The Debatable Land Part 29

"May I come, too, Lady Rachel? I mean when this mossy-whiskered physician unties me."

"May!" she said, scornfully. "You must. Where else should you go?"

"It's queer, but it seems like home, Hagar. I never saw it. Wasn't Hagar the mother of homeless Ishmaelites?"

So Mrs. Mavering was gone. One Sabrina, a fat negro woman, was left, who shook the floor with her tread, who wore extraordinary green kerchiefs on her head, and exploded in a melting gobble of mirth at Gard's every remark, till humor became a burden and he tried depression. "I shall die, Sabrina." Sabrina gobbled with joy. He tried wrath. "You're a galoop, Sabrina, a galoop!"--and Sabrina spilled his coffee over her billows of delight.

Mavering appeared and disappeared, brought with him once a big, deep-breathing man, slightly singular in dress, with a blown, gray beard and hair, soft eyes, and affectionate, impulsive ways. Mavering introduced him.

"He calls himself a poet, not a Plesiosaurus. His poetry looks as if it were written, nevertheless, by a saurian with one of his fins. I recommend you two to mutual and plastic embraces." Afterwards the gray man came often of himself, and would sit by the bedside, holding Gard's white, bony fingers, and recite:

"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking--"

"... do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?"

Or, "The Song of Myself"--

"A child said, 'What is the gra.s.s?' fetching it to me with full hands."

They grew suddenly friendly and confident, and talked art and letters.

"Some of that is good stuff," Gard remarked, "and it's all yeasty--something stirring in it. But I don't see--Here, you're an egoist, too--you simply whoop with it--and impartially affectionate at the same time as a self-obliterated Buddhist."

"They are one. The more I love myself, the more I love you."

"But what do you mean by, 'If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, translucent mould of me'? Now, that's belated Greek."

"It's nothing old. It's new and democratic."

Gard grumbled feebly.

"It sounds queer enough for a gospel. It won't do for me now. I shall have to fat up to it."

The gray man leaned forward with that tremulous, dewy look in his eyes.

He seemed to have an immense capacity of feeling, a physique made large to endure it.

"You didn't love yourself enough. All that wasn't love. You didn't love any one. Love inward, love outward, love everywhere, love some one most, love many much. All empty without that, a drifting boat without anchor.

You look for the boatman. No one there. Drowned? No. Never was there."

After a long silence--"Say that 'Cradle' thing again. It's a man's soul in the body of a whale. I don't believe it's new and democratic. It must be old and human. But I know what you mean."

So February and March were gone. Mavering said there was a big fight coming, went away, and came no more; nor the gray man, either, who was absorbed in his hospitals and his "average young man," and grown hollow-eyed with watchings and strenuous sympathy. Everything gone, nothing coming except spring and letters from Hagar; nothing staying except Gard himself and Sabrina, who reminded one of melting b.u.t.ter, but of whom the quant.i.ty grew no less. "Hagar! Hagar!" the high fluting voice seemed now to call continually, till the tension of his longing, Gard fancied, would pull Hagar to him if he did not go soon.

Late in April they packed him into a night train, and all night, or whenever he awoke and looked out, the earth seemed to be running away southward, as if sucked towards the whirlpool of the war, but the stars to be travelling northward with him. How impatient they were! How they snapped and danced and quivered! "Hurry, hurry! But you will see how we will shine over Hagar and forget the bleak laws of our journeyings, and be nightlamps in Helen's garden."

In the morning the train stood still in the terminal. He had some hours to wait. He crept through the station. The rattle and roar of the city met him at the door. The few returning soldiers like himself were lost in pursuing crowds, the only signs here of the war that to southward had seemed branded on the soil and written across the street fronts. A policeman caught sight of his uniform, and added some points to his rank, out of benevolence.

"What'll you have, colonel?"

"I think I'll have a cab."

The hurrying crowd paused, and cheered huskily when he drove away. He had the cabman drive across town and down the old avenue. At the church of the Holy Trinity there was a morning service beginning, and he climbed the steps. Within, a few hundred people were scattered about.

The only sound was the moaning of the organ. High up at one side he could see Moselle's hunched shoulders and dingy yellow head, faded with age, against the blue and gilded pipes. Moselle began to play a prelude, something stately and stern, like the thousand-century-old front of a gray crag, that might be well known but never could be familiar. The dingy old head moved Gard more than the prelude. He went back to the cab and drove down towards the Brotherhood. There was no flowing river so strange as the flowing river of the street. Every one was isolated, no doubt; but, after all, there was a bond. It ought to be celebrated and sworn to. A truckman on top of a dray looked down and probably caught him smiling to himself, grinned, and shouted, "How goes it?" Here and there on the sidewalk, too, men called out to him. Every door and window here between Trinity and the Brotherhood was familiar, and the brick walls and shuttered windows of the Brotherhood were eloquent. He thought. "I'll go in another time, and see Francis and his sick flower-bed, and the school and Andrew. It would scare me into a relapse to see the Superior now. n.o.body but the _bonus Deus_ ever understood him, and the _bonus Deus_ is in Hagar."

So he went back to the station. The train ran for an hour or more past glimpses of the sea, and then turned up the Wyantenaug Valley. At Hamilton he changed cars. The brave old river sweeps around a curve, and Hamilton lies in the curve. He could see the tower of the grand-stand in the Fair grounds, and Saint Mary's among the other steeples, but he sat still on the station platform, saw his trunk go by on a hand-truck, and watched beyond the freight-yards the rippling, glinting river, hurrying, busy, with its myriad little shining points of happiness. Was it the languor of his weariness or a magic in the river that flowed down from that promised land of Beulah, the mythical Hagar, the mother of the homeless--a Mecca, a Bethlehem, an Arden of wise flowers and musical brooks? The river seemed to gesture, and mutter syllables and sentences. Some one spoke loudly over his head. He looked up and saw Morgan Map.

"Going up the valley? So am I," Morgan said, and Gard nodded languidly.

It occurred to him, slowly, that he ought to be surprised. "The train's ready. Come along."

A practical man, this Map, Gard thought--a very genius of accomplishment. Why should he go into Beulah, too? Why not? But he must be doing something here, this forcible schemer, who did nothing unaccountably. If he meditated violence, it was a poor place for it.

Much better to have set fire to the house near the hospital, or corrupted Sabrina and poisoned the breakfast. Still--Gard pulled himself slowly up the car steps. His knees had not yet recovered from their wavering inadequacy--still, it was what Mavering would have called "a sportsmanlike situation." Map might try some simple, antique, and desperate thing. In that case it would be well to get one's gun where it could be pulled suddenly. Gunpowder was the handicap that made an invalid even with two hundred pounds and six-feet-two of red-haired, aggressive health. And all that was nonsense. What a sinewy force it was--this love of a woman!--that suddenly snapped a man's habits apart, dragged all his other motives indifferently after it; one of the universal energies. Joy and desperation, and the beast and the climbing soul, seemed packed in it more closely side by side than in any other experience.

Two or three men were in the car at one end. Morgan went to the other end and pulled over a seat. The two sat down facing each other, and Morgan produced cigars.

"I'm glad you brought these, however you happen to be here," said Gard.

"The doctor forbids them, so I don't carry any, but accept them from fate. It's a fine point of casuistry. I disliked that doctor--I disliked his whiskers, mostly. They used to get twisted up in my feverish nightmares. _Did_ you happen to be here?"

"No. I found out what time you were going, got leave of absence and came along."

"To see where I was going? I don't know that I understand why."

"Oh, partly. I had a general plan. I'll explain. I'm a practical man,"

he went on, quietly, after a moment. "I don't believe in loading up with the past. No scruples and no malice. What's no use to remember I forget.

They're all dead weight. I cut loose. That's the way I'm made. Now, I don't know how you're made--don't know what kind you are."

"Neither do I. I'm going up to Hagar to find out."

"Well! I said; I'm done, hedged out; hedged in, too. The question is, Can I cut out--cut loose? It depends on Windham. The more I thought about it the more I didn't get any definition of you. I concluded to come along--see what could be done--clear up the ground--know what's to pay. If you go to Hagar with the purpose supposed, that's all right.

I'm done, anyway. I have an errand of my own there--which doesn't concern you, however. I throw up my hand. I was in h.e.l.l and played for keeps. I say now, a man that's won needn't bear malice. No use in that.

He can call me what he chooses if it eases his mind. That won't hurt me any, nor him. He's safe. He needn't be dainty. It's a fact. I sent a tracer after you up the Shenandoah. G.o.d knows why it missed, I don't. I could have sworn there was daylight through Jack Mavering's head. Missed again. He walked in on me in Mrs. Mavering's sitting-room and made me feel like a wet hen. I put my head in my pocket and walked out. What else could I do? You're going to Hagar. All right, I'll show you where to go. What more can I do? I'm telling you all this now from policy."

"And I'm calling no names," Gard remarked. "Mavering professes to have a great admiration for you as a practical pract.i.tioner. You're probably right to come along."

"Oh, I figure pretty well. I was a fool--but still, that thing was figured pretty well. I'd have won out finally all right if--"

"I object to what you have in mind to say--prefer to think you wouldn't 'have won out finally, if--' Better not speculate. We'll call that a stipulation."

Map lifted his brows and settled himself more comfortably. A change, an expression of relief, slipped over his big, harsh-boned face, the only sign of the tension that he had been under.

"Stipulations--that's what I want. If there's anything to be done to restore amiability, good G.o.d! it's surely my part to do it."

Gard looked out of the window and was silent.

Green meadows and brown fallows moving past, white houses under aged maples, hills of climbing pasture lands and pale-green forests. Did men carry any sullen burdens in this valley? Better drop them and go unburdened into Hagar.