Part 2 (2/2)
A lot of lads in the gallery began calling for Everett. We're common here; and not many of the quality patronize stock. Soon he pushed out from behind the curtain and made one of those fool speeches which generally fall flat. Only this one didn't.
Then I went ”behind.” The dressing rooms at the Alhambra are not home-like. Bare walls with a row of pegs along one side--a couple of chairs--a table piled with make-up stuff and over it a mirror flanked by electric lights with wire netting around them. Not gay. And grease paint, at close range, is not attractive. A man shouldn't cry after he's made up--that's a theatrical commandment, or ought to be.
Probably a man shouldn't anyhow. But some do. I imagined Everett had, and that he'd done it with his head in his arms and his arms in the litter of the big table. I think I shook hands with him--one does inane things sometimes--but I don't know what I said. I had something like your experience--I just wasn't there for a minute or two.
Afterward, I went home with him--a long half-hour on the trolley, then up three flights into ”light housekeeping” rooms in the back. There was cold meat on the table, and bread. The janitor's wife, good soul, had made a pot of coffee. ”Light housekeeping” is a literal expression, let me tell you, and doctor's bills make it lighter. I followed him into the last room of the three. It looked different from the way I remembered it the afternoon before. When he turned the gas higher I saw why--the bed was gone--one of those stretcher things takes less room. Besides, they say it's better. So there she was--all that he had left of all that he had had--the girl he'd been mad about and married in our church a year ago. He wasn't even with her when she died; there was the Sunday afternoon rehearsal to attend. She wouldn't let him miss that. ”Go on,” she told him. ”I'll wait for you.” She didn't wait.
And he faced it down, he jammed it through, that young chap did--and was funny, oh, as funny as you can think, for hours, in front of hundreds of people. He never missed a cue, never bungled a line, and all the time seeing, up there in the light-housekeeping rooms, in the last room of them all, how she lay, in the utter silence.
Perhaps I shall come across a braver thing than that before I die, but I doubt it. I tried, of course, to get him not to do it. But it was very simple to him. It was his job. n.o.body else knew the part; it was too late to subst.i.tute. The rest would lose their salaries if they closed down for the week, and G.o.d knew they needed them. So he said nothing--and was funny.
I don't know what you'd call it, but I think you know why I've told it to you. There's a splendor about it and a glory. To do one's job--isn't that the big thing, after all?
Meantime, mine's waiting for me on the other side of this desk. He has laid hands on every article in the room at least three times, and for the last few minutes has been groaning very loud. I think you'd like him--he's so alive.
Your letter saves me the cost of the western papers, and now that I know you'll--but you said not to write about you.
The Job has stopped groaning, and wants to know if I'm ”writing all night just because, or, for the reason that.”
It's night now--big night, and so still down-town here. Sometimes I stay up late to realize that I'm alive. The days are so crammed with happenings. And late at night seems so wide and everlasting. You've got the idea that I do things. Well, I don't. There are whole rows of days when it seems just a muddle of half-started attempts--a manner of hopeless confusion. There's a good deal of futility in it, first and last. That boy tonight for instance. And, sometimes, I get to wondering if, after all, one has the right to meddle in other people's lives. It's curious, but with you I've been quite sure. Always it has been as clear as light to me that you must come through this--that it will be right. I don't know how. Even that day you came, I was sure.
As soon as _you_ are sure, the thing is done. That man isn't to be worried about--or the doctors. Easy for me to say, isn't it?
Are you interested to know that I'm to have my building on the West Side? There was a meeting today. It's the best thing that's happened yet, that is, parochially. Maybe she's human after all. I mean Mrs.
Jameson. She's going to pay for it.
I think that's all. You can't say I've tried to thunder at you this time. I really didn't last time. I've known all along that you wouldn't be impressed by thunder. The answer to that young devil's question seems to be: I'm writing ”for the reason that,” and not, ”just because.” Every time I think of that boy's name I have to laugh.
GEOFFREY McBIRNEY.
September 17th.
MY DEAR MR. McBIRNEY--
What _is_ the boy's name? It must be queer if you laugh every time you think of it. Don't forget to tell me.
Your letters leave me breathless with things to say back. I suppose that's inspiration, to make people feel full of new ideas, and that you're crammed with it. In the first place I'm in a terrible hurry to tell you that something really big has touched the edge of my anaemic life, and that I have recognized it; I'm pleased that I recognized it.
Listen--please--this is it. Robert Halarkenden; I must tell you who he is. Thirteen years ago my uncle was on a camping trip in Canada and one of the guides was a silent Scotchman, mixed in with French-Canadian habitants and half-breed Indians. My uncle was interested in him--he was picturesque and conspicuous--but he would not talk about himself.
Another guide told Uncle Ted all that anyone has ever known about him, till yesterday. He was a guardian of the club and lived alone in a camp in the wildest part of it, and in summer he guided one or two parties, by special permission of the club secretary. This other guide had been to his cabin and told my uncle that it was full of books; the guide found the number astounding--”_effrayant_.” Also he had a garden of forest flowers, and he knew everything about every wild thing that grew in the woods. Well, Uncle Ted was so taken with the man that he asked the secretary about him, and the secretary shook his head. All that he could tell was that he was a remarkable woodsman and a perfect guide and that he had been recommended to him in the first place by Sir Archibald Graye of Toronto, who had refused to give reasons but asked as a personal favor that the man should be given any job he wished.
This is getting rather a long story. Of course you know that the man was Halarkenden and you are now to know that my uncle brought him to Forest Gate as his gardener. He thought over it a day when Uncle Ted asked him and then said that he had lived fifteen years in the forest and that now he would like to live in a garden; he would come if Uncle Ted would let him make a garden as beautiful as he wished. Uncle Ted said yes, and he has done it. You have never seen such a garden--no one ever has. It is four acres and it lies on the bluff above the lake; that was a good beginning. If you had seen the rows of lilies last June, with pink roses blossoming through them, you would have known that Robert Halarkenden is a poet and no common man. Of course we have known it all along, but in thirteen years one gets to take miracles for granted. Yesterday I went down into the wild garden which lies between the woods and the flowers--this is a large place--and I got into the corner under the pines, and lay flat on the pink-brown needles, all warm with splashes of September sunlight, and looked at the goldenrod and purple asters swinging in the breeze and wondered if I could forget my blessed bones and live in the beauty and joy of just things, just the lovely world. Or whether it wouldn't be simpler to pull a trigger when I went back to my room, instead of kicking and struggling day after day to be and feel some other way. I get so sick and tired of fighting myself--you don't know. Anyhow, suddenly there was a rustle in the gold and purple hedge, and there was Robert Halarkenden. I wish I could make you see him as he stood there, in his blue working blouse, a pair of big clippers in his hand, his thick, half-gray, silvery thatch of hair bare and blowing around his scholar's forehead, his bony Scotch face solemn and quiet. His deep-set eyes were fixed with such a gentle gaze on me. We are good friends, Robin and I. I call him Robin; he taught me to when I was ten, so I always have. ”You're no feeling well, la.s.sie?” he asked; he has known me a long time, you see. And I suddenly sat up and told him about my old bones. I didn't mean to; I have told no one but you; not Uncle Ted even. But I did. And ”Get up, la.s.sie, and sit on the bench. I will talk to you,” said Robin. So we both sat down on the rustic bench under the blowy pines, and I cried like a spring torrent, and Robin patted my hand steadily, which seems an odd thing for one's uncle's gardener to do, till I got through. Then I laughed and said, ”Maybe I'll shoot myself.” And he answered calmly, ”I hope not, la.s.sie.”
Then I said nothing and he said nothing for quite a bit, and then he began talking gently about how everybody who counted had to go through things. ”A character has to be hammered into the likeness of G.o.d,” he said. ”A soul doesn't grow beautiful by sunlight and rich earth,” and he looked out at his scarlet and blue and gold September garden and smiled a little. ”We're no like the flowers.” Then he considered again, and then he asked if it would interest me at all to hear a little tale, and I told him yes, of course. ”Maybe it will seem companionable to know that other people have faced a bit of trouble,”
he said. And then he told me. I don't know if you will believe it; it seems too much of a drama to be credible to me, if I had not heard Robert Halarkenden tell it in his entirely simple way, sitting in his workingman's blouse, with the big clippers in his right hand. Thirty years before he had been laird of a small property in Scotland, and about to marry the girl whom he cared for. Then suddenly he found that she was in love with his cousin--with whom he had been brought up, and who was as dear as a brother--and his cousin with her. In almost no more words than I am using he told me of the crisis he lived through and how he had gone off on the mountains and made his decision. He could not marry the girl if she did not love him. His cousin was heir to his property; he decided to disappear and let them think he was dead, and so leave the two people whom he loved to be happy and prosperous without him. He did that. Two or three people had to know to arrange things, and Sir Archibald Graye, of Toronto, was one, but otherwise he simply dropped out of life and buried himself in Canadian forests, and then, just as he was growing hungry for some things he could not get in the forest, my uncle came along and offered him what he wanted.
”But how could you?” I asked him. ”You're a gentleman; how could you make yourself a servant, and build a wall between yourself and nice people?”
Robin smiled at me in a shadowy, gentle way he has. ”Those walls are a small matter of dust, la.s.sie,” he said. ”A real man blows on them and they're tumbling. And service is what we're here for. And all people are nice people, you'll find.” And when, still unresigned, I said more, he went on, very kindly, a little amused it seemed. ”Why should it be more important for me to be happy than for those two? I hope they're happy,” he spoke wistfully. ”The lad was a genius, but a wild lad too,” and he looked thoughtful. ”Anyhow, it was for me to decide, you see, and a man couldn't decide ungenerously. That would be to tie one's self to a gnawing beast, which is what is like the memory of your own evil deed. Take my word for it, la.s.sie, there was no other way.”
”It seems all exaggerated,” I threw at him; ”there was no sense in your giving up your home and traditions and a.s.sociations--it was unreasonable, fantastic! And to those two who had taken away your happiness anyhow.”
<script>