A Cry in the Wilderness Part 29

"Sometimes when I think I know him, I find I don't. That interests me.

You 'll have the same experience when you get well acquainted with him."

"There is no monotony about that at any rate."

"I should say not." He spoke emphatically.

Mrs. Macleod turned to me.

"I 'm sure I feel just as you do, Marcia, about the 'what next'. I don't know of anything except to keep house and provide for the meals--"

"That's no sinecure in this climate, mother. Such appet.i.tes! Even Marcia is developing a bank holiday one."

"And gaining both color and flesh," said Mrs. Macleod, looking me over approvingly. I dropped her a curtsey which surprised her Scotch staidness and amused Jamie.

"Are you _sure_ you are twenty-six?" He smiled quizzically.

"As sure as you are of your three and twenty years."

Jamie turned from the window, took a book and dipped into it. I thought he was lost to us for the next two hours. Mrs. Macleod left the room.

"Sometimes I feel a hundred." Jamie spoke thoughtfully.

"And I a hundred and ten." I responded quickly to his mood.

"You 're bound to go me ten better. But no--have you, though?"

I nodded emphatically.

"Where?"

"Oh, in New York."

"Why in New York?"

"You don't know it?"

"No; but I mean to."

"I wish you joy."

"Tell me why in New York."

"You would n't understand."

"Would n't I? Try me."

I looked up at him as he stood there thoughtful, his forefinger between the leaves of the book. _He_ had no living to earn. _He_ had not to bear the burden and heat of an earned existence. How could he understand? So I questioned in my narrowness of outlook.

"I felt the burden," I answered.

"What burden?"

"The burden of--oh, I can't tell exactly; the burden of just that terrible weight of life as it is lived there. Before I was ill it weighed on me so I felt old, sometimes centuries old--"

Jamie leaned forward eagerly, his face alive with feeling.

"Marcia, that's just the way I felt when I was in the hospital. I was bowed down in spirit with it--"

"You?" I asked in amazement.

"Yes, I; why not? I can't help myself; I am a child of my time. Only, I felt the burden of life as humanity lives it, not touched by locality as you felt it."

"But you have n't really lived that life yet, Jamie."

"Yes, I have, Marcia."

"How?"

"I wonder now if _you_ will understand? I get it--I get all that through the imagination."

"But imagination is n't reality."

"More real than reality itself sometimes. Look here, I 'm not a philanthropic cad and I don't mean to say too much, but I can say this: when a thinking man before he is twenty-five has run up hard against the only solid fact in this world--death, he somehow gets a grip on life and its meaning that others don't."

I waited for more. This was the Jamie of whom the depth of simplicity in "Andre's Odyssey" had given me a glimpse.

He straightened himself suddenly. "I want to say right here and now that if I have felt, and feel--as I can't help feeling, being the child of my time and subject to its tendencies--the burden of this life of ours as lived by all humankind, thank G.o.d, I can even when bowed in spirit, feel at times the 'rhythm of the universe' that adjusts, coordinates all--" He broke off abruptly, laughing at himself. "I 'm getting beyond my depth, Marcia?"

I shook my head. He smiled. "Well, then, I 'll get down to bed rock and say something more: you won't mind my mooning about and going off by myself and acting, sometimes, as if I had patented an aeroplane and could sustain myself for a few hours above the heads of all humanity--"

I laughed outright. "What do you mean, Jamie?"

"I mean that as I can't dig a trench, or cut wood, or run a motor bus, or be a member of a life-saving crew like other men, I 'm going to try to help a man up, and earn my living if I can, by writing out what I get in part through experience and mostly through imagination. There!

Now I 've told you all there is to tell, except that I 've had something actually accepted by a London publisher; and if you 'll put up with my crotchets I 'll give you a presentation copy."

"Oh, Jamie!"

I was so glad for him that for the moment I found nothing more to say.

"'Oh, Jamie,'" he mimicked; then with a burst of laughter he threw himself full length on the sofa.

"What are you laughing at?" I demanded sternly.

"At what Ewart and the Doctor would say if they could hear us talking like this so soon as their backs were turned on the manor. I believe the Doctor's last word to you was 'griddlecakes', and Ewart's to me: 'We 'll have dinner at twelve--I 'm going into the woods with Cale'.

Well, I 'm in for good two hours of reading," he said, settling himself comfortably in the sofa corner. I had come to learn that this was my dismissal.

Before Mr. Ewart's return, I took counsel with myself--or rather with my common-sense self. If I were to continue to work in this household, I must know definitely what I was to do. The fact that I was receiving wages meant, if it meant anything, that I received them in exchange for service rendered. The Doctor left the matter in an unsatisfactory, nebulous state, saying, that if Ewart insisted on paying my salary it was his affair to provide the work; and thereafter he was provokingly silent.

I had been too many years in a work-harness to shirk any responsibility along business lines now, and when, after supper, I heard Jamie say just before we left the dining-room: "I'm no end busy this evening, Gordon, I 'll work in here if you don't mind; I 'll be in for porridge," I knew my opportunity was already made for me. I told Mrs.