Strong Hearts Part 10

XI

Time did pa.s.s--in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive:

The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloom And the birds made music all the day.

Many of our days must not be the wine, but only small bits of the vine, of life. We cannot gather or eat _them_; we can only let them grow, branch, blossom, get here and there green grapes, scarce a tenth of a t.i.the, in bulk or weight, of the whole growth, and "in due season--if we faint not"

pluck the purpled cl.u.s.ters. And as the vine is--much, too, as the vine is tended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life for which to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than its intermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to put everything off upon "Senda," but really this was hers. I have edited it a trifle; her inability to make, in her p.r.o.nunciation, a due difference between wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral.

Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that she must have got her English first from books.

"Yes," she said, "I didt. Also I have many, many veeks English conversations lessons befo'e Ame'ica. But I cannot se p'onunciation get; because se spelling. Hah! I can _not_ sat spelling get!"

O, but didn't I want to offer my services? But, like Bunyan's Christian, I recalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of that female Solomon, "se aunt of my muss-er"--"One man can't ever'sing have, and mine"--establishment is already complete.

Meantime, Mrs. Fontenette, from farthest off in our group, had slipped around to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fan and blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openly fond.

"O no, I sank you!" answered Senda, in an undulating voice. "I sank you v'ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo' house, and I cannot let you take se trouble _too_ come _too_ mine. No, if I can have me only se right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sink I leave se p'onunciation to se mercy of P'ovidence."

Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband take her hand as he said, "The Providence that wou'n' have mercy on such a p.r.o.nunshation like that--ah well, 'twould have to become v'ey unpopular!"

"Anyhow," cooed Senda, "I risk it;" and then to his wife--"For se present, siss betteh I sew for you san spell for you."

Thus was our fair neighbor at every turn overmatched by the trustful love of the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority was her excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little by little became a staring fact--only not to Fontenette. You know, you can hide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long from those who do not; and if you are not old in sin--Flora and the Baron were infants--you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in perfidy.

We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help.

The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit, down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his wallowing animalisms; too dest.i.tute of the love that loves to give, or of courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real pa.s.sion, but forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.

How could we know these things so positively?

By the entomologist; the child of science. Science yearns ever to know and to tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strong _moral_ feeling against a lie; but he had never had the slightest _use_ for a lie, and a prevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanets in his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworth of these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. I noticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured and exhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails.

Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for bringing to the altar only the consent to be loved is to find herself, some time, at last, far from the altar, a t.i.tania, a love's fool. Our t.i.tania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to divert his mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one of our garden alleys in which to teach him--grace-hoops! He never caught one from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few throws, and was charmed with the toys--a genuine lover always takes to them kindly--but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she never again felt rested when her husband mentioned the game.

Furthermore, their countenances!--hers and the entomologist's--especially when in repose--you could read the depths of experience they had sounded, by the lines and shadows that came and went, or stayed, as one may read the depths of a bay by the pa.s.sing of wind and light, day by day, over its waters--particularly if the waters are not very deep.

They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and went or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated.

G.o.d knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually awakening back--or, shall we not say, being now first born?--to life, through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of sated, always of the famished sort.

XII

It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our hopes and our fears.

The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text "Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse, husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became embarra.s.singly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'

wives with him into the ark."

That has been our fat neighbor's best joke ever since, though he always says after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs.

Fontenette! Little did we think," etc. But he has never even suspected their secret.

The entomologist was the last of our pew-full to give heed to the pulpit.

When the preacher said that because it was a year of state elections, for which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse touched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showed no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that because the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terrible visitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little home from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all.

But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now the application of this great command to the individual life and character of man and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closest listener in the crowded throng.

The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions with which the speaker defined personal purity and the various false conceptions of it that pa.s.s current; abandoning the entrenched hills, so to speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventional rules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his least persuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, to surround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditional surrender. His periods were not as embarra.s.sing to a mixed audience as my citations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wisely subordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only in minds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be specially impressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence of the main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attention was provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming to birth in him.

In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has a rightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delight need be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share as senior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritual partic.i.p.ation it could not be clean, though church, state, and society should jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truth of these things; I believe them, but that is quite outside of our story.

The commonest error, he said, of those who covet spiritual cleanness is to seek a purification of self for self-purification's sake.

The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten his surroundings.

Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive, condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the general happiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, or in but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fall into manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, are clean within.

Because women, he went on, are in every way more delicately made than men, we easily take it for granted they are more spiritual. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense of condemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_ of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed's performance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their n.o.bility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends.

Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; and nothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to be so without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, no uncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or for righteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, invents some eleventh commandment to call that common which G.o.d hath cleansed; to call anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred to spotless affections.

The Baron muttered something in German, and Fontenette shut his mouth tight and straightened up in approbation.

At the close of the service we were not out of the pew before our escort was introducing Senda to his friends in front and behind as busily and elaborately as if that was what we had come for. Twice and again she cast so anxious an eye upon her husband--from whom Mrs. Fontenette had wisely taken shelter behind hers--that I softly said to her, "We'll take care of him."

A care he was! All the way down the aisle, amid the peals of the organ, he commented on the sermon aloud, mostly to himself but also to whichever of us he could rub his gla.s.ses against. Sometimes he mistook others for us until they stared. His face showed a piteous, weary distress, his thin hair went twenty ways, he seemed scarcely to know where he was or how to take his steps, and presently was saying to a strange lady crowded against him, as though it was with her he had been talking all along:

"Undt vhy shall we haf t'at owfool troubple? No-o, t'at vould kill me! I am not a cat to keep me alvays clean--no more as a hogk to keep me always not clean. No, I keep me--owdside--inside--always so clean as it comes ea.s.sy, undt I leave me so dirty as it comes ea.s.sy."

XIII

I took his arm into mine--his hand was hot--and drew him on alone. "Undt t'ose vomens," he persisted in the vestibule, "t'ey are more troubple yet as t'eir veight in goldt! I vish, mine Gott! t'ere be no more any vomens ut all, undt we haf t'e shiltern by mutchinery."

On the outer steps I sprang with others to save a young girl, who had stumbled, from pitching headlong to the sidewalk. Once on her feet again, after a limp or two she walked away uninjured; but when I looked around for my real charge he was not in sight. I hurried to Fontenette and his wife a few steps away, but he was not with them. The three of us turned back and came upon the rest of our group, but neither had they seen him.

Our other neighbor said he must have got into a car. I asked Senda if it was likely he would go home without trying to find us, and she replied that he might; but when we had all looked at one another for a moment she dded, with a distinct tremor of voice--and I saw that she feared temptation and conscience had unsettled his wits--"I sink he iss not ve'y vell. I sink he is maybe--I ton't know, but--I--I sink he iss not ve'y vell." She averted her face.

She agreed with us, of course, that there was no call for alarm, and Mrs.

Smith and I had to plead that we could not, the six of us, let her go home, away downtown, alone, while we should go as far the other way and remain all night ignorant of her husband's whereabouts. So our next door neighbor, my wife and I went with her, and his wife and the Fontenettes went home; for a conviction probably common to us all, but which no one cared to put into downright words, was that the entomologist, whether dazed or not, might wander up to one of our homes in preference to his own. In the street-car and afterward for a full hour at her house, Senda was very silent, only saying now a little and then a little more.

"_He_ iss all right! _He_ vill sure come. Many times he been avay se _whole_ night. Sat is se first time I am eveh afraid; is sat se vay when commencing to grow old? Yes, I sink sat is se reason."

When we had been at her cottage for nearly an hour, my neighbor started out on a systematic search; and half an hour later, I left Mrs. Smith with her and went also.

About one o'clock in the night, I came back as far as the corner nearest her house, but waited there, by appointment, with my neighbor; and very soon--stepping softly--he appeared.

"No sign of him?"