The next morning Katie did something which it had been in her mind to do for some time. She went to Centralia.
It was not that she expected Centralia to furnish any information about Ann. It was hard to say just why she was so certain Ann had not gone back to Centralia. The conviction had something to do with her belief in Ann.
Centralia, however, might be an avenue to something. Furthermore, she wanted to see Centralia. That was part of her passion for seeing the thing as a whole, realizing it. And she had a suspicion that if anything remained to forgive Ann it would be forgiven after seeing Centralia.
And back of all that lurked the longing to tell Ann's father what she thought of him.
Katie was in a strange mood that day. She had read Ann's letter many times, but had never finished it with that poignantly personal heartache of the night before. It was as if she were not worthy that new thing which kept warm in her own heart. For she had been hostile to the very thing from which the warmth in her own heart drew. The sadness deepened in the thought that the great hosts of the world's people sheltered joy in their own hearts and hardened those very hearts against all to whom love came less fortunately than it had come to them. How could there be 'hope for the world, no matter what it might do about its material affairs, while heart closed against heart like that, while men and women drew their own portions of joy and shut themselves in with them, refusing to see that they were one with all who drew, or would draw. It seemed the most cruel, the most wrong thing of all the world that men—and above all, women—should turn their most unloving face upon the face of love.
Of which things she thought again as she passed various Centralias and wondered if there were Anns longing for love in all those unlovely places.
She came at last, after crossing a long stretch of nothingness, to the town where Ann had lived, town from which she had gone forth to hear grand opera and find the loveliness of life. But as she stepped from the train and approached a group of men lounging at the station it came to her that "Ann's father," particularly as Ann had not been Ann in Centralia, was a somewhat indefinite person to be inquiring for.
After a moment's consideration she approached the man who looked newest to his profession and asked how many churches there were in Centralia. Thereupon one man beat open retreat and all viewed her with suspicion. But the man of her choice was a brave man and ventured to guess that there were four.
One of his comrades held that there were five. A discussion ensued closing with the consensus of opinion in favor of the greater number.
Then Katie explained her predicament; she wanted to find a man who was a minister in Centralia and she didn't know his name. Reassured, they gathered round interestedly. Was he young or old? Katie cautiously placed him in the forties or fifties. Then they guessed and reckoned that it couldn't be either the Reverend Lewis or that new fellow at the Baptist. Was he—would she say he was one to be kind of easy on a fellow, or did she think he took his religion pretty hard?
Katie was forced to admit that she feared he took it hard. With that they were agreed to a man that it must be the Reverend Saunders.
She was thereupon directed to the residence of the Reverend Saunders. Right down there was a restaurant with a sign in the window "Don't Pass By." But she was to pass by. Then there was the church said "Welcome." No, that was not the Reverend Saunders' church. It was the church where she turned to the right. She could turn to the left, but, on the whole, it would be better to turn to the right—It would all have been quite simple had it not been for the fullness of the directions.
She took it that the fullness of their directions was in proportion to the emptiness of their lives.
As she walked slowly along she appreciated what Ann had said of the town's being walled in by nothingness—the people walled in by nothingness. Her two blocks on "Main Street" showed her Centralia as a place of petty righteousness and petty vice. There was nothing so large and flexible as the real joys of either righteousness or unrighteousness.
Nor was Centralia picturesquely desolate. It had not that quality of hopelessness which lures to melancholy. New houses were going up. The last straw was that Centralia was "growing."
And it was on those streets that a lonely little girl with deep brown eyes and soft brown hair had dreamed of a Something Somewhere.
As she turned in at the residence of the Reverend Saunders Katie was newly certain that Ann had not come back to Centralia. It seemed the one disappointment in Ann she was not prepared to bear would be to find that she had returned to the home of her youth.
Katie had been shown into the parlor. She was sitting in a rocking chair which "squeaked"—her smartly shod foot resting on a pale blue rose—the pale blue rose being in the carpet. The carpet also squeaked—or the papers underneath it did. On the table beside her was a large and ornate Bible, an equally splendid album, and something called "Stepping Heavenward."
Oh no—Ann had not come back. She knew that before she asked.
Ann's father was a tall, thin man with small gray eyes. "Thin lips that shut together tight"—she recalled that. And the kind of beard that is unalterably associated with self-righteousness.
It was clear he did not know what to make of Katie. She was wearing a linen suit which had vague suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil. She had selected it that morning with considerable care. Likewise the shoes! And the angle of the quill in Katie's hat stirred in him the same suspicion and aggression which his beard stirred in her.
Thus viewing each other across seas of prejudice, separated, as it were, by all the experiences of the human race, they began to speak of Ann and of life.
"I am a friend of your daughter's," was Katie's opening.
It startled him, stirring something on the borderland of the human. Then he surveyed Katie anew and shut his lips together more tightly. It was evidently just what he had expected his daughter to come to.
"And I came," said Katie, "to ask if you had any idea where she was."
That reached even farther into the border-country. He sat forward—his lips relaxed. "Don'tyouknow?"
"No—I don't know. She was living with me, and she went away."
That recalled his own injury. He sat back and folded his arms. "She was living withme—and she went away. No, I know nothing of her whereabouts. My daughter saw fit to leave her father's house—under circumstances that bowed his head in shame. She has not seen fit to return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His purpose is not revealed."
"No," said Katie crisply, "I should say not."
He expressed his condemnation of the relation of manner to subject by a compression of both eyes and lips. That, Katie supposed, was the way he had looked when he told Ann her dog had been sent away.
"Did you ever wonder," she asked, with real curiosity, "how in the world you happened to have such a daughter?"
"I have many times taken it up in prayer," was his response.
Katie sat there viewing him and looking above his head at the motto "GodIs Love." She wondered if Ann had had to work it.
It was the suggestion in the motto led her to ask: "Tell me, have you really no idea, have you never had so much as a suspicion of why Ann went away?"
"Who?" he asked sharply.
"Your daughter. Her friends call her Ann."
"Her name," said he uncompromisingly, "is Maria."
Katie smiled slightly. Maria, as he uttered it, squeaked distressingly.
"Be that as it may. But have you really no notion of why she went away?"
She was looking at him keenly. After a moment his eyes fell, or rather, lifted under the look. "She had a good home—a God-fearing home," he said.
But Katie did not let go her look. He had to come back to it, and he shifted. Did he have it in him remotely, unavowedly, to suspect?
It would seem so, for he continued his argument, as if meeting something. He repeated that she had a good home. He enumerated her blessings.
But when he paused it was to find Katie looking at him in just the same way. It forced him to an unwilling, uneasy: "What more could a girl want?"
"What she wanted," said Katie passionately, "was life."
The word spoken as Katie spoke it had suggestion of unholy things. "ButGod is life," he said.
Suddenly Katie's eyes blazed. "God! Well it's my opinion that you know just as little aboutHimas you do about 'life.'"
It was doubtless the most dumbfounded moment of the Reverend Saunders' life. His jaw dropped. But only to come together the tighter. "Young woman," said he, "I am a servant of God. I have served Him all my days."
"Heaven pity Him!" said Katie, and rocked and her chair squeaked savagely.
He rose. "I cannot permit such language to be used in my house."
Katie gave no heed. "I'll tell you why your daughter left. She left because youstarvedher.
"Above your head is a motto. The motto says, 'God Is Love.' I could almost fancy somebody hung that in this house as ajoke!
"You see you don't know anything about love. That's why you don't know anything about God—or life—or Ann.
"In this universe of mysterious things," Katie went on, "it so happened—as you have remarked, God's ways are indeed inscrutable—that unto you was born a child ordained for love."
She paused, held herself by the mystery of that.
And as she contemplated the mystery of it her wrath against him fell strangely away. Telling him what she thought of him suddenly ceased to be the satisfying thing she had anticipated. It was all too mysterious.
It grew so large and so strange that it did not seem a matter the Reverend Saunders had much to do with it. Telling him what she thought of him was not the thing interesting her then. What interested her was wondering why he was as he was. How it had all happened. What it all meant.
Her wondering almost drew her to him; certainly it gave her a new approach. "Oh isn't it a pity!" was what Katie said next. And there was pain and feeling and almost sympathy in her voice as she repeated, "Isn't it a pity!"
He, too, spoke differently—more humanly. "Isn't—what a pity?"
"That we bungle it so! That we don't seem to know anything about each other.
"Why I suppose youdidn'tknow—you simply didn't have itinyou to know—that the way she needed to serve God was by laughing and dancing!"
He was both outraged and drawn. He neither rebuked nor agreed. He waited.
"You see it was this way. You were one thing; she was another thing. And neither of you had any way of getting at the thing that the other was. So you just grew more intolerant in the thingsyouwere, and that, I suppose, is the way hearts are broken and lives are spoiled."
Her eyes had filled. It had drawn her back to her mood of the morning. "Doesn't it seem to you," she asked gently of the Reverend Saunders, "that it's just an awful pity?"
The Reverend Saunders did not reply. But he was not looking at Katie's quill or Katie's shoes. He was looking at Katie's wet eyes.
And Katie, as they sat there for a moment in silence, was not seeing him alone as the Reverend Saunders. She was seeing him as product of something which had begun way back across the centuries, seeing far back of the Reverend Saunders that spirit of intolerance which had shaped him—wrung him dry—spirit which in the very beginning had lost the meaning of those words which hung above the Reverend Saunders' head.
It seemed a childish thing to be blaming the Reverend Saunders for the things the centuries had made him.
Indeed, she no longer felt like "blaming" any one. Sorrow which comes through seeing leaves small room for blame.
Katie did not know as much about the history of mankind as she now wished she did—as she meant to know!—but there did open to her a glimpse of the havoc wrought by the forerunners of the Reverend Saunders—of all the children of love blighted in the name of a God of love.
She had risen. And as she looked at him again she was sorry for him. Sterility of the heart seemed a thing for pity rather than scorn. "I'm sorry for you," she spoke it. "Oh I'm sorry for us all! We all bungle it! We're all in the grip of dead things, aren't we? Do you suppose it will ever be any different?"
And still he looked, not at the quill or the shoes, but the eyes, eyes which seemed sorrowing with all the love sorrows of the centuries. "Young woman," he said uncertainly, "you puzzle me."
"I puzzle myself," said Katie, and wiped her eyes and laughed a little, thinking of the scornful exit she had meant to make after telling him what she thought of him.
She retraced her steps and waited for two hours at the station, reconstructing for herself Ann's girlhood in Centralia and thinking larger thoughts of the things which spoiled girlhoods, the pity of it all. And it seemed that even self-righteousness was not wholly to blame. Katie felt a little lonely in losing her scorn of "goodness." She had so enjoyed hating the godly. If even they were to be gently grouped with the wicked as more to be pitied than hated, then whom would one hate?
Did knowing—seeing—spoil hating? And was all hating to go when all men saw?
At the last minute she had a fight with herself to keep from going back and refunding the missionary money! The missionary money worried Katie. She wanted it paid back. But she saw that it was not her paying it back would satisfy her. She even felt that she had no right to pay it back.
She returned to Chicago to find that her uncle was in town. He had left a message asking her to join him for dinner over at his hotel.
It was pleasant to be dining with her uncle that night. The best possible antidote she could think of for Ann's father was her dear uncle the Bishop.
As she watched him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she could hear him add.
But she fancied that the Reverend Saunderses of the world had yet a long course to run in the Centralias of the world. She feared that many Anns had yet to go down before them.
At any rate, her uncle was not that. To-night Katie loved him anew for his delightful worldliness.
Though he was not in his best form that night. He was on his way out to Colorado for the marriage of his son. "There was no doing anything about it," he said with a sigh. "My office has made me enough the diplomat, Katherine, to know when to quit trying. So I'm going out there—fearful trip—why it's miles from Denver—to do all I can to respectablize the affair. It seemed to me a trifle inconsiderate—in view of the effort I'm making—that they could not have waited until next month; there are things calling me to Denver then. Now what shall I do there all that time?—though I may run on to California. But it seems my daughter-in-law would have her honeymoon in the mountains while the aspens are just a certain yellow she's fond of. So of course"—with his little shrug Katie loved—"what's my having a month on my hands?"
"Well, uncle, dear uncle," she laughed, "hast forgotten the days when nothing mattered so much as having the leaves the right shade of yellow?"
"I have not—and trust I never will," he replied, with a touch of asperity; "but I feel that Fred has shown very little consideration for his parents."
"But why, uncle? I'm strong for her! She sounds to me like just what our family needs."
He gave her a glance over his glasses—that delighted Katie, too; she had long ago learned that when her uncle felt occasion demand he look like a bishop he lowered his chin and looked over his glasses.
"Well our family may need something; it's the first intimation I've had, Katherine, that it's in distress—but I don't see that a young woman who votes is the crying need of the family."
"She's in great luck," returned Katie, "to live in a State where she can vote."
He held up his hands. "Katie? You?"
"Oh I haven't prowled around this town all summer, uncle, without seeing things that women ought to be voting about."
He stared at her. "Well, Katie, you—you don't mean to take it up, do you?"
He looked so unhappy that she laughed. "Oh I don't know, uncle, what I mean to 'take up,' but I herewith serve notice that I'm going to take something up—something besides bridge and army gossip."
She looked at him reflectively. "Uncle, does it ever come home to you that life's a pretty serious business?"
"Well I hadn't wanted it to come home to me tonight," he sighed plaintively. "I'm really most upset about this unfortunate affair. I had thought that you, Katie, would be pleasant."
"Forgive me," she laughed. "I can see how it must disturb you, uncle, to hear me express a serious thought."
He laughed at her delightedly. He loved Katie. "You've got the fidgets, Katie. Just the fidgets. That's what's the matter with the whole lot of you youngsters. It's becoming an epidemic—a sort of spiritual measles. Though I must say, I hadn't expected you to catch it. And just a word of warning, Katie. You've always been so unique as a trifler that one rather hates to see you swallowed up in the troop of serious-minded young women. I was talking to Darrett the other day—charming fellow, Darrett—and he held that your charm was in your brilliant smile. I told him I hadn't thought so much about the brilliant smile, but that I knew a good deal about a certain impish grin. Katie, you have a very disreputable grin. You have a way of directing it at me across ponderous drawing-rooms that I wish you'd stop. It gives me a sort of—'Oh I am on to you, uncle old boy' feeling that is most—"
"Disconcerting?"
"Unreverential."
He looked at her, humorously and yet meditatively—fondly. "Katie, why do you think it's so funny? Why does it make you want to grin?"
"You know. Else you wouldn't read the grin."
"But I don't know. Nobody else grins at me."
"Oh don't you think we're a good deal of a joke, uncle?"
"Joke? Who?—Why?"
"Us. The solemnity with which we take ourselves and the way the world lets us do it."
He laughed. Then, as one coming back to his lines: "You have no reverence."
"No, neither have you. That's why we get on."
He made an unsuccessful attempt at frowning upon her and surveyed her a little more seriously. "Katie, do you know that the things you say sometimes puzzle me. They're queer. They burrow. They're so insultingly knowing, down at the root of their unknowingness. I'll think—'She didn't know how "pat" that was'—and then as I consider it I'll think—'Yes, she did, only she didn't know that she knew.' I remember telling your mother once when you were a little girl that if you were going to sit through service with your head cocked in that knowing fashion I wished she'd leave you at home."
Katie laughed and cocked her head at him again, just to show she had not forgotten. Then she fell serious.
"Uncle, for a long time I only smiled. I seemed to know enough to do that. Do you think you could bear it with Christian fortitude if I were to tell you I'm beginning now to try and figure out what I was smiling at?"
He shook his head. "'Twould spoil it."
He looked at his niece and smiled as he asked: "Katie dear, are you becoming world weary?" Katie, very smart that night in white gown and black hat, appealed to him as distinctly humorous in the role of world weariness.
"No," returned Katie, "not world weary; just weary of not knowing the world."
Afterward in his room they chatted cheerfully of many things: family affairs, army and church affairs. Katie strove to keep to them as merely personal matters.
But there were no merely personal matters any more. All the little things were paths to the big things. There was no way of keeping herself detached. Even the seemingly isolated topic of the recent illness of the Bishop's wife led full upon the picture of other people she had been seeing that summer who looked ill.
Her uncle was telling of a case he had recently disposed of, a rector of his diocese who was guilty of an atheistic book. He spoke feelingly of what he called the shallowness of rationalism, of the dangers of the age, beautifully of that splendid past which the church must conserve. He told of some lectures he himself was to deliver on the fallacies of socialism. "It's honeycombing our churches, Katherine—yes, and even the army. Darrett tells me they've found it's spreading among the men. Nice state of affairs were we to have any sort of industrial war!"
It was hard for Katie to keep silence, but she felt so sadly the lack of assurance arising from lack of knowledge. Well, give her a little time, she would fix that!
She contented herself with asking if he anticipated an industrial war.
The Bishop made a large gesture and said he hoped not, but he felt it a time for the church to throw all her forces to safeguarding the great heritage of the country's institutions. He especially deplored that the church itself did not see it more clearly, more unitedly. He mentioned fellow bishops who seemed to be actually encouraging inroads upon tradition. Where did they expect it to lead?—he demanded.
"Perhaps," meekly suggested Katie, "they expect it to lead to growth."
"Growth!" snorted the Bishop. "Destruction!"
They passed to the sunnier subject of raising money. As regards the budget, Bishop Wayneworth was the church's most valued servant. His manner of good-humored tolerance gave Mammon a soothing sense of being understood, moving the much maligned god to reach for its check book, just to bear the friendly bishop out in his lenient interpretation of a certain text about service rendered in two directions.
He was telling of a fund he expected to raise at a given time. If he did, a certain capitalist would duplicate it. The Bishop became jubilant at the prospect.
And as they talked, there passed before Katie, as in review, the things she had seen that summer—passed before her the worn faces of those girls who night after night during the hot summer had come from the stores and factories where the men of whom her uncle was so jubilantly speaking made the money which they were able to subscribe to the church. She thought of her uncle's church; she could not recall having seen many such faces in the pews of that church. She thought of Ann—wondered where Ann might be that night while she and her uncle chatted so cheerfully in his pleasant room at his luxurious hotel. She tried to think of anything for which her uncle stood which would give her confidence in saying to herself, "Ann will be saved." The large sum of money over which he was gloating was to be used for a new cathedral. She wondered if the Anns of her uncle's city would find the world a safer or a sweeter place after that cathedral had been erected. She thought of Ann's world of the opera and world of work. Was it true—as the man who mended the boats would hold—that the one made the other possible—only to be excluded from it? And all the while there swept before her faces—faces seen in the crowd, faces of those who were not finding what they wanted, faces of all those to whom life denied life. And then Katie thought of a man who had lived & long time before, a man of whom her uncle spoke lovingly in his sermons as Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God. She thought of Ann's father—how far he had gone from a religion of love. Then came back to her lovable uncle. Well, what of him?
Charm of personality, a sense of humor, a comfortable view of living (for himself and his kind) did not seem the final word.
"Uncle," Katie asked quietly, "do you ever think much about Christ?"
In his astonishment the Bishop dropped his cigar.
"What a strange man he must have been," she murmured.
"Kindly explain yourself," said he curtly.
"He seemed to think so much about people. Just people. And chiefly people who were down on their luck. I don't believe he would have been much good at raising money. He had such a queer way of going around where people worked, talking with them about their work. If he were here now, and were to do that, I wonder if he'd help much in 'stemming the rising tide of socialism' What a blessing it is for our institutions," Katie concluded, "that he's not anywhere around."
The Bishop's hand shook. "I had not expected," he said, "that my own niece, my favorite niece—indeed, the favorite member of my family—was here to—revile me."
"Uncle—forgive me! But isn't it bigger than that thing of being members of the same family—hurting each other's feelings? Oh uncle!" she burst forth, no longer able to hold back, "as you stand sometimes at the altar don't you hear them moaning and sobbing down underneath?"
He looked at her sharply, with some alarm.
"Oh no," she laughed, "not going crazy. Just trying to think a little about things. But don't you ever hear them, uncle? I should think they might—bother you sometimes."
"Really, Katherine," he said stiffly, "this is most—annoying. Hear whom moaning and sobbing?"
"Those people! The worn out shop girls and broken down men and women and diseased children that your church is built right on top of!"
Not the words but the sob behind them moved him to ask gently: "Katie dear, what is it? What's the trouble?"
Her eyes were swimming. "Uncle—it's the misery of the world! It's the people who aren't where they belong! It's the lives ruined through blunders—it's the cruelty—the needlesscrueltyof it all." She leaned forward, the tears upon her cheeks. "Uncle, how can you? You have a mind—a kind heart. But what good are they? If you believe the things you say you believe—oh you think you believe them—but you don't seem to connect them. Here to-night we've been talking about the forms of the church—finances of the church—and humanity is inneed, uncle—bodily need—and oh theheartneed! Why don't you go and see? Why you've only to look! What are your puny little problems of the church compared with people's lives? And yet you—cut off—detached—save in so far as feeding on them goes—claim to be following in the footsteps of a man who followed intheirfootsteps—a man who went about seeing how people lived—finding out what troubled them—trying—" She sank back with a sob. "I didn't mean to—but I simplycan't understand it.Can't understand how youcan."
She hid her face.Those faces—they passed and passed.
He had risen and was walking about the room. After a moment he stopped and cleared his throat. "If I didn't think, Katherine, that something had happened to almost derange you, I should not have permitted you to continue these ravings."
She raised her head defiantly. "Truths people don't want to hear are usually disposed of as ravings!"
"Now if I may be permitted a word. Your indictment is not at all new, though your heat in making it would indicate you believed yourself to be saying something never said before—"
"I know it's been said before! I'm more interested in knowing how it's been answered."
"You have never seemed sufficiently interested in the affairs of the church, Katherine, for one to think of seriously discussing our charities with you—"
"Uncle, do you know what your charities make me think of?"
He had resumed his chair—and cigar. "No," he said coldly, "I do not know what they make you 'think of.' I was attempting to tell you what they were."
"I know what they are. The idea that comes to my mind has a rather vulgar—"
"Oh, pray do not hesitate, Katherine. You have not been speaking what I would call delicately."
"Your charities are like waving a scented handkerchief over the stock-yards. Or like handing out after-dinner mints to a mob of starving men."
"You're quite the wrong end there—as is usual with you agitators," he replied comfortably. "We don't give them mints. We give them soup."
"Givingthem soup—even if you did—is the mint end. Why don't you give them jobs?"
He spread out his hands in gesture of despair. "What a bore a little learning can make of one! My dear niece, I deeply regret to be compelled to inform you that there aren't 'jobs' enough to go around."
"Why aren't there?"
"Why the obvious reason would seem, Katie," he replied patiently, "that there are too many of them wanting them."
"And as usual, the obvious reason is not it. There are too many of you and me—that's the trouble. They don't have the soup because they must furnish us the mints." It was Katie who had risen now and was walking about the room. Her cheeks were blazing. "I tell you, uncle, I feel it's a disgrace the way we live—taking everything and doing nothing. I feel positively cheap about it. The army and the church and all the other useless things—"
"I do not agree with you that the army is useless and I certainly cannot permit you to say the church is."
"You'll not be able to stop other people from saying it!"
He seemed about to make heated reply, but instead sank back with an amused smile. "Katie, your learning sounds very suspiciously as though it were put on last night. I feel like putting up a sign—'Fresh Paint—Keep Off.'"
"Well at any rate it's not mouldy!"
"At college I roomed with a chap who had a way of discovering things, getting in a fine glow of discovery over things everybody else had known. He would wake me out of a sound sleep to tell me something I had heard the week before."
"And it's trying to be waked out of a sound sleep, isn't it, uncle?" she flashed back at him.
It ended with his kindly assuring her that he was glad she had begun to think about the problems of the world; that no one knew better than he that there was a social problem—and a grave one; that men of the church had written some excellent things on the subject—he would send her some of them. Indeed, he would be glad to do all in his power to help her to a better understanding of things. He was convinced, he said soothingly, that when she had gone a little farther into them she would see them more sanely.
Katie was back home; or, more accurately, she was back at Wayne's quarters, where they could perhaps remain for a month or two longer.
And craving some simple, natural thing, something that could not make the heart ache, she went out that afternoon to play golf. The physical Kate, Katie of the sound body, was delighted to be back playing golf. Every little cell sang its song of rejoicing—rejoicing in emancipation from the ill-smelling crowds, return to the open air and the good green earth.
It seemed a saving thing that they could so rejoice.
Katie was reading the little book on man's evolution which the man who was having much to do with her evolution had—it seemed long ago—sent her in the package marked "Danger." She had finished the book about women and was just looking through the one on evolution on the day Caroline Osborne's car had stopped at her door. That began a swift series of events leaving small place for reading. But when, that last day they were together in Chicago, she asked him about something to read, he suggested a return to that book. There seemed wisdom and kindness in the suggestion. The story of evolution was to the mind what the game of golf was to the body. With the life about her pressing in too close there was something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all—were suffocating her—something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds—made her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more vital—imperative—but she had more space in which to see them, was given a chance to understand them rather than be blindly smothered by them.
For a number of years Katie had known that there was such a thing as evolution. It had something to do with an important man named Darwin. He got it up. It was the idea that we came from monkeys. The monkey was not Katie's favorite animal and she would have been none too pleased with the idea had it not been that there was something so delicious about solemn people like her Aunt Elizabeth and proper people like Clara having come from them. She was willing to stand it herself, just because if she came from them they did, too. She had assumed all along that she believed in Darwin and that people who did not believe in him were benighted. But the chief reason she had for believing in him was that the church had not believed in him. That was through neither malice nor conviction as regards the church, but merely because it was exciting to have some one disagreeing with it. It had thrilled her as "fearless," She had always meant to find out more about evolution, she had a hazy idea that there was a great deal more to it than just the fact of having come from monkeys, but she led such a busy life—bridge and things—that there was never time and so it remained a thing she believed in and was some day going to find out about.
Now she was furious with herself and with everybody connected with her for having lived so much of her life shut out from the knowledge—vision—that made life so vast and so splendid. It was like having lived all one's life in sight of the sea and being so busy walking around a silly little lake in a park that there was no time to turn one's face seaward. She wondered what she would think of a person who said the little toy lake kept her so busy there was never a minute to turn around and take a good look at the sea!
Katie had always loved the great world of living things—the fishes and birds—all animals—all things that grew. They had always called to her imagination—she used to make up stories about them. She saw now that their real story was a thousand-fold more wonderful—more the story—than anything she had been able to invent. She would give much to have known it long before. She felt that she had missed much. There was something humiliating in the thought of having lived one's life without knowing what life was. It made one seem such a dead thing. Now she was on fire to know all about it.
She smiled as it suggested to her what her uncle had said a few days before of the fresh paint. She supposed there was some truth in it, that one who was conserving the past must find something raw and ludicrous in her state of mind. Her passion to fairly devour knowledge would probably bring to many of them the same amused smile it had brought to her uncle. But it was surprising how little she minded the smile. She was too intent on the things she would devour.
Her glimpse into this actual story of life brought the first purely religious feeling she had ever known. It even brought the missionary fervor, which, as they sat down to rest, she exercised upon Worth, who had been proudly filling the office of caddy. She told him that she was going to tell him the most wonderful fairy story there had ever been in the world. And the thing that made it most wonderful of all was that, while it was just like a fairy story in being wonderful, it was every bit true. And then she told him a little of the great story of how one thing became another thing, how everything grew out of something else, how it had been doing that for millions of years, how he was what he was then because through all those years one thing had changed, grown, into something else.
As she told it it seemed so noble a thing to be telling a child, so much purer and more dignified—to say nothing of more stimulating—than the evasive tales of life employed in the attempt to thwart her childish mind.
Worth was upon her with a hundred questions.Howdid a worm become something that wasn't a worm? Did it know it was going to do it? And why did one worm go one way and in a lot of million years be a little boy and another worm go another way and just never be anything but a worm? Did she think in another hundred million years that little bird up there would be something else? Wouldtheybe anything else? And why—?
She saw that she had let herself in for a whole new world of whys. One thing was certain: if she were to remain with Worth she would have to find out more about evolution. Her knowledge was pitifully incommensurate to his whys.
But it was beautiful to her the way his mind reached out to it. He was lying on his stomach, head propped up on hands, in an almost prayerful attitude before an ant hill. Did she think those little ants knew that they were alive? Would they ever be anything else? He wanted to be told more stories about things becoming other things, seemed intoxicated with that idea of the constant becoming.
"But, Aunt Kate," he cried, "mama told me that God made me!"
"Why so He did, Worthie—that is, I suppose He did—but He didn't just make you out of nothing."
He lay there on the grass in silence for a long time, looking at the world about him—thinking. After a while he was singing a little song. This was the song:
"Once I was a little worm—Long—long—ago."
Katie smiled in thinking how scandalized Clara would be to have heard the story just told her son, story moving him to sing a vulgar song about having been a horrid little worm. It would be Clara's notion of propriety to tell Worth that the doctor brought him in his motor car and expect his mind, that wonderful, plastic little mind of his, to be proper enough to rest content with that lucid exposition of the wonder of life.
The time was near for Clara's six months of Worth to begin. Katie had promised she would bring him to her wherever she was; and Clara was in Paris and meaning to remain there. It meant that Worth would spend the winter in Paris, away from them; from time to time—as the custom of the city dictated—he would be taken for perfunctory little walks in theBoisand would be told to "run and play" if he asked indelicate questions concerning the things of life.
In the light of this story of the ways of growth the arrangement aboutWorth seemed an unnatural and a brutal thing.
She did not believe that, as a matter of fact, Clara wanted Worth. The maternal passion was less strong in Clara than the passion forlingerie. But she wanted Worth with her for six months because that kept him from Wayne and Katie for six months and she knew that they did want him.
The poor little fellow's summer had not been what Katie had planned. Part of the time he had been with his father and part of the time with her—that thing of division again, and as neither of them had been happy any of the time Worth had had to suffer for it. He seemed to have to suffer so much through the fact that grown-up people did not know how to manage their lives.
Suddenly he sat up. "Aunt Kate," he asked, "when's Miss Ann coming back?"
"I don't know, dear."
"Well whereisshe?"
"She's been—called away."
"Well I wish she'd come back. I like Miss Ann, Aunt Kate."
"Yes, dear; we all do."
"She tells nice stories, too. Only they're about fairies that are just fairies—not worms and things that are really so. Do you suppose Miss Ann knows, Aunt Kate, that she used to be a frog?"
Katie laughed and tried to elucidate her point about the frog. But she wondered what difference it might not have made had Ann known that, as Worth put it, she used to be a frog. With Ann, fairy stories would have to be about things not real. All Ann's life it had been so. It suddenly seemed that it might have made all the difference in the world had Ann known that the things most wonderful were the things that were.
Or rather, had the world in which Ann lived cared to know real things for precious things, the desire for life as the most radiant thing that had ever been upon the earth. Ann would have found the world a different place had men known life for the majestic thing it was, seen that back of what her uncle called the "splendid heritage of the country's institutions" was the vastly more splendid heritage of the institution of life. Letting the former shut them from the latter was being too busy with the toy lake to look out at the sea.
Seeing Ann as part of all the life that had ever been upon the earth she became, not infinitesimal, but newly significant. Widened outlook brought deepened feeling. Newly understanding, she sat there brooding over Ann anew, pain in the perfection of her understanding.
But new courage. Life had persisted through so much, was so triumphant. The larger conception lent its glow to the paling belief that Ann would persist, triumph.
"Aunt Kate," Worth burst forth, "let's take the boat and go up and find the man that mends the boats."
Aunt Kate blushed. "Oh no, dearie, we couldn't do that."
"Why we did do it once," argued Worth.
"I know, but we can't do it now."
"I don't see why not."
No, Worth didn't see.
"I just want to ask him, Aunt Kate, if he knows that he used to live in a tree."
"Oh, he knows it," she laughed.
"He knows everything," said Worth.
"Worthie, is that why you like him? 'Cause he knows everything? Or do you like him—just because you like him?"
"I like him because he knows everything—but mostly I like him just because I like him."
"Same here," breathed Aunt Kate.
The man who mended the boats was coming to see her that night. Perhaps golf and evolution should not grow arrogant, after all.
He had been strange about coming; when she talked with him over the 'phone he had hesitated at the suggestion and finally said, with a defiance she could not see the situation called for, that he would like to come. In Chicago he had once said to her: "There's too much gloom around you now for me to contribute the story of my life. But please remember that that was why I didn't tell it."
She wondered if the "story of his life" had anything to do with his hesitancy in coming to see her. Surely he would have no commonplace notions about "different spheres," though he had mentioned them, and with bitterness. He was especially hostile to the army, had more than once hurt her in his hostility. She would not have resented his attacking it as an institution, that she would expect from his philosophy, but it was a sort of personal contempt for the army and its people she had resented, almost as she would a contemptuous attitude toward her own family.
She had contended that he was unjust; that a lack of sympathy with the ends of the army—basis of it—should not bring him to a prejudiced attitude toward its people. She maintained that officers of the army were a higher type than civilians of the same class. He had told her, almost roughly, that he didn't think she knew anything about it, and she had replied, heatedly, that she would like to know why she wouldn't know more about it than he! In the end he said he was sorry to have hurt her when there was so much else to hurt her, but had not retracted what he had said, or even admitted the possibility of mistake.
It seemed that one of the worst things about "classes" was that they inevitably meant misunderstanding. They bred antagonism, and that prejudice. People didn't know each other.
Considering it now, she wondered, though feeling traitorous to him in the wondering, if the man who mended the boats might shrink from anything so distinctly social as calling upon her.
Their meetings theretofore had been on a bigger and a sterner basis; she had missed a few of the little niceties of consideration, a few of those perfunctory and yet curiously vital courtesies to which she had all her life been accustomed as a matter of course from her army men; but it had been as if they were merely leaving them behind for things larger and deeper, as if their background was the real world rather than world of perfunctory things. From him she had a consideration, not perfunctory, but in the mood of the things they were sharing. That sense of sharing big things, things real and rude, had swept them out of the world of artificial things. Now did he perhaps hold back in timidity from that world of the trivial things?
She put it from her, disliking herself as of the trivial things in letting it suggest itself at all. Expecting him to be just like the men she had known would be expecting the sea to behave like that lake in the park.
That night she put on her most attractive gown, a dress sometimes gray and sometimes cloudy blues and greens, itself like the sea, and finding in Katie a more mysterious quality than her openness would usually suggest. Feeling called upon to make some account to herself for dressing more than occasion would seem to demand, she told herself that she must get the poor old thing worn out and get something new.
But it was not a poor old thing, and the last thing Katie really wanted was to succeed in getting it worn out.
As she dressed she was thinking of Ann's pleasure in clothes. There were times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was understandable—lovable—after having been to Centralia, after knowing. So many things were understandable and lovable after knowing.
She wished she might call across the hall and ask Ann to come in and fasten her dress. She would like to chat with her about the way she had done her hair—all those intimate little things they had countless times talked about so gayly.
She walked over into Ann's room—room in which Ann had taken such pride and pleasure. Ann had loved the things on the dressing-table, she had more than once seen her fairly caressing those pretty ivory things. She wondered if Ann had anything resembling a dressing-table—what she wore—how she managed.
Those were the little worries about Ann forever haunting her, as they would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be getting enough to eat.
There was a complexity in her mood of that night—happiness and sadness so close as at times to be indistinguishable—the whole of it making for a sense of the depth of life.
But their evening was constrained. Katie blamed the dress for part of it, vexed with herself for having put it on. She had wanted to be attractive—not suggest the unattainable.
And that was what something seemed suggesting. He appeared less ill at ease than morose. Katie herself, after having been so happy in his coming, was, now that he was there, uncontrollably depressed. They talked of a variety of things—in the main, the things she had been reading—but something had happened to that wonderful thing which had grown warm in their hearts as they walked those last two blocks.
Even the things of which they talked had lost their radiance. What did it matter whether the universe was wonderful or not if the wonderful thing in one's own heart was to be denied life?
From the first, it had been as if the things of which they talked were things sweeping them together, they were in the grip of the power and the wonder of those things, wrung by the tragedy of them, exalted by the hope—in it all, by it all, united. It was as if the whole sea of experience and emotion, suffering and aspiration, was driving, holding, them together.
So it had been all along.
But not tonight. It was now—or at least so it seemed to Katie—as if those forces had let them go. What had been as a great sea surging around their hearts was now just things to talk about.
It left her desolate. And as she grew unhappy, she forced her gaiety and that seemed to put him the farther away.
The two different worlds had sent Ann away; was it, in a way she was unable to cope with, likewise to send him away?
Watts passed through the hall. She saw him glance out at the soldier loweringly and after that he grew more morose, almost sullenly so.
It seemed foolish to talk of one's being free when held by things one could not even see.
It was just when she was feeling so lonely and miserable she wished he would go that the telephone rang and central told her that Chicago was trying to get her.
It was in the manner of the old days that she turned to him and asked what he thought it could be.
The suggestion—possibility—swept them back to the old basis, the old relationship. Katie grew excited, unnerved, and he talked to her soothingly while she waited for central to call again.
They spoke of what it probably was; her brother was in Chicago, Katie told him, and of course it was he, and something about his own affairs. Perhaps he had news of when he would be ordered away. Yes, without doubt that was it.
But there was a consciousness of dissembling. They were drawn together by the possibility they did not mention, drawn together in the very thing of not mentioning it.
As in those tense moments they tried to talk of other things, they were keyed high in the consciousness of not talking of the real thing. And in that there was suggestion of the other thing of which they were not talking. It was all inexplicably related: the excitement, the tenseness, the waiting, the dissembling.
Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant—something stealing back to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie's eyes just then.
The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his eyes from her face.
When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver he lay a steadying hand upon her arm.
At first there was nothing more than a controversy as to who had the line. In her impatience, she rose; he rose, too, standing beside her.
"Here's your party," said central at last.
Her "party" was Wayne.
But something was still the matter on the line; she could not get whatWayne was trying to tell her.
As her excitement became more difficult to control the man at her side kept speaking to her—touching her—soothingly.
At last she could hear Wayne. "You hear me, Katie?"
"Oh yes—yes—what is it?"
"I want to tell you—"
It was swallowed up in a buzzing on the line.
Then central's voice came clear and crisp. "Your party is trying to tell you thatAnnis found."
"Oh—" gasped Katie, and lost all color—"Oh—"
"Katie—?" That was Wayne again.
"Ohyes, Wayne?"
"I have found her. She is well—that is, will be well. She is all right—going to be all right. I'll write it all to-morrow. It's all over, Katie. You don't have to worry any more."
The next instant the telephone was upside down on the table and Katie, sobbing, was in his arms. He was holding her close; and as her sobs grew more violent he kissed her hair, murmured loving things. Suddenly she raised her head—lifting her face to his. He kissed her; and all the splendor of those eons of life was Katie's then.
Captain Jones had come down from Fort Sheridan late that afternoon. He had been in Chicago for several days, as a member of a board assembled up at Fort Sheridan. The work was over and he would return to the Arsenal that night.
But he was not to go until midnight. He would have dinner and go to the theater with some of the friends with whom he had been in those last few days.
He wished it were otherwise. He was in no mood for them. He would far rather have been alone.
He had a little time alone in his room before dinner and sat there smoking, thinking, looking at the specks of men and women moving about in the streets way down there below.
He was in no humor that night to keep to the everlasting talk about army affairs, army grievances and schemes, all those things of a world within a world treated as if larger than the whole of the world. The last few days had shown him anew how their hold on him was loosening.
There seemed such a thing as the army habit of mind. Within their own domain was orderliness, discipline, efficiency, subservience to the collectivity, pride in it, devotion to it—many things of mind and character sadly needed in the chaotic world without. But army men lacked perspective; in isolation they had lost their sense of proportion, of relationships. They had not a true vision of themselves as part of a whole. They had, on the other hand, unconsciously fallen into the way of assuming the whole existed for the part, that they were larger than the thing they were meant to serve. Their whole scale was so proportioned; their whole sense of adjustment so perverted.
They lacked flexibility—openness—all-sides-aroundness.
Life in the army disciplined one in many things valuable in life. It failed in giving a true sense of the values of life.
He could not have said why it was those inflated proportions irritated him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false standards. And more and more the thing which mattered to him was reality.
He tried to pull away from the things that thought would lure him into.He had not the courage to let himself think of her tonight.
He feared he had not increased his popularity in the last few days. At a dinner the night before a colonel had put an end to a discussion on war, in which several of the younger officers showed dangerous symptoms of hospitality to the civilian point of view, with the pious pronouncement: "War was ordained by God."
"But man pays the war tax," he had not been able to resist adding, and the Colonel had not joined in the laugh.
He found it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds—and perhaps driven also from "survival of the fittest" shelter—a pompous retreat could always be effected to divinity.
It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a discussion on the unemployed. "The poor ye have always with you," said the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives.
He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down below. He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds.
With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to express reality. She made him want it. She made him want life. Made him feel what he was missing—realize what he had never had.
It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life.
She, too, had wanted life. Her quest had been for life—that he knew. And he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell her—what he had never told any one—that all his life he, too, had dreamed of a something somewhere.
And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he had come to think of them as standing between.
During the summer he had seen. In the mornings when they were going to work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been upon the streets with the people who worked. He could not any longer regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the most vital thing in the world. It did not seem to him that what the world wanted was a more deadly rifle. His lip curled a little as he looked down at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made to them whether rifles were improved or not. And so many things did make difference with them—they needed improvements on so many things—that to be giving one's life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him as a sorry vocation.
It made him feel very distinctly apart.
He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world than were the men of the army. They were tied up in their own war of competition—competition in preparedness for war. They were frantically occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein. They would so perfect destruction as to destroy themselves. Meanwhile their blood had grown so hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for persuading themselves a real war awaited them. This hot blood found its way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial virtues, "the steeps of life," "the romance of history"—all calculated to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood. So successful was the self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism.
Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear.
And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant hallucination.
It seemed rather close to farce.
That night he was going back. Katie, too, had gone. For the first time that summer neither of them would be there. It seemed giving up.
Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined to remain apart.
He looked far more the dreamer than the man of warfare as he sat there, his face, which was so finely sensitive as sometimes to be called cold, saddened with the light of dreams which know themselves for dreams alone.
That very first night, night when she had been so shy, he had felt in her that which he called the real thing, which he knew for the great thing, which had been, for him, the thing unattainable. And with all her timidity, aloofness, elusiveness, he had felt an inexplicable nearness to her.
He had found out something about the conditions girls had to meet. His face hardened, then tightened with pain in the thought of those being the conditions Ann was meeting. He did not believe those conditions would go on many days longer if every man had to see them in relation to some one he cared for. "The poor ye have always with you" might then prove less authoritative—less satisfying—as the final word.
And the other conditions—things his sort stood for—Darrett—the whole story—He had come to loathe the words chivalry and honor and all the rest of the empty terms that resounded so glibly against false standards.
Something was wrong with the world and he could not see that improving a rifle was going to go very far toward setting it right.
And there was springing up within him, even in his loneliness and gloom, a passion to be doing something that would help set it right.
An older officer with whom he had been talking that day had spoken lovingly of his father, under whom he had served; spoken of his hardihood and integrity, his manliness and soldierliness. As he thought of it now it seemed to him that just because hewashis father's son—had in him the blood of the soldier—he should help fight the real battles of the day—the long stern battles of peace.
His father had served, faithfully and well. He, too, would like to serve. But yesterday's needs were not to-day's needs, nor were the methods of yesterday desirable, even possible, for to-day. What could be farther from serving one's own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what had been the real service to a day gone by?
There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be the only way to save the things that war had left him. That perhaps he could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving.
Looking out across the miles of the city's roofs, hearing the rumble of the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from softness and degeneration. Thinking of the problems of that very city, it seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight for, no stimulus to manhood.
Men and women! Those men and women passing back and forth and all the millions of their kind, they were what counted. The things that mattered to them were the things that mattered. Their needs the things to fight for.
So he reflected and drifted, brushing now this, now that, in thought and fancy.
Weary—lonely—he dreamed a dream, dream such as the weary and the lonely have dreamed before, will dream again. Too utterly alone, he dreamed he was not alone. Heart-hungry, he dreamed of love. He dreamed of Ann. He had dreamed of her before, would dream of her again. Dream of her, if for nothing else, because he knew she had dreamed of love; because she made him know that it was there, because, unreasoningly, she made him hope.
Her face that night at the dance—that night in the boat, when they had talked almost not at all, had seemed to feel no need for talking—things remembered blended with things desired until it seemed he could feel her hair brush his face, feel her breath upon his cheek, her arms about his neck—vivid as if given by memories instead of wooed from dreams.
But the benign dream became torturing vision—vision of Ann with hands held out to him—going down—her wonderful eyes fearful with terror.
It was that which dreaming held for him.
And it seemed that he—he and his kind—all of those who stood for the things not real were the thing beating Ann down.
Dreams gone and vision mercifully falling away there came a yearning, just a simple human yearning, to know where she was. He felt he could bear anything if only he knew that she was safe.
The telephone rang. He supposed it was some of his friends—something about the hour for dining.
He would not answer. Could not. Too sick of it all—too sore.
But it kept ringing, and, habit in the ascendency, he took down the receiver.
It was not a man's voice. It was a woman's. A faint voice—he could scarcely catch it.
And could with difficulty reply. He did not know the voice, it was too faint, too far-away, but a suggestion in it made his own voice and hand unsteady as he said: "Yes? What is it?"
"Is this—Captain Jones?"
The voice was stronger, clearer. His hand grew more unsteady.
"Yes," he replied in the best voice he could muster. "Yes—this isCaptain Jones. Who is it, please?"
There was a silence.
"Tell me, please," he managed to say. "Is it—?"
The voice came faintly back, "Why it's—Ann."
The keenest joy he had ever known swept through him. To be followed by the most piercing fear. The voice was so faint—so unreal—what if it were to die away and he would have no way to get it back!
It seemed he could not hold it. For an instant he was crazed with the sense of powerlessness. He felt it must even then be slipping back into the abyss from which it had emerged.
Then he fought. Got himself under command; sent his own voice full and strong over the wire as if to give life to the voice it seemed must fade away.
"Ann," he said firmly, authoritatively, "listen to me. No matter what happens—no matter what's the matter—I've got something you must hear. If we're cut off, call up again. Will you do that? Are you listening?"