The Happy End Part 27

He picked one up tentatively. It was called A Letter. Elim opened it and regarded its tenuous violet script. Then, with an expression of augmented determination, he folded it again and placed it with its fellow at the bottom of the heap. He firmly attacked the topmost theme.

He read it slowly, made a penciled note in a small precise hand on its margin, folded it once more and marked it with a C minus. He went carefully through the pile, jotting occasional comments, judging the results with A, B or C, plus or minus. Finally only the two he had placed at the bottom remained.

Elim took one up again, gazing at it severely. He wondered what Rosemary Roselle had written about--in her absurd English--this time. As he looked at the theme's exterior, his attention shifted from the paper to himself, his conscience towered darkly above him, demanding a condemnatory examination of his feelings and impulses.

Had he not begun to look for, to desire, those essays from a doubtless erroneous and light young woman? Had he not even, on a former like occasion, awarded her effort with a B minus, when it was questionable if she should have had a C plus? Had his conduct not been dishonest, frivolous and wholly reprehensible? To all these inexorable accusations he was forced to confess himself guilty. He had undoubtedly, only a few minutes before, looked almost impatiently for something from Rosemary Roselle. Beyond cavil she should have had an unadorned C last month. And these easily proved him a broken reed.

He must at once take himself in hand, flames were reaching hungrily for him from the pit of eternal torment. In a little more he would be d.a.m.ned beyond any redemption. He was married ... shame! His thoughts turned to Hester, his wife for nine and more years.

Her father's farm lay next to the Meikeljohns'; the two places formed practically one convenient whole; and when Elim had been no more than a child, Meikeljohn Senior and Hester's parents had solemnly agreed upon a mutually satisfactory marriage. Hester had always been a thin pale slip of a girl, locally famous for her memory and grasp of the Scriptures; but it was only at her fourteenth year that her health began perceptibly to fail, at the same time that a succession of material mischances overwhelmed her family. Finally, borne down to actual privation, her father decided to remove to another section and opportunity. He sold his place for a fraction more than the elder Meikeljohn could pay ... but there was Hester, now an invalid; and there was the agreement that Meikeljohn had made when it had seemed to his advantage. The latter was a rigidly upright man--he accepted for his son the responsibility he himself had a.s.sumed, and Hester was left behind. s.p.a.ce in the Meikeljohn household was valuable, the invalid presented many practical difficulties, and, with the solemn concurrence of the elders of their church, Elim--something short of seventeen but a grave mature-seeming boy--and Hester were married.

The winter of his marriage Elim departed for college--his father was a just man, who had felt obscurely that some reparation was due Elim; education was the greatest privilege of which Meikeljohn could conceive, so, at sacrifices that all grimly accepted, Elim was sent to Cambridge.

There, when he had been graduated, he remained--there were already more at the Meikeljohn home than their labor warranted--a.s.sistant to the professor of philosophy and letters.

Elim again opened the paper before him and spread it severely on the table. The supposit.i.tious letter, "Two, Linden Row," opened in proper form and spelling, addressed to "Dearest Elizabeth." Its progress, however, soon wabbled, its periods degenerated into a confusion. It endeavored to be casual, easy, but he judged it merely trivial. At one paragraph, despite his resolution of critical impersonality, his interest deepened:

"On Thursday we have to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard.

Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, but unfortunately I found that I had said the same many times before, only about different heroes. My tale of Woe----"

Elim once more took himself firmly in hand; he folded the paper and sharply indorsed it with a C minus. Afterward he felt decidedly uncomfortable. He wondered if Rosemary Roselle would be made unhappy by the low marking? Probably she wouldn't care; probably all that occupied her mind were dress and company. Possibly she danced--light, G.o.dless.

The haze within deepened; he could see through the window the tops of the maples--they held a green sheen as if in promise of the leaves to follow. The robin whistled faint and clear.

Possibly she danced. Carried away on the gracious flood of the afternoon, he wondered what Rosemary Roselle looked like. He was certain that she was pretty--her writing had the unconscious a.s.surance of a personable being. Well, he would never know.... Rosemary Roselle--the name had a trick of hanging in the memory; it was astonishingly easy to repeat. He tried it aloud, speaking with a sudden emphasis that startled him. The name came back to him from the bare walls of his room like an appeal. Something within him stirred sharp as a knife. He rose with a deep breath, confused, as if some one else, unseen, had unexpectedly spoken.

III

His conscience, stirring again, projected the image of Hester, with her pinched glistening countenance, on his conjecturing. He resolutely addressed himself to the judgment of Rosemary Roselle's second paper, his lighter thoughts drowned in the ascending dark tide of his temperament It was called Our Waitress, and an instant antagonism for the entire South and its people swept over him.

He saw that the essay's subject was a negro, a slave; and all his impa.s.sioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence of the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride in the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under the domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have been, from the obdurate and resplendent granite ma.s.ses of the highland where they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim Meikeljohn's political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling fanaticism.

Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states had seceded, he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that slavery would be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of drastic means for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book in one hand, grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and unsparing blade for the wrong-doer.

He consciously centered this antagonism on Rosemary Roselle; he visualized her as a thoughtless and capricious female, idling in vain luxury, cutting with a hard voice at helpless and enslaved human beings.

He condemned his former looseness of being, his playing with insidious and destructive forces. A phrase, "Babylonish women," crept into his mind from some old yellow page. He read:

"Indy is a large light mulatto, very neat and very slow. She has not much Sense, but a great deal of Sensibility. Helping her proves Fatal.

The more that is done for her the less well does she work.... Indy is very unfortunate: going out with a present of money she lost every penny. Of course she was incapable of work until the sum was replaced."

Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of shiftlessness.

If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined beyond redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and unapproving.

It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of Southern iniquities that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his responsibility had allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that her very name held a dangerous potentiality--it came too easily to the tongue; it had a wanton sound like a silk skirt.

The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so well.

IV

The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a Confederate States of America in February, the scattered condition of the Union forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.

The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all except Elim Meikeljohn--in Boston he knew money would be spent.

He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the letter. Its beginning was commonplace--"My dear son, Elim"--but what followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained: Hester, his wife, was dead.

At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened to him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had never considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to think of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her invalid's chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon others, more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the increasing difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation, than his mother's flushed toiling.

Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fort.i.tude; any rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection upon Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted it the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his entire existence had been overthrown.

He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled--his father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why this had been done. "A black swelling" was included in the details. He finished:

"And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would be better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible Being Who worketh His will in the night."

Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning--he was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts beyond control whirled in his brain.

Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which--suppressed by his rigid adherence to a code of duty--he had not been conscious, leaped into vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self. He grew aware of himself as an ent.i.ty, of the world as a broad and various field of exploit and discovery.

There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home; and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the realization that he detested the whole thing--the hours in cla.s.s; the droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the inst.i.tution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their majority; the covert humility he had been forced to a.s.sume--by the thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior position--turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.

The hour for supper approached and pa.s.sed, but Elim did not leave his room. He walked from wall to wall, by turns arrogant and lost in his new situation. Of one thing he was certain--he would give up his occupation here. It might do for some sniveling sycophant of learning and money, but he was going forth to--what?

He heard footfalls in the bare hall below, and a sudden easy desire for companionship seized him; he drew on the st.u.r.dy Meikeljohn coat and descended the stairs to the lower floor. Harry Kaperton's door was open and Elim saw the other moving within. He advanced, leaning in the doorway.

"Back early," Elim remarked. "What's new at Parker's?"

Kaperton was unsuccessful in hiding his surprise at the other's unexpected appearance and direct question. "Why--why, nothing when I left;" then more cordially: "Come in, find a chair. Bottle on the table--oh, I didn't think." He offered an implied apology to Elim's scruples.

But Elim advanced to the table, where, selecting a decanter at random, he poured out a considerable drink of pale spirits. Harry Kaperton looked at him in foolish surprise.

"Had no idea you indulged!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Always took you to be a severe Puritan duck."

"Scotch," Elim corrected him, "Presbyterian."

He tilted the gla.s.s and the spirits sank smoothly from sight. His throat burned as if he had swallowed a mouthful of flame, but there was a quality in the strong rum that accorded with his present mood: it was fiery like his released sense of life. Kaperton poured himself a drink, elevated it with a friendly word and joined Elim.

"I'm going home," the former proceeded. "You see, I live in Maryland, and the situation there is getting pretty warm. We want to get our women out of Baltimore, and our affairs conveniently shaped, before any possible trouble. I had a message this evening to come at once."

The two men presented the greatest possible contrast--Harry Kaperton had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed facile excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of tremendous emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult within, harsh and dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his somber greenish-black dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and they took a second drink, then a third.

Kaperton's face flushed, he grew increasingly voluble, but Elim Meikeljohn was silent; the liquor made no apparent impression upon him.

He sat across the table from the other with his legs extended straight before him. They emptied the decanter of spirits and turned to sherry, anything that was left. Kaperton apologized profoundly for the depleted state of his cellar--knowing that he was leaving, he had invited a party of men to his room the night before. He was tremendously sorry that Elim had been overlooked--the truth being that no one had known what a good companion Elim was.

It seemed to Elim Meikeljohn, drinking sherry, that the night before he had not existed at all. He did not a.n.a.lyze his new being, his surprising potations; he was proceeding without a cautious ordering of his steps.

It was neither a celebration nor a protest, but instinctive, like the indiscriminate gulping of a man who has been swimming under the water.

"Why," Kaperton gasped, "you've got a head like a cannon ball."

He rose and wandered unsteadily about, but Elim sat motionless, silent, drinking. He was conscious now of a drumming in his ears like distant martial music, a confused echo like the beat of countless feet. He tilted his gla.s.s and was surprised to find it empty.

"It's all gone," Kaperton said dully.

He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim, felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose, sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.