The Empty Sack Part 51

CHAPTER XXVI

During the next few months, the necessity for bracing Teddy and his sisters to meet fate threw Bob Collingham's personal preoccupations more and more into the background. All that was implied by the fact that Jennie was his wife and he was her husband went into this single supreme task.

Habit came to his aid by fitting them all to the situation as though they had never been in any other. They grew used to the fact that Teddy was in jail and might come out of it only by one exit. Teddy grew used to it himself. The family, once more at Marillo, grew used to the odd arrangement by which Bob and Jennie worked together and lived apart. The Collinghams grew used to the thought of the Folletts, and the Folletts to that of the Collinghams.

"You get used to anything," Junia commented to her husband, as one who has made a new discovery. "It seems to me as if Edith's living in that flat on Cathedral Heights and keeping only one maid is all I'd ever dreamed for her."

To Bob, this wonting of the mind was the easier because Wray stayed in California, his absence making it possible to leave in abeyance the subjects that couldn't yet be touched upon.

The first chance of fortifying the three girls seemed to present itself on a night in that autumn when it was still warm enough to sit on the screened piazza. His car was, as usual, before the door, and in an hour or so he would be making his way to Marillo. As he had returned to his work at the bank, his spare time was now in the evenings.

"If you want to do something for me, Gladys, there's a way."

He said this in reply to an aspiration of all three, in which the youngest sister had been spokesman.

Gladys's voice was eager and affectionate.

"What way, Bob? Tell us. We'll do anything."

Smoothing Pansy's back as she lay on his crossed knees, he considered how best to make it clear. Gladys sat close to him, as the one who most easily took him fraternally. Gussie, in whom he stirred an unusual self-consciousness, kept herself more aloof. Altogether in the shadow, Jennie was seemingly withdrawn, and yet more intensely aware of him than anyone.

"It's this way," he tried to explain: "Living is like climbing a mountainside. You drag yourself up to a ledge where you can stand and take breath, and feel that you've reached somewhere. Then, just as you think that you can camp there and be comfortable for the rest of your life, you find yourself summoned to move to the next ledge higher up. At that some of us get discouraged; some fall off and go down; but most of us brace ourselves for another great big test. Do you see?"

Gladys answered, doubtfully, "I see-a little."

"Well then, the thing we need for the test is pluck, isn't it?"

Gussie spoke dreamily.

"We need pluck for everything."

"So we do; and I often think that we don't make enough of it. Pluck is different from courage, because it's-how shall I say?-it's a little more cheery and intimate. Courage is like a Sunday suit that you wear for big occasions; but pluck is your everyday clothes, which you need all the time and feel easy in. Courage is n.o.ble and heroic-something we'd be shy about claiming. Pluck is the courage of the common man, which anyone can feel he has a right to."

"I can't," Gussie confessed. "I'm the awfulest coward."

With this Gladys agreed.

"Yes, Gus is a regular scarecat. I'm not afraid of hardly anything."

"We're all cowards in our way; but we could all be plucky when we mightn't like to call ourselves brave. Do you get what I mean?" Gladys made a sound of a.s.sent which seemed to answer for all three. "Well, what I'm trying to say is this: That the time has come when we're all being summoned-you three-and me-and Teddy-and all of us-to pull up to another ledge. It's going to be tough, but we can make up our minds that we can go through with it. I don't mean just knowing that we _must_ go through with it, but knowing that we _can_."

There was silence for the two or three minutes during which the girls thought this over.

"You said," Gladys reasoned, "that it was something we could do for you.

I don't see-"

"You'd do it for me, because it's easier to pull with strong people rather than with weak ones. You see, this is something which no one of us can meet alone; we must all meet it together, and the stronger each of us is the stronger we all are. Being strong is a matter of knowing that you're strong, just as being weak is the same. If I was sure that none of you was going to break down, I could be stronger myself, and we could all buck up Teddy."

After another brief silence, Gladys sighed.

"All the same, it would be terrible-if they did anything to him."

"Not more terrible than what millions of sisters faced in the last few years, with their brothers blown to bits. They were able to bear it by getting the idea that they could."

Jennie spoke for the first time.

"Ah, but that was glory, and this is disgrace."

"Then it calls for more pluck-that's all. The test comes to one in one way and to another in another. Real glory is in meeting it."

It was still Jennie who urged the difficulties.

"But when it's the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world!"

"Why, then, it's pluck again, and still more pluck. It _is_ the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world. It's harder than when women hear their boys are missing, and never know what becomes of them; and that's pretty hard. But, Jennie, hard things are the making of us, and if we come through the hardest test in the world and still keep our kindlier feelings and our common sense, why, then, we come out pretty strong, don't we?"

Jennie said no more. She liked to have him talk to them in this way. It took for granted that they were worth talking to, and to become worth talking to had been a secret aim since the day when she first learned the value of pictures and books. A good many times she had stolen in to confer with the genial custodian at the Metropolitan; a good many volumes she had hidden in her room to study after she went to bed. She had proved to herself that she had a mind; and now Bob was hinting at unknown resources of strength. It nerved her; it put new heart in her.

Having always been taught to consider herself weak, the suggestion that she could come through her test victoriously-that she could help him and Gussie and Gladys and Teddy and her mother to do the same-thrilled her like a sudden revelation.

To Bob himself the theme was not a new one, though it was the first time he had ever got any of it into words. He had been mulling over it and round it ever since the war first called him from a state of mental lethargy. Needing then a clew to life, he had cast about him without finding one. Neither Groton nor Harvard had ever given him anything he could seize. His parents hadn't given him anything, nor had their religion. Mentally, he had gone to France much as a jellyfish puts to sea, to be tossed about without volition of its own, and get its support from the food that drifts its way. Nothing much had drifted his way till he found himself in the hospital.

There, in the long, empty days and sleepless nights, the "why" of things played in and out of his brain like a devil's tattoo. He hated to think that all he had witnessed was futility and waste, and yet no explanation that anyone gave him made it seem otherwise. The question of suffering was the one that most perplexed him. What was the good of it? Why had it to be? Even the agony of his slashed head and crushed foot was almost beyond bearing; and what was that in comparison with all the pain, physical and emotional, at that minute in the world? What was the idea?

How did it get you anywhere?

In as far as he received an answer, it came one night when he waked from a light doze. He waked repeating certain words which he recognized as vaguely familiar:

"_Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ._"

He said them over two or three times before getting their significance.

"That's it," he thought then. "That's why we have to go through all this rumpus. 'Thou therefore endure _hardness_!' _Endure_ it! Accept it! Rub it in! That's it, by gum!" The expletive was the strongest in which his feeble state allowed him to indulge; but he continued: "That's what's the matter with me. I'm not hard. I'm soft. I'm soft inside. In my mind, in my heart, I'm like putty, like dough. It isn't that I'm tender; I'm just _soft_. If I've ever had to bear anything hard, I've kicked like the d.i.c.kens; and that's why I'm such an a.s.s now. 'Thou therefore endure _hardness_!' I'll be hanged if I won't try."

So the trying came to be a kind of religion-not a very vital religion, or one as to which he was very keen, and yet a religion. During the winter he was seeing Jennie, and the spring he married her, and the summer he spent in South America, he had fumbled with it without getting hold of it. Not till he began his strivings with Teddy, and his efforts to divert the minds of Teddy's family, did it grow sharply defined to his vision as a way of life.

Perhaps it was Teddy who taught him. Perhaps they mutually taught each other. He couldn't tell. He only became aware that something was working in the boy like the might of spirit in the inner man. Possibly Teddy was learning more quickly than himself because his lessons were more intensive.

He noticed this first on the day when he went, at the lawyer's suggestion, to back up the argument that to plead guilty was the only hope.

"I've done all I can with him," Stenhouse declared. "Now it's up to you.

He thinks you're G.o.d; and so you may have some influence."

"But I never will," Teddy answered, coolly. "I'd never have done society-as the chaplain calls it-any harm if society hadn't done me harm to begin with. I may be guilty in the second place, but society is guilty in the first, and no one will make me say anything different from that."

"That's all very well, Teddy; but society won't accept the plea."