Chapter XXII

Of Mavering, Who Disappears--Of the Gray Poet--Of Morgan, Who Appears Once More

When Gard returned to the knowledge of the light, he brought with him the impression that Helen was near. It was an irritating shock not to find her. He remembered a number of widely separated moments when he had been conscious of physical things--unless all these were vagrant dreams: the rain on the tent, the surgeon, the bitter cold, and Helen sitting there holding his wrist. The last was a portrait without surroundings or background. Her hair was pushed away from her forehead, and her eyes had seemed to probe and search for him down wherever he was lost.

Mrs. Mavering sat beside him now. She shook her head to signify silence when he wished to say something, to question her about this doubt; so that he fell to staring at the ceiling and trying to work his brain, How slowly the ideas moved, how reluctant they were, how pale and unsuggestive! To remember something was to pull a long, sagging rope, until at last the remembrance would emerge from a tideless, flat sea in a drowned condition. It was exasperating of Helen not to be there. The exasperation lasted four months.

The days and weeks slipped by, marked less by nights and days than by bits of information given and assimilated at intervals. He learned where he was and how he came there, and brooded over the subject, turned it slowly in his mind, and concluded to go on turning it. It had innumerable sides, surfaces, depths--some that were astonishing, some that melted into day dreams. It seemed to him that he was on the way to recover in time--a doctor, in fact, with side whiskers, gray and pendent, came periodically, and stated as much in a loud voice, and in that case he was glad that life looked interesting and came towards him with shining approach. The winter sunlight falling through clear panes under white, translucent curtains was as if newly washed.

It is said that the secret of the strong, temperate zones lies in their winter and spring, the antiseptic storms, the trance, and burial, and then the cleansed revival, the issues of a fresh seed-time. And there appear to be certain bitter waters, flowing near the roots of existence, in which, if it so happens to a man, he may wash his eyes clear of confusion, and afterwards wonder how it came that he was once weary of living. So it seemed to Gard that he had gone around a circle and begun a new season of expectation. He was that black-robed acolyte again, slim and somewhat pale, who, in breathless eagerness to see and know, had come out of the door of the brotherhood's brick-walled court-yard into the hurrying avenue, hearing the high fluting. "Follow, follow," looking for a banner and sword and shield, possibly for a girl in the brakes with sunlight on her hair, at least for something he had not tried to explain to the Father Superior. Whatever his motives and purposes then, they had become clouded since, and were clear again, and calling, "It is time to be alive and out among the melodies." It was good--the mere living; a handsomely furnished world, with a number of things in it.

Mrs. Mavering went away in the late winter. Widow Bourn died in January, when wild winds and snows were beating against the combative little church, and Helen was alone in the cottage, except for an elderly woman, depressed and angular, in the kitchen. Helen refused to go to Thaddeus, to his bewildered disgust. Mrs. Mavering, for some reason, did not think the refusal strange, but she became intent for the North as soon as she heard it.

"May I come, too, Lady Rachel? I mean when this mossy-whiskered physician unties me."

"May!" she said, scornfully. "You must. Where else should you go?"

"It's queer, but it seems like home, Hagar. I never saw it. Wasn't Hagar the mother of homeless Ishmaelites?"

So Mrs. Mavering was gone. One Sabrina, a fat negro woman, was left, who shook the floor with her tread, who wore extraordinary green kerchiefs on her head, and exploded in a melting gobble of mirth at Gard's every remark, till humor became a burden and he tried depression. "I shall die, Sabrina." Sabrina gobbled with joy. He tried wrath. "You're a galoop, Sabrina, a galoop!"--and Sabrina spilled his coffee over her billows of delight.

Mavering appeared and disappeared, brought with him once a big, deep-breathing man, slightly singular in dress, with a blown, gray beard and hair, soft eyes, and affectionate, impulsive ways. Mavering introduced him.

"He calls himself a poet, not a Plesiosaurus. His poetry looks as if it were written, nevertheless, by a saurian with one of his fins. I recommend you two to mutual and plastic embraces." Afterwards the gray man came often of himself, and would sit by the bedside, holding Gard's white, bony fingers, and recite:

"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking--"

* * * * *

"... do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?"

Or, "The Song of Myself"--

"A child said, 'What is the grass?' fetching it to me with full
hands."

They grew suddenly friendly and confident, and talked art and letters. "Some of that is good stuff," Gard remarked, "and it's all yeasty--something stirring in it. But I don't see--Here, you're an egoist, too--you simply whoop with it--and impartially affectionate at the same time as a self-obliterated Buddhist."

"They are one. The more I love myself, the more I love you."

"But what do you mean by, 'If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, translucent mould of me'? Now, that's belated Greek."

"It's nothing old. It's new and democratic."

Gard grumbled feebly.

"It sounds queer enough for a gospel. It won't do for me now. I shall have to fat up to it."

The gray man leaned forward with that tremulous, dewy look in his eyes. He seemed to have an immense capacity of feeling, a physique made large to endure it.

"You didn't love yourself enough. All that wasn't love. You didn't love any one. Love inward, love outward, love everywhere, love some one most, love many much. All empty without that, a drifting boat without anchor. You look for the boatman. No one there. Drowned? No. Never was there."

After a long silence--"Say that 'Cradle' thing again. It's a man's soul in the body of a whale. I don't believe it's new and democratic. It must be old and human. But I know what you mean."

So February and March were gone. Mavering said there was a big fight coming, went away, and came no more; nor the gray man, either, who was absorbed in his hospitals and his "average young man," and grown hollow-eyed with watchings and strenuous sympathy. Everything gone, nothing coming except spring and letters from Hagar; nothing staying except Gard himself and Sabrina, who reminded one of melting butter, but of whom the quantity grew no less. "Hagar! Hagar!" the high fluting voice seemed now to call continually, till the tension of his longing, Gard fancied, would pull Hagar to him if he did not go soon.

Late in April they packed him into a night train, and all night, or whenever he awoke and looked out, the earth seemed to be running away southward, as if sucked towards the whirlpool of the war, but the stars to be travelling northward with him. How impatient they were! How they snapped and danced and quivered! "Hurry, hurry! But you will see how we will shine over Hagar and forget the bleak laws of our journeyings, and be nightlamps in Helen's garden."

In the morning the train stood still in the terminal. He had some hours to wait. He crept through the station. The rattle and roar of the city met him at the door. The few returning soldiers like himself were lost in pursuing crowds, the only signs here of the war that to southward had seemed branded on the soil and written across the street fronts. A policeman caught sight of his uniform, and added some points to his rank, out of benevolence.

"What'll you have, colonel?"

"I think I'll have a cab."

The hurrying crowd paused, and cheered huskily when he drove away. He had the cabman drive across town and down the old avenue. At the church of the Holy Trinity there was a morning service beginning, and he climbed the steps. Within, a few hundred people were scattered about. The only sound was the moaning of the organ. High up at one side he could see Moselle's hunched shoulders and dingy yellow head, faded with age, against the blue and gilded pipes. Moselle began to play a prelude, something stately and stern, like the thousand-century-old front of a gray crag, that might be well known but never could be familiar. The dingy old head moved Gard more than the prelude. He went back to the cab and drove down towards the Brotherhood. There was no flowing river so strange as the flowing river of the street. Every one was isolated, no doubt; but, after all, there was a bond. It ought to be celebrated and sworn to. A truckman on top of a dray looked down and probably caught him smiling to himself, grinned, and shouted, "How goes it?" Here and there on the sidewalk, too, men called out to him. Every door and window here between Trinity and the Brotherhood was familiar, and the brick walls and shuttered windows of the Brotherhood were eloquent. He thought. "I'll go in another time, and see Francis and his sick flower-bed, and the school and Andrew. It would scare me into a relapse to see the Superior now. Nobody but the _bonus Deus_ ever understood him, and the _bonus Deus_ is in Hagar."

* * * * *

So he went back to the station. The train ran for an hour or more past glimpses of the sea, and then turned up the Wyantenaug Valley. At Hamilton he changed cars. The brave old river sweeps around a curve, and Hamilton lies in the curve. He could see the tower of the grand-stand in the Fair grounds, and Saint Mary's among the other steeples, but he sat still on the station platform, saw his trunk go by on a hand-truck, and watched beyond the freight-yards the rippling, glinting river, hurrying, busy, with its myriad little shining points of happiness. Was it the languor of his weariness or a magic in the river that flowed down from that promised land of Beulah, the mythical Hagar, the mother of the homeless--a Mecca, a Bethlehem, an Arden of wise flowers and musical brooks? The river seemed to gesture, and mutter syllables and sentences. Some one spoke loudly over his head. He looked up and saw Morgan Map.

"Going up the valley? So am I," Morgan said, and Gard nodded languidly. It occurred to him, slowly, that he ought to be surprised. "The train's ready. Come along."

A practical man, this Map, Gard thought--a very genius of accomplishment. Why should he go into Beulah, too? Why not? But he must be doing something here, this forcible schemer, who did nothing unaccountably. If he meditated violence, it was a poor place for it. Much better to have set fire to the house near the hospital, or corrupted Sabrina and poisoned the breakfast. Still--Gard pulled himself slowly up the car steps. His knees had not yet recovered from their wavering inadequacy--still, it was what Mavering would have called "a sportsmanlike situation." Map might try some simple, antique, and desperate thing. In that case it would be well to get one's gun where it could be pulled suddenly. Gunpowder was the handicap that made an invalid even with two hundred pounds and six-feet-two of red-haired, aggressive health. And all that was nonsense. What a sinewy force it was--this love of a woman!--that suddenly snapped a man's habits apart, dragged all his other motives indifferently after it; one of the universal energies. Joy and desperation, and the beast and the climbing soul, seemed packed in it more closely side by side than in any other experience.

Two or three men were in the car at one end. Morgan went to the other end and pulled over a seat. The two sat down facing each other, and Morgan produced cigars.

"I'm glad you brought these, however you happen to be here," said Gard. "The doctor forbids them, so I don't carry any, but accept them from fate. It's a fine point of casuistry. I disliked that doctor--I disliked his whiskers, mostly. They used to get twisted up in my feverish nightmares. _Did_ you happen to be here?"

"No. I found out what time you were going, got leave of absence and came along."

"To see where I was going? I don't know that I understand why."

"Oh, partly. I had a general plan. I'll explain. I'm a practical man," he went on, quietly, after a moment. "I don't believe in loading up with the past. No scruples and no malice. What's no use to remember I forget. They're all dead weight. I cut loose. That's the way I'm made. Now, I don't know how you're made--don't know what kind you are."

"Neither do I. I'm going up to Hagar to find out."

"Well! I said; I'm done, hedged out; hedged in, too. The question is, Can I cut out--cut loose? It depends on Windham. The more I thought about it the more I didn't get any definition of you. I concluded to come along--see what could be done--clear up the ground--know what's to pay. If you go to Hagar with the purpose supposed, that's all right. I'm done, anyway. I have an errand of my own there--which doesn't concern you, however. I throw up my hand. I was in hell and played for keeps. I say now, a man that's won needn't bear malice. No use in that. He can call me what he chooses if it eases his mind. That won't hurt me any, nor him. He's safe. He needn't be dainty. It's a fact. I sent a tracer after you up the Shenandoah. God knows why it missed, I don't. I could have sworn there was daylight through Jack Mavering's head. Missed again. He walked in on me in Mrs. Mavering's sitting-room and made me feel like a wet hen. I put my head in my pocket and walked out. What else could I do? You're going to Hagar. All right, I'll show you where to go. What more can I do? I'm telling you all this now from policy."

"And I'm calling no names," Gard remarked. "Mavering professes to have a great admiration for you as a practical practitioner. You're probably right to come along."

"Oh, I figure pretty well. I was a fool--but still, that thing was figured pretty well. I'd have won out finally all right if--"

"I object to what you have in mind to say--prefer to think you wouldn't 'have won out finally, if--' Better not speculate. We'll call that a stipulation."

Map lifted his brows and settled himself more comfortably. A change, an expression of relief, slipped over his big, harsh-boned face, the only sign of the tension that he had been under.

"Stipulations--that's what I want. If there's anything to be done to restore amiability, good God! it's surely my part to do it."

Gard looked out of the window and was silent.

Green meadows and brown fallows moving past, white houses under aged maples, hills of climbing pasture lands and pale-green forests. Did men carry any sullen burdens in this valley? Better drop them and go unburdened into Hagar.

"I suppose there might be a sort of public duty involved," he said, "which interests me just now about to the extent of an empty medicine bottle. I flung the last one at Mrs. Mavering's black cook. You remember Sabrina? You couldn't even break glass on her. Do you think of taking up regularly with--I beg your pardon--with a criminal career?"

"Criminal! A criminal's a fool. I'm no fool, or never was before. I lost my head. That's only once. Criminal! Why, look here! What do you make out of this world you and I have been shovelling dirt in now some years? Isn't every man in it for himself and against his neighbor, if his neighbor's in his way--which he partly is, always? Do people go into society to amuse themselves or each other? Themselves, of course. And business is competition, and competition's private war according to rules of custom. I'm supposed to be a lawyer. That's a succession of jobs at beating somebody else and getting paid for it. This civil war is one collection of private interests against another collection. The South was getting beaten in business--held a losing hand--wanted to break up the game. That meant a fight. Take you and me. You wouldn't let me out of this if you saw anything more in it. You don't see anything more in it. I don't, either. I'd do exactly the same, for the same reason. Never shove a man farther than you need to make your point. I don't compete with you any more in anything. I keep out of your way and avoid offence. For the rest, I compete. The law is an artificial line. The line is moved now and then. At one time it's criminal to lend money at interest and innocent to fight a duel. Another, it's the other way. That's all right. But a man's a fool not to fight inside the line as it happens to stand. There's room enough."

Gard thought he saw some of his own philosophies in caricature. They looked unlovely enough in caricature. Map was an interesting man. If peculiar, it was rather that his mind was so sharp-edged, unqualifying, absolute. It refused to see shades. It saw hard outlines and felt the impact of surfaces. Gard thought that at one time he would have found him still more interesting and would not have felt this repulsion from him. Probably convalescence was a fastidious state. He turned away to the window. There was a domed mountain in sight, its spurs thrust forward into the valley, sides covered partly with a young-leaved forest, partly with pine and hemlock, and its bald, rocky head bare in the sunlight. The train stopped at a little station by the river. The old, battered stage rolled them away slumberously over an echoing covered bridge, across the valley bottom lands, where the zigzag fences and the calling of the ploughman to his team, the bluebird on the zigzag fence, and the slim white birches along the mountain spurs all seemed in the same concord with the ancient earth and childlike sky. The silent, misanthropic stage-driver looked the kin of the country-side's slow vegetation.

The road swung around the mountain and went up through a dim green avenue of pines and hemlocks, and below, in its bowldered crypts and gorges, poured a stream with white foam and mysterious song, or sometimes lay still in black pools. The steep slope of the mountain was on the left. The road climbed steadily, and came out of the woods at last not a mile from the village in a cup of the hills of Hagar.

At the cross-roads Morgan stepped out and Gard followed.

"The house is behind the church there." Morgan said, shortly, and moved to walk away, but stopped and turned half around when Gard spoke, listening with his mouth set and yellow brows drawn low.

"I dare say you'll succeed, you and your philosophy," said Gard, slowly, looking towards the church and the house behind it. "I dare say I sha'n't, in that way--or care to, very much. Competition doesn't seem to me worth while."

Morgan was silent. The battered stage had rolled away down the hill to the post-office, where Mr. Paulus came out for the mail, and Thaddeus Bourn followed after him. Thaddeus looked up the hill, dropped the iron point of his cane on the stone step with a click, and stared blankly. Mr. Paulus, mail-bag in hand, stopped and followed the direction of Thaddeus's eyes. The stage-driver climbed down from his seat and joined them.

"I don't care," Gard continued, "a blank cartridge what you did or tried to do. There's no stipulation except that we keep out of each other's way. Is that satisfactory?"

"That's all right." Morgan hesitated, and brought out with apparent effort: "You'd better look in the cemetery first; I saw something there," went his way with long strides, and disappeared down the first dip on the Cattle Ridge road.

"There's a cemetery, very true," Gard thought, and went towards it, past the minister's picket fence and neat gate to where the mournful hemlocks stood in meditation. And there some one in a black dress was kneeling and planting flowers over a new grave, and near by was a tall, gray stone, and thereon, graven in large letters:

"SIMON BOURN,

"BORN ---- DIED ----

"REMEMBER ME."

Morgan swung along, and looked not to right or left, nor cared if any villager speculated on the singular sight of "one of the Map boys" observably bound for the square house on the hill; past the mill where Job Mather watched his slow millstones, past the mill-pond, the blacksmith's, and the rambling, low farm-house that hived innumerable Durfeys, through the stone pillars of Squire Map's gate, up to the square house on the hill.

The door was locked. He rang the bell, and waited some time. The place seemed half deserted, unkept, the walks littered with last year's rotting leaves.

The door opened suddenly and Squire Map nearly filled it with broad, bowed shoulders.

"I've lost her, dad."

"Come in, Morgan."

The latter followed into the dining-room and they sat down. Opposite him on the wall was the portrait of his mother in her bridal-dress. A stately lady always, somewhat cold. She seemed to wear her bridal-veil as a kind of drapery for her pride. Morgan spread his large hands on the table and looked at them.

"I played like hell for it."

"No doubt. Go on."

He told his story coolly and without omission.

"I suppose you are a worse man than your brother," said the squire at last. "He is more scrupulous. I liked you better. You have more candor, carry more weight. I have not been a scrupulous man."

Morgan was looking at the portrait.

"What did you want me to lose for? You won."

"Won! No, I lost. So will you, soon or late. Better soon than late." He followed Morgan's eyes. "Your mother--I'd as lief she'd have died twenty years earlier."

"This sort of thing is futile, dad. Why don't you come out of your shell? Come and get into the push again."

"What for? From my standpoint and my age, Morgan, ask yourself--What for?"

Morgan laughed, lifted his fists, and let them fall with a crash on the table.

"I'm young yet."

"Oh, there's a great deal in that. But one draws no interest from time. You live on your capital. But there's much in being at the beginning instead of at the end--a great deal in that."