August First Part 4

They say it's one part of the brain working a shade ahead of the rest.

I don't believe that. I do not believe my brain is working at all.

It's spinning around. For days I've been living in the Fourth Dimension--something like that. It changes the values to have a new universe whirl up around one. New heavens and a new earth--that's it.

I have given up trying to a.n.a.lyze it. Even if I didn't want to tell you I couldn't help it. I'm beyond that now, and--helpless. I never dreamed of its being like this. I never thought much about it, except vaguely, as anybody does, and here it's come and s.n.a.t.c.hed away the world.

I don't know how this is going to get itself said. But I can't stop it. That frightens me, rather; I've been used to ordering myself about or, at least, to feeling that I could. But that seems to be over. I don't pretend that I didn't foresee it, or rather that I didn't recognize it right at the beginning. What I did was to put off reckoning with it.

I see that I'm going to say things wrong. You have got to overlook that; I can't help it. I told you my brain wasn't working. For days I've been in a maze. Then your letter came, late this afternoon, and that settled it. Do you know what you said? Do you? You said: "If you were a real man, I wouldn't have exploded like this." A real man--what do you _think_ I am? That's what I want to know. You'll find out I'm real enough before you and I are done. Do you suppose that I have been reading your letters all these weeks--those letters in which you said yourself you put your soul--as though they were stock quotations? Did you think you were a numbered "case," that I was keeping notes about you in that neat filing-cabinet down in the office?

Well, it hasn't been exactly that way.

Do you remember that day you were here? How it rained--how dark it was? Why, I've never seen you, really. I'm always trying to imagine your face.

I've got to talk to you--some things can't be written. You won't stop me. Do you suppose you can? You've got to give me a chance to talk--that's only square. No, I don't mean all that. I don't quite know what I'm saying. I mean, you will let me come, won't you? I'll go away again after; you needn't be afraid. That's fair, isn't it?

You see, it's been strange from the start, and so quick. You, in the middle of the storm that day--the things you said--the fearful tangle you were in. And then the letters--the wonderful letters! And we thought we were keeping it all impersonal. You, with your blazing individuality--you, impersonal! I can't imagine your face, but you've stripped the masks and conventions off your soul for me--I've looked at that. I couldn't help it, could I? I couldn't stop. I can't now. I can't look at anything else. There isn't anything else--it fills my world--it's blotted out what used to be reality.

You're hundreds of miles away--what are you doing? Sitting, with your white dress a rosy blur in the lamplight, reading, thinking, afraid--frightened at the doctors--shrinking at the thought of that d.a.m.ned, pawing beast? We'll drop that last--this isn't the time for that--not yet. Miles away you are--and yet you're here--the real you that you've sent me in the letters. Always you are here. I listen to your voice--I've got that--your voice, singing through my days--here in the silence and the firelight, outside in the night under the stars, always, everywhere, I hear you--calling me.

You see, my head's gone. Don't think though, that I don't know the risk this is. But there isn't any other way. Those four weeks you didn't write, when I thought you had gone under--that was when I began to see how it was with me. Since then I've gone on, living on your letters, until now I can't imagine living without them--and more. And yet I know this may be the end. That's the risk. But I can't go on like that any more. It's everything now, or nothing. I want to know what you are going to do about it. What are you thinking--what must you think--what will you say to me when I see you in your still garden of miracles? I've got to know. If you meant it--you said I was the centre of your world--it can't be true that you meant that. I the centre of your great, clean, wind-swept world of hill-tops and of visions? I, who haven't got the decent strength to hold my tongue, and keep my hands. But you did say that--you did! When I come, will you say it to me again, out loud, that? I can't imagine it--such a thing couldn't happen to me. But if you shouldn't--if you should tell me not to come--no, I can't face that. Where is the solution? I see perfectly that you can't care--why should you?--I see also that you must be made to. That's just it. I know what I must have and that I can never have it. No, that isn't so. I know that I shall come and take you away from what you fear and hate, out of the world we both know is not real, into reality. I shall tell you why I want you, why you must come. You will listen and you will answer. You will say why it's madness and insanity. I shall have to hear all your obvious reasons, but I shall know that you know they are lies--Do you think--do you dream, that they can stand between me and you? You can't stop me.

Because I have seen your soul--you said so--you've held it out, in your two hands, for me to look at. You can't keep me away from you. I know how you'll fight against it. You won't win--don't count on it.

This isn't insolence--it's the thing that's got me. I can't help it.

A man is that way. I don't half know what I've said; I don't dare read it. You have got to make it out yourself, somehow.

You've asked me questions. You're troubled, frightened--I know, it's--h.e.l.l. Do you think I can sit here any longer and let you go through that alone? I've been over the whole thing--I've done nothing else, and out of the maze of it all I'm forced to come to this. It's the old way and the only one--the answer to it all. What can you do with your life--your life that is going to be, that is now, all glorious with loveliness and light? Give it away--that's it--give it to me, and then we two will set it to music and send it singing through the world. The old way. You to come home to when the day is done--your face, your hands, your eyes----

You'll have to overlook this. It's mad to go on. It's mad anyway. If you knew how I've lied to myself, how I've struggled and fought and twisted to keep this back from you! And here it is, confused and grotesque and contradictory and wrong. If I could look at you and say it, I could get it right. If I could look at you--if I could see you.

Give me a chance. Then I'll go away again--if you say so. I had to give you warning--it didn't seem square not. And I've bungled it like this! I tell you I can't help it. It's what you've done to me. I tried to spare you this, but I waited too long--now it's almighty.

Give me my man's chance--Oh I know I'm not worth it--who is?

Afterwards--

G. McB.

_October 10th_.

Telegram received by the Reverend Geoffrey McBirney, St. Andrews Parish House, Warchester:

You must not come. Leaving Forest Gate. Sailing for Germany Sat.u.r.day.

Letter.

AUGUST FIRST.

The son of the under-gardener was a steady ten-year-old three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, and his Scottish blood commended him to Robert Halarkenden and inspired a confidence not justified on the three hundred and sixty-fifth day.

"Angus," said Halarkenden, regarding the boy with a blue glance like a blow, "the young mistress wishes this letter posted to catch the noon train. The master has sent for me and I canna take it. You will"--the bony hand fished in the deep pocket and brought out a nickel--"you will hurry with this letter and post it immediately." "Yes, sir," said Angus, and Robert Halarkenden turned to go to the master of the great house, ill in his great room, with no doubt about the United States mails. While Angus, being in the power of the three hundred and sixty-fifth day, trotted demurely into the meshes of Fate.

Fate was posing as another lad, a lad of charm and adventure. "C'm on, Ang," proposed Fate in nasal American; "Evans's chauffeur's havin' a rooster-fight in the garage. Hurry up--c'm on--lots of fun." And while Angus, stirred by the prospect, struggled with a Scotch conscience, the footman from next door sauntered up, a good-natured youth, and, stopping, caught the question.

"Get along to your chicken-fight," he adjured Angus, and took the letter from his hand. "I'm on my way to the post-office now. I'll mail it as good as you, ain't it?" And Angus fled up the street along with Fate. While Tom Mullins thrust the letter casually into a coat-pocket and dropped in to see his best girl, and, in a bit of horse-play with that lady, lost the letter. "Sure, I mailed it," he answered Angus's inquiries that afternoon, and Angus pa.s.sed along the a.s.surance, not going into details, and every one concerned was satisfied.

While, in a Parish House many miles down the railed roads that measure the country, a man waited. And waited, ever with a sicker restlessness, a more unendurable longing. Sat.u.r.day came, and the man hoped, till the hour for any boat's sailing was long past, for a letter, another telegram. Then, "She has had it mailed after she left," he reasoned, and all of Monday and Tuesday he waited and watched and invented reasons why it might come to-morrow or even later--even from the other side--from Germany. Two weeks, three, and then four, he held to varying fictions about the letter, which Arline Baker, the lady of Tom Mullins's heart, had picked up from the floor that day in October and tucked into a bureau drawer to give to Tom--tucked under a summer blouse. And the weather had turned chilly, helping along Fate as weather will at times, and the summer blouse had not been worn, and the letter had been forgotten.

Then there came a day when he took measures with himself, because suspense and misery were eating his strength. He faced the situation; he had poured his heart, keeping back nothing, at her feet. And she had not answered, except with a few words of a telegram. He knew, by that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life.

But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was facing a stone wall; there was no further step to take; she must be in Germany; he did not know her address; if he did, how could he write again? A man may not hound a woman with his love. Yet he was all but mad with anxiety about her, beyond this other suffering. Why had she suddenly gone to Germany? What did that mean? In his black struggles for enlightenment, he believed sometimes that, in a fantastic attack of _n.o.blesse oblige_, she had married the other man and gone to Germany with him. That thought drove him near insanity. So he gathered up, alone before his fire, all these imaginings and doubts, and sat with them into the night, and made a packet of them, and locked them away, as well as he might, into a chamber of his memory. And the next day he flung himself into his work as he had not been able ever to do before; he made it his world, and resolutely shut out the buoyant voice and the personality so intimately known, so unknown. He tried to be so tired, at night, that he could not think of her; and he succeeded far enough to make living a possibility, which is all that any of us can do sometimes. Often the thought of her, of her words, of her letters, of the gay voice telling of a hideous future, stabbed him suddenly in the night, in the crowded day. But he put it aside with a mighty effort each time, and each time gained control.

And then it was May, and in June he was to have his vacation. And once more the doubt of his fitness for his work was upon him. The stress of the tremendous gait of the big parish, and the way he had thrown his strength by handfuls into the work, had told. If a healthy and happy man uses brain and heart and body carefully it is perhaps true that he cannot overwork. But if a high-strung man gives himself out all day long, every day, recklessly, and is at the same time under a mental strain, he is likely to be ill. Geoffrey McBirney was close to an illness; his att.i.tude toward life was warped; he was reasoning that he had made the girl a test case and that the case had failed; that it was now his duty to stand by the test and give up his work. And then, one day, the letter came. The weather had turned warm in Forest Gate and Arline Baker had got out her summer blouses.

October 10th [it was dated].

This morning, after I had read your letter it was as if I were being beaten to earth by alternate blows, like thunder, like lightning, fierce and beautiful and terrible, of joy and of grief.

For I care--I care--I can't wait to tell you--I'm so glad, so triumphant, so wretched that I care--that it's in me to care, desperately, as much as any woman or man since the foundation of the world. It's in me--once you said it wasn't--and you have brought it to life, and I care--I love you. I want to let you come so that it left me blind and shaking to send that telegram. But there isn't any question. If I let you come I would be wicked. I, with my handful of broken life, to let you manacle your splendid years to a lump of stone?

Could you think I would do that? Don't you see that, because I care, I'm so much more eager not to let you? I'm selfish and my first answer to that letter was a rush of happiness. I forgot there was anything in time or s.p.a.ce except the flood which carried me out on a sea of just you--the sweeping, overwhelming many waters of--you. I wonder if you'd think me brazen if I told you how it seemed? As if your arms were around me, and the world reeling. Some of those clever psychologists, James or Lodge, I can't remember who, have a theory that to higher beings the past and present and future are all one; no divisions in eternity. It seemed like that. Questions and life and right and wrong all dissolved in the white heat of one fact. I didn't see or hear or know. I put my head on the table, on your writing, in my locked room, and simply felt--your arms.

If this were to be a happy love-affair I couldn't write this; I would have decent reserve--I hope; I would wait, maybe, and let you find out things slowly. But there isn't time--oh, there isn't any time. I have to tell you now because this is the last. You can't write again; I won't let you throw away your life; I'm not worth much, generally speaking, but I'm worth your salvation just now if I have the strength to give it to you. And I'm staggering under the effort, but I'm going to give it to you. I'm going to keep you away.

It was realizing that I must do this which beat me to earth with those terrible, bright, sharp swords. You see I'm starting off suddenly with Uncle Ted. He is very ill, with heart trouble, and the doctors think his chance is to get to Nauheim at once. It was decided last night, and we had pa.s.sage engaged for Sat.u.r.day within an hour, and then this morning the letter came. As soon as I could pull myself together a little I began to see how things were, and it looked to me as if somebody--G.o.d maybe--had put down a specific hand to punish my useless life and arrange your salvation. My going away is the means He is using.

For you are such a headstrong unknown quant.i.ty, that if I had seen you, I couldn't have held you, and how could I have fought the exquisite sweetness and glamour that is through even your written words, that would make me wax in your hands, if you had been here and I had heard your voice and seen your eyes and felt your touch; oh, I would have done it--I _must_ do it--but it would have killed me I think. It's more possible this way.

For I'm going indefinitely and all I have to do is to suppress my address. Just that. You can't find it out, for Robin is going away too; he is to do some work of mine while I am gone; and you can't come here and inquire for "August First," can you, now? So this is all--the end. Suddenly I feel inadequate and leaden. It is all over--the one chance for real happiness which I have had in my b.u.t.terfly days--over.

But you have changed earth and heaven--I want you to know it. I can't even now say that if Uncle Ted shouldn't need me; if the hideous, creeping monster should begin its work visibly on me, that I might not some day use the pistol. But I do say that because of you I will try to make any living that I may do count for something, for somebody. I am trying. You are to know about that in time.

And now the color is going out of my life--you are going. Some day you will care for some one else more than you think now you care for me.

I'm leaving you free for that--but it's all I can do. Why must my life be wreck and suffering? Why may I not have the common happinesses?

Why may I not love you--be there for you "at the end of the day"? The blows are raining hard; I'm beaten close to earth. Has G.o.d forsaken me? I can only cling tight to the thin line of my duty to Uncle Ted; I can't see any further than that. Good-by.

AUGUST FIRST.

The man shook as if in an ague. He laid the letter on a table and fastened it open with weights so that the May breeze, frolicking through the top of the Parish House, might not blow it away. Standing over it, bending to it, sitting down, he read it and re-read it, and paced the room and came back and bent over it. He groaned as he looked at the date. Seven months ago if he had had it--what could have held him? She loved him--what on earth could have kept him from her, knowing that? Not illness nor oceans or her will. No, not her will, if she cared; and she had said it. He would have swept down her will like a tidal wave, knowing that.

Seven months ago! He would have followed her to Germany. He laughed at the thought that she believed herself hidden from him. The world was not big enough to hide her. What was a trip to Germany--to Madagascar? But now--where might she not be--what might not have happened? She might be dead. Worse--and this thought stopped his pulse--she might be married.

That was the big, underlying terror of his mind. In his restless pacing he stopped suddenly as if frozen. His brain was working this way and that, searching for light. In a moment he knew what he would do. He dashed down the familiar steep stairs; in four minutes more he had raced across the street to the rectory, and brought up, breathless, in the rector's study.

"What's the matter--a train to catch?" the rector demanded, regarding him.

"Just that, doctor. Could I be spared for three days?"

The rector had not failed to have his theories about this brilliant, hard-working, unaccountable, highly useful subaltern of his. His heart had one of its warmest spots for McBirney. Something was wrong with him, it had been evident for months; one must help him in the dark if better could not be done.

"Surely," said the rector.

There was a fast train west in an hour; the man and his bag were on it, and twenty-four hours later he was stumbling off a car at the solid, vine-covered, red brick station at Forest Gate. An inquiry or two, and then he had crossed the wide, short street, the single business street of the rich suburb, facing the railway and the station, and was in the post-office. He asked about one Robert Halarkenden. The postmaster regarded him suspiciously. His affair was to sort letters, not to answer questions. He did the first badly; he did not mean to do the other at all.