gorgas grew apprehensive and suspicious and on guard.
“My dear Leverings,” he wrote. “Here’s Mystery for you! And a Lady! And local newspaper notoriety—not yet scandalous!”
He had been lecturing before the Alpha Women’s Club on “The Dull Pleasures of the Mob.” It was one of those defenses of the intellectual life which every enthusiastic scholar is prepared to utter at a moment’s notice. The intellectual audience were proud of him; they applauded every one of his clever shafts as justification for their life of charming indolence. Then he forgot himself and inquired:
“Is there any question on that point?”
That was an absent-minded schoolroom phrase.
“Yes; there is a question on that point,” came astrong pleasant voice from the extreme end of the hall. He could not at first discern the lady, for she did not rise. “Do you really believe all this twaddle you are giving us, or are you just ‘parroting’ from a book?”
The very young ladies laughed gayly. The rascals! They had been taking notes on all his golden utterances; yet they turned in glee to search out the rebellious questionist. The elders buzzed their horror; but they, too, squirmed about, curious to behold the cause of so inhospitable an interruption.
“Oh, never mind,” the voice boomed out patiently. “It’s a hopeless thing to ask anyone.”
She arose to go. Everyone could see the commanding figure and the perfect smile of good nature which half atoned for the rather shocking speech.
“Go on, little man,” she nodded. “You’re giving them what they want, I suppose”—waving an arm over the audience—“or what they are trained to believe they want. Perhaps they deserve it,” she laughed. “But I’m a little sorry for you”; she turned to the speaker directly, as she gathered up her belongings; “you look like the sort who could do better—with a little honest tutoring.”
“Don’t go, my dear lady, I beg of you,” Blynn called after her. Lecturers soon get used to eccentric debaters from the floor; although this one was decidedly of uncommon mould. She stopped at the door. “Please come back—let us reason together. If you don’t mind, I don’t. You can’t imagine what a great relief it is to get an interruption.”
She watched Blynn good naturedly, wavering between the desire to speak and the feeling of the futility of saying anything.
Blynn went on coaxingly.
“You stir my male curiosity deeply. All my life I have been respected and revered, treated like a special shipment of something valuable. You cannot know how lonely I have been. Why, even my students respect me.”
She wavered. Already she had dropped her muff into a rear seat.
“I can’t tell you how eager I am to be exposed,” Blynn smiled engagingly and waved a welcoming hand. “Do come back and let us dispute as did Plato and his friends; amicably, if possible, but always in the name of high truth.... You were saying, O Unknown One.”
“I was saying what was in my mind, O Knowing One,” she replied. “But I am sorry now that I spoke. Your question seemed to touch a spring—the spring of ‘high truth.’ High truth, I fear, is a rude, uncivilized thing—most of us keep it thoroughly well guarded—I apologize for employing it here. But—” she fastened him with her motherly smile, “please don’t talk so confidently of the dull pleasures of the mob. Perhaps, as you suggest, Browning and Swinburne touch only the ultra-violet mind; talk about that, it is within your sphere; but until you know more about people, let the mob alone. To know the secret you have to be a mob yourself.... Forgive me for talking straight out,Professor. It is an uncultivated thing to do, I know; but it is right in the spirit of the mob, one of its dull pleasures.... I must go.... If I stay I’ll break out, and then someone would have to read me the riot act.... You’re a first-rate book, Professor; I should enjoy you—on a shelf; but you have never reallybeen. Goodby.”
Of course Blynn turned the event to account and made several quick epigrams out of the affair.
“The audience cheered my little sallies,” he wrote, “which I accepted as proof of their regard—a vote of confidence, as it were, after a thundering attack from the opposition. Everyone apologized and told me that I had handled the situation with proper urbanity. No one seems to know her. She is not a member of the Alpha Women’s Club. But I’m glad she spoke out; to tell the truth, my dull lecture was boring even me!”
The newspapers got a story out of the interruption; and for a nine-days the cartoonist played up professors and “the dull pleasures of the mob.” One of the hits in a touring musical comedy company had its source here.
“Are you happy, Mike?”
“Sure, perfesser, I’m happy; ain’t I got a headache!”
Gorgas wrote a single sentence of disapproval of the lady’s rudeness and in postscript inquired, “How old is she?”
And Blynn came back with an imitation of the laconic note.
“Dear Gorgas: She was not rude, but enchanting.“P. S. She is as old as truth, which is ever young and beautiful.”
“Dear Gorgas: She was not rude, but enchanting.
“P. S. She is as old as truth, which is ever young and beautiful.”
The “Lady” came in for occasional notice in nearly every letter. “The ‘Interruption,’” he wrote, “has had a disturbing effect on me. Somehow between my audiences and myself the phantom smile of the unknown mocks me, although I haven’t seen her again. When I speak confidently out of my store of book-knowledge the smile seems to broaden into a grin; but when I quote Aristotle or Plato, it positively laughs in derision.”
In public, he explained, he had come to be consciously on the defensive. He began to avoid book authorities and seek illustration from his slender personal experience of men and things. Occasionally she drove him to take off his glasses and look about him. In his off hours, instead of burrowing in the library, he walked about the streets and observed the throngs. He wandered along the aisles of department stores, chatted with policemen, and elbowed workmen in the trolley cars; sat in the public squares and talked with the old men who sun themselves there daily, and with the youngish tramps, down at the heel and beery.
Once he had wandered on a wharf where excursionists were about to embark for a brief trip down the river. A rosy mother was struggling with a huge picnic basket and a medley of children. She let him help her with the next youngest baby, while the husbandwith two toddlers was surging ahead to secure a good seat. Before Blynn had quite made up his mind what to do next, the boat had slid off into the stream and he was in for a first-hand experience of the “dull pleasures of the mob.”
It was pleasure, he had to admit some hours later, but by no means dull. He exhausted all the slot devices for chewing gum and chocolate, weighed the kiddies on all the machines, invested wholesale in lemonade and bananas, and actually waltzed to the strains of a harp and one violin. At Houston Park they swooped down upon the carrousel, captured places on the scenic railway by vulgar bribery, and eventually “set ’em up” to a dessert of “hoky-poky” ice cream, as part-payment for a share of the basket lunch.
The young husband permitted all this gallantry without surprise. Indeed, in the twilight trip homeward Blynn and he sat together in the stern of the boat and smoked out a fine friendship—one exhausted kiddie asleep content in the professor’s arms—and there it was he paid Blynn the fine compliment of inquiring where he “worked.”
“At Holden College,” Blynn replied, guiltily waving a hand in a vague professional manner, the which his companion seemed to take as the motions of mopping a floor.
“Purdy soft, hey?” he grinned.
“Tolerable,” said Blynn.
“Women do all the scrubbin’,” he volunteered.
“Aye, and they do it well,” Blynn told him.
“An’ all summer nothin’ to do at all!” he mused. “Purdy soft! Purdy soft!”
He looked at Blynn proudly, as if the securing of such a sinecure was in itself a worthy act.
“I express for Hamilton’s,” he confided. “Furniture vans,” he added in answer to an inquiring look. “Some days we jess ‘move,’ but most times we hussels pianos. Y’back feels it nights, I tell y’. But, y’ sleeps good.”
“Ah!” Blynn said. “I envy you there. I don’t ‘sleep good’ at all. Half the night I lie awake thinking of foolish unnecessary things.”
“Y’ ain’t got no work to do!” the expressman spoke with emphasis. “It’ll give any man the bug-eye. What you want is a reg-u-lar job. What you’re a-doin’, that’s a woman’s business. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at cinches—grass cutting, drivin’ a wagon, takin’ the dog out walkin’. Made me sick. I got to putgutsin my job. That’s whatyouneed—a job y’ got to putgutsin.”
As the talk grew confidential at parting he let the professor lend him five dollars without the shadow of a protest. There was nothing squeamish, self-conscious or over-modest about the expressman. “Sure!” he said and pocketed the bill without more ado. He treated Blynn so like an equal that the university man stalked off elated as if he had just been admitted to an exclusive fraternity.
It was through such wild adventures that Blynngraduated to a deed of daring. One cool, spring Saturday night found him strolling along the badly lighted streets of a section known as “The Ditch.” The swinging doors of an odorous “saloon,” backed by a glaring warm light, which made the dark street a shade dimmer, seemed to bid a “Welcome All!” He went in.
The faces of the lounging drinkers at the bar were worth many times the small admission fee, the price of a strangling glass of ginger ale. They were like characters in a modern Morality Play, Blynn thought, as he named them in order: “Simple,” thin nose, hanging lip and lack-lustre eye; “Low-brow,” a rogue by right of inheritance; “Toothless,” a boy with the face of a crone; “Evil,” selfish to the point of cruelty; “Braggart,” serious and self-contemplative; “Sloth,” simply fat.
Speech was gone to a mumble; cackles of laughter arose over nothing at all; futile drivel slavered from the chin.
“’S my treat—godda drink ’th me!” fumbled “Simple,” displaying a bill.
The well-groomed barkeep and owner swept it off into his resplendent cash-register and began the swift passing out of the accustomed drinks. Blynn’s second ginger ale was slid beside him before he could guess the meaning of the action.
And so treating went the rounds. Here and there pay-envelopes were opened and tossed on the counter with bravado. To Blynn’s amazement the alert barkeepboldly kept the change of those who were too far gone to protest. When “Evil” called blasphemously for his money the barkeep roared with delight and spun the coins out from behind a concealed glass.
“Thought I’d got you that time, Pete!” he shouted gayly.
No one seemed to notice that Blynn’s pile of ginger ale was untouched. He had resolved not to be a party to the disgusting custom. So he was about to pay his little bill and depart, when an almost inarticulate soliloquy from “Evil,” the least sodden of the lot, stopped him short and sent his head aflaming.
“Wife’s sick ’gin, dam ’er.Tol’’er, break ’er head.Willbreak ’er head w’enna g’ home. Las’ night—las’ night—’noth’ dam brat.... Allus havin’ dam brats.... Locked ’er up; ’did. Tol’ ’er, break ’er head.Willbreak ’er head w’enna g’ home.”
He went on with this maudlin talk, to which no one attended. Ordinarily, Allen Blynn looked on the miseries of the poor with a mild professorial eye. The world is a horrible place for some folks, “a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night”; no remedy is nigh; we must sigh in pity and pass on to our own compelling tasks.
But this fellow’s story, which he enlarged upon until there was no doubt of his meaning, Blynn viewed in no spirit of philosophic calm. Perhaps the alcoholic air of the place had got into his vitals, and had stirred them; perhaps that hidden, scourging priest within him had broken forth to battle with the evil one; perhaps theLady had made him realize that he lacked something of being a man: at any rate, he strode up back of that villainous beer-sop and spun him about so that his back leaned at an angle against the bar and his feet spread out in front of him.
“Where do you live?” Blynn darted the question at him so fiercely that he answered automatically.
“Twenty-six Hogan street,” he growled, then slid heavily and sat down in the gutter before the bar. From this posture he hurled weak curses.
The barkeep leaped adroitly across the bar, shoved Blynn aside with, “Here you! Get out o’ this. Tryin’ to start somethin’?” while he jerked his customer to normal human posture.
“Evil” reached for a glass and hurled it at random. The shot slid him down again into the gutter; the glass fell wide with a glorious crash. “Low-brow” seized a bottle, but was too weak to hold it. It slipped to the floor, almost an echo of the other smash. “Simple” came up behind, with only the friendliest intentions, no doubt, and put one beery arm about the professor’s shoulder. Blynn turned swiftly at the heavy touch and embraced him—without love, one may be sure—thereby projecting upon his shirtfront the full contents of that beer-mug, a cavernous vessel holding, at least, a quart. The vile odor was a lasting memory.
The embrace had been a clumsy thing, but the divorce was swift and artistic. As Blynn instinctively shoved “Simple” forward—the cold beer against the chest gave impetus to the push—the barkeep’s grip on“Simple’s” collar sent him spilling backward. On the way he carried “Toothless” with him. “Sloth” never even looked around; he leaned comfortably against the bar and mumbled in his beer.
All these movements Blynn watched with interested eyes, caught every sound as if it were data for a book. One-half of his mind was a spectator, cool, undisturbed, careless of the outcome, concerned only with the spectacle; the other was saying over and over again, “26 Hogan street! 26 Hogan street!” and it was throbbing with rage.
“Here’s my money for one glass of ginger ale,” Blynn confronted the barkeep. “And I want my change—all of it, do you hear! You’ve robbed every drunken sot in the room except that vile cur,” pointing to “Evil” still sprawling in the gutter before the bar. “I’ve seen you steal their money out of their pay-envelopes. Give me my change, you viper!” He slapped a twenty-five cent piece on the sopping counter. “Give me my change, you bloodsucker, you poisoner, you—”
“Git out!” the barkeep yelled as he rushed at him. “Git out!”
He yelled much more. He told Blynn things concerning his past that were biologically impossible and made prophetic assertions about the future. His speeches were wild enough but his actions were genuinely savage. Before Blynn could get into any proper pugilistic position the barkeep had welted him across the side of the head with a huge fist.
The Lady had called him a first-rate book! A book? Not much!
It would be a pleasant thing to say here that Allen Blynn had trained in his youth with a football team or that he had taken recent boxing lessons from Corbett’s sparring partner. The truth is that his physical condition was only that of an abstemious “professor” the spry side of thirty, who jogged daily about the gymnasium track, or pulled a few perfunctory chest-weights, just to give edge to the evening meal. But that unexpected blow on the side of the head maddened him and summoned triple strength.
In one spring he had that barkeep by the throat and had carried him to the floor over the sprawling legs of “Simple.” Seizing him by his flap ears he was fiercely pounding his head against the floor, when he found himself lifted in the air by two bluecoats, turned about and sent forward at a fearful angle, through the swing-doors, into the darkened alley of a street. As he went out someone smashed the side of his head with a bottle, and he always maintained the theory that an officer near the door had assisted accurately with a boot; but his greatest joy as he sprawled on the pavement was the feeling—later discovered to be an illusion—that he still held in his hands the remains of the barkeep’s ears.
On the way to 26 Hogan street he laughed and sang and exulted in strange words. Before his mind he summoned the barkeep and that Satan’s limb, “Evil,” and invited them to “Come on!” Names he called them, mouthfilling, rhythmic cadences; anathema that neverhad been in his vocabulary before, but which every man who has mingled with other men knows by instinct.
And she had called him a book!
By ’phone and messenger, help was brought to “26 Hogan street.” They broke in the locked door, conveyed the sick woman to the care of good nurses, clean linen and real food. Her little brood they kept with her, and so, in this one instance out of many, lightened the dark hours of the very poor. Blynn confessed with shame that before this experience he had not really known of their existence.
Soon after the groggery episode Professor Blynn was scheduled for a banquet speech at the annual meeting of a local Drama Club. The subject, selected long before, was “Realism in Modern Dramatic Art and the Decadence of True Fantasy.” Certain notes which he had put lovingly together for that evening were not at all consulted as he talked. The musty references to Freytag, Horace, and Boileau did not suit his mood. He could not get out of his mind some of the stirring realities of the life about him; so, casually, and without any deep professional manner, he talked of the material near at hand out of which great dramas might come. He drew on his most recent stores. For stage setting he proferred the blinking steamboats on the dark river, crowded with returning excursionists, and humming with harp and violin; for characters, “Simple,” “Low-brow,” “Evil,” “Toothless,” “Braggart,” “Sloth”; and for theme, The Birth of New Life in the Houses of Failure.
The newspaper boys were bent on putting him back on the first page—he grinned inwardly at the story he really could give them! That is why they condensed the remarks of really important speakers and put Allen Blynn forth almost verbatim.
Out of it all he got one dubious result, a letter.
“You are getting on, my dear Professor,” it began abruptly, without heading or date line. “You are no longer abook; you have developed into anewspaper. Eventually, you may become wholly human. Press on.”
It was signed, “The Lady of the Interruption,” a title he remembered he had given her when reporters had interviewed him about her on her first startling appearance.
At various times these and other exciting adventures were dictated to the impersonal stenographer-by-the-hour and mailed to the Levering family.
“The anonymity of the Lady distresses me,” he wrote once. “If I could put my whole case before her, I am sure she would give me a higher rating. For already one of my friends of the Public Square benches has found me out and successfully negotiated the loan of a dollar. Let someone try to get an unearned dollar out of any ‘newspaper.’”
And that was not all. His companion of the excursion steamer—the male—had caught him on the campus, where no doubt he had been lying in wait, and had sold him tickets for the annual Expressmen’s Ball.
“Perfes’r—” he began.
“But I am the janitor; am I not?” Blynn smiled.
“Am I not!” he mimicked, “‘Am-I-not’ ain’t never been no janitor.... ‘Am I not!’” he got a deal of amusement out of the phrase. “Knew y’ was a profess’r all the time. Wharf watchman tol’ me. Said you was a smart gab-fester, too. He’s heard you—a Socialist, he is.”
“Lately,” wrote Blynn, “he has been seeking my advice on a number of family matters, leading up to hints for loans. An unkempt, overgrown daughter came to my rooms yesterday with a note. I was stone-cold; but it almost made me ill.“And now ‘Evil’ has found me out. He objects at the hospital because of my card on a bunch of roses; and threatens to sue me for personal assault; I presume he will complete the charge by adding alienation of his wife’s affections! A book I may have been, raised thence to a daily journal, but, Leverings all, I appeal to you for promotion; assault and alienation are right human qualities.“Faithfully yours,“Allen Blynn.“I am on the trail of the Lady.”
“Lately,” wrote Blynn, “he has been seeking my advice on a number of family matters, leading up to hints for loans. An unkempt, overgrown daughter came to my rooms yesterday with a note. I was stone-cold; but it almost made me ill.
“And now ‘Evil’ has found me out. He objects at the hospital because of my card on a bunch of roses; and threatens to sue me for personal assault; I presume he will complete the charge by adding alienation of his wife’s affections! A book I may have been, raised thence to a daily journal, but, Leverings all, I appeal to you for promotion; assault and alienation are right human qualities.
“Faithfully yours,“Allen Blynn.
“I am on the trail of the Lady.”
The Leverings agreed that the “Lady of the Interruption” was a delightful mystery—all except Gorgas; but she said little at home. She put the case to Bea Wilcox, and to Bardek.
“What do I think of her?” Bea echoed her inquiry. “I think she’s no lady at all.”
“That’s what I think. I—” Gorgas began eagerly.
“I think she’s a Brass Image,” said Bea.
“It is so!” Bardek agreed solemnly, who knew nothing of the subtile English meanings of “brass.” “And it is before such images that men do often bow in worship. If she is young, as you say, and if she come to the man and fight him, then it is the female hunting the male for herself.”
“Whatareyou driving at, Bardek?” Bea broke in. “Females, as you call them, don’t hunt males. It’s the other way about.” She put her arm around Gorgas and rocked back and forth in a characteristic attitude. “We know—us girls know—don’t we, Browny?”
“Oh, yes!” Bardek had open contempt for Bea’s mind. “You talk like most peoples who do not see anything. Look at all the hats of women! Dead birds and painted flowers and rags and wires! Ugly? Phuh! But zey do not see zat zey are ugly. So! When you will want your man, you will go to him—like all t’others—and you cry out to him that you are here; and he will not come at first; and zen you will wear crazy clothes, and dance and beat a drum until he must see you. And all the time you will not know that you do that. You will not see.... Buthowyou will beat zat drum!”
“Professor Blynn would not listen to her!” Gorgas announced irrelevantly. Her mind was on the Lady of the Interruption; there was defiance in her tone, a note of challenge to the unknown trespasser, none of which was lost on Bardek. He shaded his bushy brows atrifle, and he gazed thoughtfully into her flushed face as if he had suddenly discovered something new and interesting there; but he gave no other sign of what might be his own surmises.
“Do you think so, Bardek?” she persisted.
“No-o,” he hesitated; “not at the first.” A smile began to flutter across his face; then he roared in sudden laughter. “He is so far up—at the top of the Heaven!Howshe must beat her little drum for to make Saint Acetum to hear!”
“Who is Saint Acetum?” both girls asked.
Bardek sobered abruptly. “You do not know Saint Acetum?” he asked gravely.
No; they did not know. Saints were not in fashion any more. This is not the Middle Ages, Bardek. But they should be ashamed, nevertheless, he told them, and scolded beautifully. Then he explained:
“Saint Acetum it is who is forever repairing ze roof of ze Heaven. Can you not see him up there—far superior in altitude to all the angels of Heaven, and slowly feeling zat heissuperior?”
But what had Saint Acetum to do with Mr. Blynn?
“Ho!” cried Bardek. “Mr. Blynn, he is so good! Like Saint Acetum he is worried zat ze roof of ze Heaven may fall down; so it is zat he is always fixing, fixing; and he will not listen even when ze good angels call to come down and be for a little time happy.... And you have not heard of Saint Acetum?Nom du nom!And you are not ashamed of zat?”
“Acetum?” repeated Bea. “What a funny name.”
“‘Acetum,’ it is ‘vinegar,’” Bardek explained. “Zat is Latin, Miss Bea, of which you know nothings, because you have gone to school—”
“Oh, we had Latin in school; didn’t we, Browny?”
“Zat is what I say,” nodded Bardek firmly. “You know nothings. What! You do not know about Saint Acetum, ze Vinegar Saint; you do not know—” Bardek burst suddenly into ironic laughter—“because it is I, Bardek, who have jus’ made him up out of my head!”
“Oh!” laughed Gorgas, somehow relieved at the thought that the Vinegar Saint was merely an invention of Bardek. “Allen Blynn, the Vinegar Saint! That istoofunny!”
“So you see,” Bardek was exulting in his cleverness, “howshe must beat her little drum, that Lady, to draw down Saint Acetum, who is always repairing ze roof of ze Heaven?”
Gorgas was sobered instantly. “Do you think that woman is trying to marry Mr. Blynn?” she asked anxiously.
“No,” Bardek replied, while he watched her out of half-closed eyes; “I do not say so much. I think she do not know what she do. But she isvairyinterested—oh,vairyinterested—in the nice young man. She do not like him? Oh, no! But she go, and go; and she talk and she write. In all the great big world there is but one reason for that. The little roots ofthe weeds, zey shove and push and work and zey do not know why, but one day zey come out where is water; andzenzey know why.”
“It is terrible!” the words escaped Gorgas involuntarily. It gave her an inexpressible sensation of illness to think ofmon capitaineat the mercy of so irresistible a force.
“Oh, no!” laughed Bardek; “it is not terrible. No! It is vairy wonderful andle bon Dieu, he has made it so!”
Le bon Dieu!Ah, no! It could not be from heaven, or why should the very thought of it torment her?
She went home to nights of acute distress and days of smiling mockery. She listened to all sorts of inquiries about her health, parried the questions with vague fibbings; but she knew the cause of the storm that raged within.
Then came a night of resignation. She surprised herself—and blamed herself, too—at her easy recovery. What powers of adaptability we have! The deepest grief is, somehow, assuaged. If it was to be; it was to be. She found herself, one day, laughing at herself. A fortnight later, she was lost in the preparation for her graduation from The Misses Warren’s Select French and English School for Young Ladies. The sorrows of seventeen are not fatal. Yes; she was quite herself now, marvelling only occasionally at the turbulence that had shaken her.
And therein she deceived herself, as all of us continually do. She was quite her serene self—so shethought. We know so little about ourselves, about what we think, about what we want, even about what we are doing. We talk much—confidently; we declaim, make speeches, deny vehemently, or affirm with hand upraised: but deep within us, like a Hidden River, flows the unconscious life. When it wells to the surface we know it for the first time, cry out in fear, or exult. When it subsides we say, “It is not there!” We are poor witnesses, with all our boastings and modesties, poor witnesses either for or against ourselves.
“I wonder where my roots are going?” Gorgas asked herself. For answer she dropped the consideration of the width of ribbon she would wear on her graduation dress and sat down to write a letter to Allen Blynn. It was a burst of personal confession—the Hidden River was welling very, very near the surface!—and most particularly she told him about the “Brass Image,” and warned him. Then she read it over and destroyed it.
“Oh, I guess I’m not brassy enough,” she said and shook her head.