Part 14 (1/2)
When, at length, shy Bird of Fortune, shall my snare thy wings enfold?”
Footsteps sounded along the walk, the linked steps of two, lingering, yet with the springing fall of youth; then a murmur of voices, girl's and boy's interchanging, lingering, too, and low, weighted, like the footsteps, with the burden of their hour. Margaret drew back a little behind the sapless vine-stems. She knew that she could not be seen in the shadow of the porch, even by a pa.s.ser far less absorbed than the two who drifted by. She had recognized Frank and Jean at once, and thrilled intimately at the quality of their voices. Both were changed from the careless tones of every day, Frank's husky and strained, Jean's vibrant and tremulous. What they said was quite inaudible--only that betraying _timbre_, conscious and unconscious, hung on the scented air. A single word in the girl's thrilled voice--a sharpened, quivering note of life at high tension--pierced the shadows of the porch:
”---- you ----”
”'You!'” Margaret leaned forward among her shadows, thrusting her clenched hands downward, then pressed them tight upon her heart. ”You!”
That little key unlocked the flood-gates. The barriers went down, and the tide of pa.s.sionate loneliness swept her soul.
”You!” she whispered to the fragrant, s.h.i.+mmering, vitalizing night; and the word mocked her, and returned unto her void. She leaned her bosom against the angled surface of the porch-post; she pressed her face among the dry, unbudded vines. The cry went out from her into the empty s.p.a.ces of the world--a voiceless, hopeless call: ”You! you! you! Oh, you who never came to me!”
Her soul was ravaged by that mocking bitterness of loss which comes only to those who have not possessed. She, crying for a lover in the night, she who had never been sought! If ever her shy and homely girlhood might have attracted a youth, poor Margaret's love of poetry would have frightened him away. If the burdened poverty of her maturity might have admitted a suitor, her acquaintance numbered no man who would not have shunned an earnest-minded old maid. And she knew this utterly. A thousand old aches were in the sudden rush of anguish, and shame fought among them. She was shocked and startled at the drip of salt tears down her cheeks, at the heaving of her shaken breast.
She struggled to rebuild her old barriers against the woe--pride, and dignity, and the decent acceptance of one's lot. But those were for the eyes of men and women; and here were no eyes, only night, and the risen sap and the wild heart in her breast. Duty? She had never swerved in doing it, but she thrust the thought by with pa.s.sionate rebellion at the waste of her in dull service to the outworn lives which neither asked nor could take from her anything but the daily drudgery. She groped for the old humble consolations, tender appreciations, generous friends.h.i.+ps, the joy in others' joy. But there the wall had broken through. ”I am nothing to them!” thought Margaret bitterly. ”Jean will not care to talk to me after to-night. And I can't always kiss other people's babies! I want one of my own!”
The gauzy veil of dream that wrapped her often had fallen from before her eyes. Rent by the piercing beauty of the night, and soaked in her tears, that fragile fabric of vision served no more. Imagined blisses had betrayed her, naked and tender, to the unpitying lash of truth. The remote, the universal, mocked her sore longing for something near and real, of earth and flesh--oh, as welcome in sorrow as in joy!--to be imperiously her own! The river of life dashed by and would not fill her empty cup. The love she loved so had pa.s.sed her by.
She faced the hollowest desolation known to humanity. She had committed no sin; she had been true and tender and faithful; she had not failed in the least and humblest dues of love: yet, now she stood wrapped in torment, and saw, across a great gulf fixed, the joys of love's elect.
She stood utterly frustrate and alone--a shared frustration were happiness! Her mental life had been so intensely uncompanioned that she was tortured with doubts of her own reality. What warrant of Being had that soul which could not touch in all the blank, black s.p.a.ces of the void another soul to give it a.s.surance of itself? What if the aching throat and riven breast were but the phantom anguish of a dream Thing, unpurposed, unjustified, a Thing of ashes and emptiness!
There remained G.o.d--perhaps! Was G.o.d a dream too? Was there any _You_ in all the empty worlds?
She stood quite still, questing the universe for G.o.d. She thought of her father's G.o.d--the savage Hebrew deity he thought he wors.h.i.+ped, the harsh Puritan formalist who ruled his creed, the hysterical, illogical sentimentalist who swayed his heart. She dropped them all out of her mind. G.o.d was not, for her, in the ancient earthquake or fire or whirlwind. But--perhaps--somewhere!
She sank to her knees in the darkness, and, laying her head upon her arms on the railing, sought in her soul for G.o.d.
”You are Love,” she said. ”They say it, but they do not believe it; but _I_ believe it. You are Love that creates, and makes glad--and wounds. You are Love that rises in all creatures in spring, and would make all things beautiful and kind. You are Love that gives--and gives itself. You made me to love love and love's uses, and nothing else in the world! You made my life loveless. Why?”
She waited a moment, then, with a sobbing breath of remembrance, ”Oh, one spring they nailed you on a cross because you loved too much!”
After that she was very still, her head bent upon her arms, her heart quiet, waiting for the still, small voice, the answer of G.o.d.
It came presently, and she knew it was the answer. She accepted it with comfort, and sad pride, and submission, and a slow, strange, white happiness of consecration. The answer came without any words. If there had been words, they might have been, perhaps, like these:
”Bear the pain patiently, my daughter, for life is wrought in pain, and there is no child born without sharp pangs. I have not shut thee out from my festival of spring. Thy part is thy pang. I have given thee a coronal of pain and made thee rich with loss and desire. I have made thee one of my vestals who guard perpetually the hearth-fire which shall not be lit for them. I have denied thee love that love shall be manifest in thee. Wherever love fails in my world, there shalt thou re-create it in beauty and kindness. The vision thou hast, and the pa.s.sion, are of me, and I charge thee find some fair and sweet way that they perish not in thee. All ways are mine. Be thou in peace.”
Margaret rose at length. The moon was gone from the sky, but out of its deep, tender darkness shone the far, dim light of stars. A cool wind touched her cheek, bearing a faint, ethereal odor of blossoms as from a great distance. And upon her face, if one might have seen for the darkness, shone a fine, ethereal beauty far-brought from that great distance which is nearer than hands and feet.
Against the shadowy front of the house opposite, two figures were vaguely discernible, the taller a little darker than the encompa.s.sing s.p.a.ce, the other a little lighter. As Margaret looked, they melted together, and were no longer two but one.
She smiled in the darkness, very sweetly, and, holding her head high, turned and went quietly into the dark little house.
Work Is a Blessing
_By Lafayette Young_
Work is a blessing to the human race.
If this had remained a workless world, it would have been a homeless world. The progress of the human race began when work began. When work began, men began to wear clothes; thus progress commenced.