The Vision of Elijah Berl Part 15

Elijah interrupted her.

"I want to do things. You want to do things." He was striding back and forth across the floor of the office in growing excitement. "I don't care for money. You don't care for money. Look!" He laid his hand on her arm and pointed to the dusty street. "'Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.' Because of this, it is falling!

falling! But one can breathe the breath of life into these dry bones. It shall rise from its ashes. Deliver these lands from the hands of them who have wrought this,"--he flung his hand toward the street,--"from them and their kind, and Ysleta shall yet live. It shall look forth upon waters of plenty flowing from the mountains, upon green hillsides, and upon valleys standing out with fatness." He paused, his voice dropped almost to a whisper, but vibrating with intense emotion. "The vision of the future came to me. I was alone and I waited. Then you came into my life. What I lack, you have; patience, sympathy. You don't know what it means to me."

Helen's eyes were not frank and fearless now. They were shrinking, questioning, doubting; but they could not drop from Elijah's. She felt rather than knew her feet were trembling on the brink, but she could not turn back. The old fascination was yet strong upon her, but she felt its strength as a whole. Of its elemental compounds she was ignorant; the religious fanaticism that with frenzied kisses wears smooth a block of worthless stone; the merciless vanity that comes to one who is fixed in the belief that he is G.o.d's elect; the human element that demands love, sympathy and unswerving devotion to the idols he worships, whatever the cost to others. These were strong elements and Helen felt their power even as Ralph and others had felt it. There was in Elijah an unshaken, unshakable belief in himself. His work appealed to others as it had appealed to Helen. Others selected with unclouded judgment the grains of Elijah's enthusiasm from the chaff of his fanaticism. Others had not a woman's heart; Helen had. She was not conscious of it, of how it was blinding her judgment, of where it was leading her. This consciousness was dimly suggesting itself to her, not from herself but from Elijah.

Let him arouse that consciousness to active life, then she would know, then she would act!

Helen drew a deep, inspiring breath, looking up again. Her eyes were fiercely questioning.

No! This zealous pa.s.sion that strode sure-footed on the brink of destruction, could not be a.s.sumed, was not a.s.sumed. Helen was quick to judge and quick to decide when she saw clearly. She was clean of heart and pure of mind. She could not know that a human soul, lashed to frenzy by the stings of an outraged conscience, can yet clothe itself in robes that might be worn by an angel of light.

"Then I saw in my dream that there was a way to h.e.l.l, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the city of destruction."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Whether warned by intuition that one more step would be fatal, or whether his blinded sense of right was a.s.serting itself, the fact remained that for several days, Elijah was hardly ever in the office and even then for only a brief time. He seemed to Helen, absorbed if not sullen. At first she noticed this with positive relief; later she had misgivings which grew more insistent as time went on. She saw and she could not see. She saw the dream of Elijah's solitary years daily taking shape and form. She saw that his work had roots which struck deep in solid, lasting worth; she saw Ysleta founded on drifting sand. The one had solid business principles; the other had glittering promises as worthless as fairy gold. Was this all? From here on, her vision was blurred. Was this principle which one had and the other had not, after all, rooted deep in the mysterious influence which guided Elijah's life?

It was with positive grat.i.tude one morning that she heard Uncle Sid's ponderous knock on her door and his raucous voice calling to her.

"Come, Helen. Let's you and me take a walk before the sun has burned the dust all off o' the gra.s.s."

"All right, Uncle Sid! I'll be there in a moment."

She was up and dressed almost before the echo of Uncle Sid's voice had died away.

Uncle Sid eyed her approvingly as she stepped into the hall.

"Pretty trim lookin' craft," he remarked. "Don't take you long to get under way, either."

"Where are you going, Uncle Sid?"

"Anywhere, so I get out o' the smell o' varnish! Sand's better'n that."

Uncle Sid wrinkled his nose in deep disgust. "You can blow sand off; but this stuff! It just soaks into you till you can taste it."

Helen laughed.

"It is penetrating."

"Penetratin'!" Uncle Sid snorted. "I should say it was. If starvin'

cannibals just got one whiff of us they'd never think o' cookin' us unless they'd got used to lunchin' off pitch pine."

They pa.s.sed through the office, startling a dozing clerk and porter to forced attention; but these, discovering that their services were not needed, settled themselves to their former positions.

The outside air was heavy with the indescribable odor of newness and of hustling activity in drowsy repose.

Uncle Sid had a bag in his hand which b.u.mped softly against the outer door as he opened it.

"Oranges," he explained. "Hope to Gracious they ain't infected. I gave 'em a good chance. I kept 'em in my room last night."

Outside the door, he gained his first knowledge of a California fog. The sticky, clammy chill penetrated their garments like water. Uncle Sid b.u.t.toned his sailor jacket as he descended the broad steps.

"This settles it!"

"Settles what?" Helen inquired, her teeth chattering.

"This 'ere fog has given me an idea. I'm goin' down to the river, the Christopher Sawyer, or some such heathen name. I just bet it's one of those uncanny sort o' streams that fit this country like a wet sail to a spar."

"You'll have to explain, Uncle Sid; I'm stupid this morning."

Uncle Sid looked sceptical, but resumed his point.

"Just look at this fog! I bet that the Christopher Sawyer gets out o'

bed nights and distributes itself through the air general, an' waits for the sun to herd it back. I'm goin' down to see."

Helen followed the old gentleman, absently humoring him in his fancy.

She was in a listening mood rather than a talkative one, and Uncle Sid distracted her thoughts from her own perplexities.

"Gosh a'mighty!" Uncle Sid was out in the street, peering through the mist. "Seems like wadin' through skim milk."

"Which way?" Helen paused beside him.

"I snum to Gracious if I know! I didn't adjust my compa.s.ses last night, an' I guess I'll have to sail by dead reckonin'. Every country that ever I was in before, an' I've been in most of 'em, the water ran down hill.

Now here, what there is of it, don't seem to pay any attention to grades. When it comes to a hill, it just changes to gas, coagulates on the other side, an' goes on."

Uncle Sid was under way; Helen, absorbed in thought, followed absently in his wake. The palms which the industrious boomers had planted along the streets, loomed hazily through the fog ahead, gradually sharpened in outline, and again grew hazy with distance, as they pa.s.sed them by. From each palm, a tuft of yellow-green spears stood up defiantly above a cl.u.s.ter of gray spikes pointing downward to their warty trunks; a picture of hope eternal in spite of inevitable death, as cheerfully suggestive of mortality, as the upward pointing hands, and the downward-drooping willows on the tombstones of New England's puritan dead.

Helen was wondering what possible pleasure there could be in this walk, but it was new and strange to Uncle Sid and he ploughed steadily ahead.

In spite of the dragging sand that made her feet feel like lead, the exercise did not stir her blood to a glow of warmth. The physical chill of the fog, the tawny sand that seemed to tinge the creeping mist, the mental chill of her mood affected her so that it suddenly seemed to her as if she could not take another step.

"Aren't you hunting needless trouble, Uncle Sid?" she suddenly cried, stopping short and looking at Uncle Sid. "Let's go back. We can be no end more miserable in our awful hotel with only half the trouble."

"I ain't seen no signs of the Christopher Sawyer yet, exceptin' this."

Uncle Sid clove a semicircle through the mist with his outstretched arm.

"Oh, well, if it's a scientific voyage, Uncle Sid, let's go right on."

"Must be that. It's something an' it ain't no pleasure excursion, that's sure!"

They plodded on. It seemed to Helen as if it were miles, she was certain it was hours. At last it grew lighter, and the yellow tawn of the sand appeared to have risen higher and higher, till the whole of the shrouding mist was a yellow haze.

"I can't go another step, Uncle Sid." Helen stopped short and sat down on a hummock of sand.

"What's the matter little girl? You seem sort o' done up this mornin',"

Uncle Sid dropped beside her with a sounding slump. "There! here I be!