Part 6 (1/2)
”Mad as a March hare,” contemptuously muttered the doctor.
His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.
”I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it,” persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener.
”We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself.
It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing.”
Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.
”There's two ways for 'em to end. If they're made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the brutes as they can. It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true. I have seen it. I've seen every one of them the United States can produce. It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the basis of every sound speculation.'”
The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--”You see, that nailed the parson.”
The parson nodded gravely.
”You'll find no such experiment in the Bible,” threw in the young doctor, alluding to ”serious things” as a peace-offering to his reverend friend.
”One, I believe,” dryly.
”Well,” broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, ”that's neither here nor there. This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since the Creation. Plan of his own. He spends his days now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they're all to be transported into the country to start a new Arcadia. A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you. All start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honour, rise according to the stuff that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!”
”Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,”
spitefully lisped the doctor. ”Blood, Sir. His mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out.”
”Here he is,” maliciously whispered the woolman. ”No, it's Holmes,” he added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.
He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--”a low fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the best catch,” etc., etc. The others, on the contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.
The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters.
The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the ”Sirventes de Bertrand de Born.” Joel, up in the barn by himself, worked through the long day in the old fas.h.i.+on,--pondering gravely (being of a religious turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche, reported in the ”Gazette;” wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher invoked, as he did once a week, the curses of the law upon slaveholders, praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face of the earth. Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the excitement of the day was over. The New Testament was,--well,--hardly suited for the--emergency; did not, somehow, chime in with the lesson of the hour.
I may remark, in pa.s.sing, that this course of conduct so disgusted the High Church rector of the parish, that he not only ignored all new devils, (as Mr. Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the millennium were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer at the poor dead old troubles of Luther's time. One thing, though, about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's pet.i.tion for the ”wiping out” of some few thousands, he was using up all the fragments of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old horse he had found by the road-side.
Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.
Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely heard it, being used to it. Once, however, another sound came between,--an iron tread, pa.s.sing through the long wooden corridor,--so firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a clock. She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came slowly nearer, up to the door without,--pa.s.sed it, going down the echoing plank walk. The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead brick wall. The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who was within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible pa.s.sion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out, her soul as it was, as G.o.d knew it,--G.o.d and this man. No longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven or in h.e.l.l. The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.
She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky. Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart's life to do it. He would trample her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would never be!
The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that pa.s.sed her on the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.
So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the bits of gra.s.s that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.
He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, pa.s.sing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.
Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to G.o.d with a loud and exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?
The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were places where it did not s.h.i.+ne: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of. G.o.d knows how the man groped for the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.
There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the suns.h.i.+ne, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coa.r.s.er light was barred, into the deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and pa.s.sion men were keen to read in the unpitying suns.h.i.+ne, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer. No kind thought, no pure desire, no weakest faith in a G.o.d and heaven somewhere, could be so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out, glow about it, s.h.i.+ne under it, hold it up in full view of G.o.d and the angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had done for six thousand years. I have no name for the light: it has a name,--yonder.
Not many eyes were clear to see its--s.h.i.+ning that day; and if they did, it was as through a gla.s.s, darkly. Yet it belonged to us also, in the old time, the time when men could ”hear the voice of the Lord G.o.d in the garden in the cool of the day.” It is G.o.d's light now alone.
Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly clearness. I think it was this light that made the burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the pa.s.sers-by, it was this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes quick to know the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky, or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its crimson cornucopias filled with hot s.h.i.+ning. She liked clear, vital colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered her, somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a vague sense of loss. It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her. Other things her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains. Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flas.h.i.+ng, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a pa.s.sioned trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.