An hour later Thurley discovered herself in bed, a doctor watching her
and Miss Clergy in the doorway, her face gray with apprehension. A nurse
whispered she had fainted while standing at the window; that there was no
need for alarm. The doctor added that she had brain fag, nothing serious
if she would go away to some place where she could be pulled together.
After more suave remarks and those little sugar-coated pellets left
behind, he departed and Thurley sent the nurse and Miss Clergy away,
tossing restlessly and wondering if she could make them understand that
she would not go to a milk-fed sanitarium where nurses sneaked about in
rubber-heeled shoes and one had to exclaim over sunsets with the other
patients, to say nothing of bulletlike little biscuits and health foods
and the talk on “Iceland Moss” given by a convalescent missionary!
When a wild rose tries to become a hothouse variety there is certain,
some time during the transition, to be a bad scratching of thorns which
was all that ailed Thurley.
In the morning Bliss Hobart dropped in to see her and Thurley brightened
so visibly that the nurse left the room, grinning superciliously.
“Bother opera things,” Bliss said. “I’m really glad you fainted
yesterday; you fainted enough for me, too, didn’t you? I was just
considering getting up on top of Grant’s Tomb and dancing a Highland
fling—masculine form of nerve fag.... I say, Thurley, do you know you’re
coming with me to my hermitage? I’m leaving to-night and we’re to bully
Miss Clergy into being chaperone.” Here they both laughed at each other
like children and the pellets almost lost the sugar coating in wrath at
the small part they played in curing this wild rose person! “Oh, yes, you
are coming. I was just leaving for Blessed Memory myself when they told
me you were ill. A month there will set you right.”
“You mean the place you disappear to—”
“And Lissa hints of a harem, a dope den, a gambling lair and what not?
Yes, ma’am, Blessed Memory is its name. You’ll be there this time
to-morrow. Remember, rouge boxes and high heels not admitted.”
He left her to thank her kind fortune she had had sense enough to faint
and bruise herself slightly. Why, oh, why, had she never thought of doing
so beforehand? She was humming as she waited for her maid to come and get
a steamer trunk.... Miss Clergy watched from the corner of the doorway
unawares. But what she thought she kept to herself.
* * * * *
Blessed Memory, buried in the wildest part of Maine, with the nearest
post office entirely unpronounceable, proved to be an advance sample
of paradise. Being perfect there was nothing complex about it—and
very little to tell concerning it. Time flew, the hours tumbling over
themselves like babies at play. It was exactly like the thirsty traveller
coming upon the ice-cold mountain spring and drinking his fill with no
comment but the satisfied and grateful, “A-a-h, man alive!” So it was
with Thurley.
It seemed that Hobart had come into the wilderness prepared to prove
that he could make it habitable, as he told her. After he had built a
shack, found his food and water, lived by himself for weeks at a time to
experiment with bark, twigs and logs—learning the call of wood beasties
and forgetting the cries of men—he permitted himself a few extravagances
in the way of tools and furnishings until Blessed Memory, as he called
the small, silvery shingled house set in a sand dune like a great
moonstone in palest gold, came to be a reputable habitation where he took
refuge each year, “living,” he said, in order that he might “exist the
rest of the time.”
Miss Clergy was ill at ease in her nunlike bedroom without ornament and
scant of furnishings. But she found thought for reflection in watching
Thurley and Bliss as they went off to try for fresh fish. Her queer,
bright eyes would blink rapidly as if a succession of unpleasing thoughts
had attacked her conscience and she refused to give way to them. When
they would return and hallo for her to answer, she would usually take
refuge in the plea of eternal neuralgia and leave them to their own ways
for the remainder of the day!
The rooms contained old-style braided rugs and a spinning wheel which,
to Hobart’s delight, Thurley knew how to use, thanks to Betsey Pilrig,
old blue china and pewter, a square piano on which Hobart played jingling
tunes while Thurley sang them as gloriously as when she played missionary
with Philena. The beds were mahogany, so was the fire settle, and there
was an outdoor Dutch oven which her host insisted on using, a pump and a
well and a tiny barn where his wheezy little automobile rested when it
was not chasing up and down country roads in search of supplies.
He had no real neighbors nor did he wish for them. He had bought
enough acres on all sides of Blessed Memory to secure him freedom from
molestation. He wanted to feel, so he explained, that even lavender and
black velvety butterflies, great, golden bees and humming-birds might
come and go at will.
There were no books or even writing materials in the house. “When I have
to go in to town for supplies, I get my extremely urgent mail and reply
to it while at the post office,” he explained. “But I wish nothing inky
about the hermitage.”
Thurley, who had first viewed the little house and the wild surroundings
with dismay as to what she would ever do with herself, fell to work
within a few days and became a busy Martha engrossed with house and
outdoor work, plying the axe while Hobart was away, replanting flower
beds, picking berries, climbing trees to sit astride some sturdy limb and
dream of nothing, actually to forget language, as it were, entering the
realm of delicious thought, rejoicing in merely singing _sounds_ as did
the birds, instead of clumsy words needing to be phrased and accented.
“I never knew any one could be so busy in such a wilderness,” she told
Hobart one late afternoon when they had tramped clear to the sea-coast
and sat resting before they journeyed homeward with the aid of barn
lanterns.
“Because you and I and other creatures who live by their wits most of the
time and have the tasks of physical existence performed for them, need
to remember that one can almost see and feel the truth of eternity ...
the eternal seasons, Thurley, the ever-dying, ever-reviving blossoms, the
migration of the birds, the continual progress and continual decay of all
forms of life—that is what makes us really seem so busy. Because most of
the time we are nibbling at a fragment of this supreme truth, boxed up in
a steam-heated apartment with a man and a maid and an engagement tablet
to be our aids, we sing some silly opera and return to the apartment
convinced we are quite indispensable to mankind. We need to come to such
a place as this and humbly realize eternity. That is why I named the
little house Blessed Memory, because I carry the thought with me when I
lock the door for the long, white winter.”
Thurley was silent, the most sympathetic answer she could have made. She
was mentally quoting,
“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,
“Bright hollows of billowy foam”
—as suitable for the scene.
It was a quiet sea haven they had found. Bliss had tramped there many
times, he told her. Around them were wet sea wrack and pungent bog
myrtle, tall protruding cliffs with the green grass clinging to them and
dusky birds incessantly slipping about. The sea itself was a shadowy,
gray wilderness broken with rosy trails which led to darkish mystery. In
the sky a star trembled.
“Tell me more,” she demanded childishly.
“What about? I must seem as bad as a complete reading course shipped on
without warning,” he began, playing with pebbles, “but do you know what I
was thinking, Thurley? That the art vanguard are certain to succeed, that
this time of strife should not be for merely freedom of seas and colony
disputes—it is the time of discord in which all matters shall have their
hearing. And then, one sees absurd glimpses now and then that make one
want to shout for joy—”
“What?
“Oh, a life insurance agent with a well worn copy of Keats in his inner
pocket or the apparently frivolous hairdresser who reads Ruskin’s essays
with the girl who sells fountain pens during lunch hour—or a very famous
prima donna who finally admits that the shadow can never be the substance
and that works without faith are dead, too!”
Thurley was thinking in disconnected fashion. “Tell me, will the war
level class as well, so that it will result in there being no very rich
or no poor?”
He shook his head. “We must always have wealth demonstrate herself with
freedom; we must always have class. Let each man be what he was best
intended; we cannot have one class, one rule, one creed any more than one
dimension. The Cause who made such eternal contrasts as the snowbound
north and orchid-decorated tropics, the sagebrush desert and the French
vineyards—has the example not been set us for all time? There must be
wealth and its opposite poverty and the sunny, useful medium running
between the two and understanding each alike. Remember, player and worker
are like the wings of a bird, equal and necessary. Class must exist
the same as vicarious atonement—the mother bearing the child, soldiers
fighting for stay-at-homes. The ancient but sometimes forgotten or denied
unity of the race is the belief in immortality.”
It was dark; the sea with the white rocks rising out of the water here
and there gave the effect of the black and white cathedral front at
Siena. Hobart lit their lanterns and urged a homeward journey.
“I don’t want to go,” Thurley begged. “Tell me more—”
“Yet you try to make me think you do not believe my vision,” he said,
“that you will not be like the soldier in the old song, who did not halt
but ‘he gave the bridle-reins another shake.’”
“Tell me why artists have different lives from the world in general,” she
retorted.
“There are some isolated, superb but lonely souls whose work robs them
of human ties and leaves them chaste yet wistful. True, again, on the
firm yet terrible foundation of expiated sins is genius often laid—the
splendid blossom of the tree of experience. The greatest leaders have
often, to their enemies’ delight, pleaded guilty to a youth of folly,
small faults, petty actions—and yet there has come an awakening and with
the handicap of the past as a ballast, they forge on to the heights. I
sometimes think handicaps are as necessary for an artist as ballast for a
balloon. Without them we would sail upwards beyond ordinary comprehension
and the whole purpose would be of no avail. Let us stay sufficiently
earthbound to insure usefulness and proper responsibility.... Come,
Thurley, even if the poets say the children of dark and the children of
light tread the same pathway, our lanterns may fail us and we would have
to scramble to find the house.” He helped her up.
“You mean, too,” she said, not content to stop the argument, “that
artists should set the example—as well as prescribe one—”
“Those who are not sufficiently developed to perceive the higher cosmic
laws must have man-made laws to teach the first great principle—which is
to obey. Obedience either forced or voluntary is the first requisite in
moulding character. Those of us who can glimpse the higher laws must also
keep annoying man-made ones to help those less developed by our example.”
Thurley began picking her way along the beach, singing softly:
If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!
If all the trees were one tree—what a great tree it would be!
If all the axes were one axe—what a great axe that would be!
AND if all the men were one man—what a great man Bliss would be!
Three weeks later when Hobart drove Thurley into the nearest station, he
asked almost timidly if she felt it had been worth while.
“So worth while,” she said, “it showed me what I must not do.”
Miss Clergy gave a sigh of relief as she was settled on the local train
running down to the main line.
“You look like a little girl again,” she told Thurley. “I’m sure it was
very kind of him.... Did you ever fancy he might fall in love with you?
Imagine how distressing it would be for him—knowing your position!”
Thurley resigned herself to the inevitable, and as they jolted onward she
thought of how very great and how very small was love and that from atom
to apostle the personal equation would come blundering in on one’s most
sacred thoughts.