THE REASON OF A WOMAN WHO HAD NO REASON
It was not a jest--Nancy's telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going
to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence
to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner
woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a
secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice
overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise
of the train did no more than confuse the words so that only she could
hear them.
When the exciting time of this listening had gone and she stepped from
the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart
spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats--a thing which, now
that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at
the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees
weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend
embarrassingly in either direction.
Then in the outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of
her crass fatuity. She was quickly in a carriage, eager to avoid any
acquaintance, glad the driver was no village familiar who might amiably
seek to regale her with gossip. They went swiftly up the western road
through its greening elms to where Clytie kept the big house--her own
home while she lived, and the home of the family when they chose to go
there.
At last, the silent, cool house with its secretive green shutters rose
above her; the wheels made their little crisping over the fine metal of
the driveway. She hastily paid the man and was at the side door that
opened into the sitting-room. As she put her hand to the knob she was
conscious of Clytie passing the window to open the door.
Then they were face to face over the threshold--Clytemnestra, of a
matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of
herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her
face, was unmistakably maidenish--Clytie of the eyes always wise to
another's needs and beaming with that fine wisdom.
She started back from the doorway by way of being playfully
dramatic--her hands on her hips, her head to one side at an astounded
angle. Yet little more than a second did she let herself simulate this
welcoming incredulity--this stupefaction of cordiality. There must be
quick speech--especially as to Nancy's face--which seemed strangely
unfamiliar, set, suppressed, breathless, unaccountably young--and there
had to be the splendid announcement of another matter.
"Why, child, is it you or your ghost?"
Nancy could only nod her head.
"My suz! what ails the child?"
Here the other managed a shake of the head and a made smile.
"And of all things!--you'll never, never, never guess!--"
"There--there!--yes, yes--yes! I know--know all about it--knew it--knew
it last night--"
She had put out a hand toward Clytie and now reached the other from her
side, easing herself to the doorpost against which she leaned and
laughed, weakly, vacantly.
"Some one told you--on the way up?"
"Yes--I knew it, I tell you--that's what makes it so funny and
foolish--why I came, you know--" She had now gained a little in
coherence, and with it came a final doubt. She steadied herself in the
doorway to ask--"When did Bernal come?"
And Clytie, somewhat relieved, became voluble.
"Night before last on the six-fifteen, and me getting home late from the
Epworth meeting--fire out--not a stick of kindling-wood in--only two
cakes in the buttery, neither of them a layer--not a frying-size chicken
on the place--thank goodness he didn't have the appetite he used
to--though in another way it's just downright heartbreaking to see a
person you care for not be a ready eater--but I had some of the plum
jell he used to like, and the good half of an apple-John which I at once
het up--and I sent Mehitty Lykins down for some chops--"
"Where is he?"
There had seemed to be a choking in the question. Clytie regarded her
curiously.
"He was lying down up in the study a while ago--kicking one foot up in
the air against the wall, with his head nearly off the sofy onto the
floor, just like he used to--there--that's his step--"
"I can't see him now! Here--let me go into your room till I freshen and
rest a bit--quick--"
Once more the indecisive knees seemed about to bend either way under
their burden. With an effort of will she drew the amazed Clytie toward
the open door of the latter's bedroom, then closed it quickly, and stood
facing her in the dusk of the curtained room.
"Clytie--I'm weak--it's so strange--actually weak--I shake so--Oh,
Clytie--I've got to cry!"
There was a mutual opening of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet
eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck--and
stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from
head to foot--the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing
shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her
arms from that desperate grip of Clytie's neck. Long she held her so,
even after the fit of weeping passed, clasping her with arms in which
there was almost a savage intensity--arms that locked themselves more
fiercely at any little stirring of the prisoned one.
At last, when she had lain quiet a long time, the grasp was suddenly
loosened and Clytie was privileged to ease her aching neck and cramped
shoulders. Then, even as she looked down, she heard from Nancy the
measured soft breathing of sleep. She drew a curtain to shut out one
last ray of light, and went softly from the room.
Two hours later, as Clytemnestra attained ultimate perfection in the
arrangement of four glass dishes of preserves and three varieties of
cake upon her table--for she still kept to the sinfully complex fare of
the good old simple days--Nancy came out. Clytie stood erect to peer
anxiously over the lamp at her.
"I'm all right--you were a dear to let me sleep. See how fresh I am."
"You do look pearter, child--but you look different from when you came.
My suz! you looked so excited and kind of young when I opened that door,
it give me a start for a minute--I thought I'd woke out of a dream and
you was a Miss in short skirts again. But now--let me see you closer."
She came around the table, then continued: "Well, you look fresh and
sweet and some rested, and you look old and reasonable again--I mean as
old as you had ought to look. I never did know you to act that way
before, child. My neck ain't got the crick out of it yet."
"Poor old Clytie--but you see yesterday all day I felt queer--very
queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn't rest, and I lay awake
and excited all night--and something seemed to give way when I saw you
in the door. Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right
now--"
She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her--standing in the doorway of
the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him. She went to
him with both hands out and he kissed her.
"Is it Nance?"
"I don't know--but it's really Bernal."
"Clytie says you knew I had come."
"Clytie must have misunderstood. No one even intimated such a thing. I
came up to-day--I had to come--because--if I had known you were here,
wouldn't I have brought Allan?"
"Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few
days--there was some business to do here. Dear old Allan! I'm aching to
get a stranglehold on him!"
"Yes--he'll be so glad--there's so much to say!"
"I didn't know whom I should find here."
"We've had Clytie look after both houses--sometimes we've rented
mine--and almost every summer we've come here."
"You know I didn't dream I was rich until I got here. The lawyer says
they've advertised, but I've been away from everything most of the
time--not looking out for advertisements. I can't understand the old
gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a
thoroughly decent chap."
"Oh, hardly a reprobate!"
"Worse, Nance--an ass--think of my talking to that dear old soul as I
did--taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith. I
shudder when I remember it. And yet I honestly thought he might be made
to see things my way."
Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a
look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of
their last parting--that singular moment when they blindly groped for
each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling
handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all
time since--and increasingly during the later years--secret memories of
it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to
fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but
that they had trembled--those two strange hands that had both repelled
and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of
triumphant certainty.
Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew
in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.
Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless
above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those
all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual
look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little
awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.
They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic
watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of
this or that esteemed fleshpot.
Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the
returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and
the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during
the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known,
with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in
the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a
face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that
one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next,
coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.
As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming
forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from
inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting,
judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the
perfect whole out of many little imperfections.
Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to
a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer
relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered
presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even
his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she
listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far
night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled
together--with such prescience that through all the years her hand was
to feel the groping of his.
Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by
side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the
lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered
her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her
dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew
the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the
wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled
rooms.
And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had
played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy.
Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal's
devising had frightened them for the last time--when in a sudden flash
of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other
with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One
day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of
their child's faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an
institution, the Gratcher was imperishable--that it was brute humanity's
instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while
the child's Gratcher was not the man's, the latter was yet of the same
breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that
the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter
him when he hears God's call to live.
She had not been able to understand, nor did she now. She was looking
out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung--to the rustic
chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that
last evening. Then with a start she was back in the present. Nancy of
the old days must be shut fat in the old house. There she might wander
and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never
could she come forth; over the threshold there could pass only the wife
of Allan Linford.
Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her--a
fear born of his hand's hold upon hers when they had met. She shrank
under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted. Then from
her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking
to know how great was her peril--to learn what measure of defense would
best insure her safety--recognising fearfully the traitor in her own
heart.
Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they
had been silent for many minutes. This could not safely be--this
insidious, barrier-destroying silence. She seemed to hear his heart
beating high from his own sense of peril. But would he help her? Would
he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for
the old days--would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no
man's law but his own? She shivered at the thought of his nearness--of
his momentous silence--of his treacherous ally.
She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen
and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For
a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer
terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving
fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers
with a boy's pleading and a man's power? And what of her own secret
guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across space had
responded to him through that imperious need of her heart. Swiftly in
this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical
eyes--saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the
hidden traitor. More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt
his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak. With a little
steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light,
she waited for the sound of his voice--waited as one waits for something
"terrible and dear"--the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or
pass--to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against
elemental forces.
"Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?"
She stared stupidly. So tense had been her strain that the words were
mere meaningless blows that left her quivering. He thought she had not
heard.
"Would you mind my pipe--and this very mild mixture?"
She blessed him for the respite.
"Smoke, of course!" she managed to say.
She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his
pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch. Then he struck the match and in that
moment she suffered another shock. The little flame danced out of the
darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter
quietness. The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body
placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving. The shaded eye
surveyed some large and tranquil thought--and in that eye the soul sat
remote, aloof from her as any star.
She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief--a
relief as cold as stone. She had not felt before that there was a chill
in the wide sweetness of the night. Now it wrapped her round and slowly,
with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.
The silence grew too long. With a shrugging effort she surmounted
herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in
the gloom. A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her.
Her intellect awoke to inquiries. She began to question him of his days
away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.
"You know, Nance, I was a prodigal--only when I awoke I had no father to
go to. Poor grandad! What a brutal cub I was! That has always stuck in
my mind. I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver. I had
found a lodging in the police station. There were others as forlorn--and
Nance--did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind? It's
sublime. We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and
pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us. You would have
thought that none of them could fear bad luck--worse luck--none of them
could have been more dismally situated. But, do you know? most of those
fellows became nervous--as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been
pampered princes in a time of revolution. I was one of the two that
volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.
"We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly
along the street a few blocks away from the station. We grappled with
him and hustled him back to the crowd. He slept with us on the floor,
and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he
talked to himself a good bit. He and I awoke earliest next morning. I
asked him if he was hungry and he said he was. So I bought two fair
breakfasts with the money I'd saved for one good one, and we started out
of town. This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind
to find a certain friend of mine--a chap named Hoover. The second day
out I discovered that this queer man was the one who'd been turning
Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind. He was
running away because he liked a quieter life."
He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance--until she prompted
him.
"Yes, he said, 'Father' had commanded him to go into the wilderness to
fast. He was always talking familiarly with 'Father,' as we walked. So I
stayed by him longer than I meant to--he seemed so helpless--and I
happened at that time to be looking for the true God."
"Did you find him, Bernal?"
"Oh, yes!"
"In this strange man?"
"In myself. It's the same old secret, Nance, that people have been
discovering for ages--but it is a secret only until after you learn it
for yourself. The only true revelation from God is here in man--in the
human heart. I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance--I'd had so
much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me--but I mustn't bore you
with it."
"Oh, but I must know, Bernal--you don't dream how greatly I need at this
moment to believe _something_--more than you ever did!"
"It's simple, Nance. It's the only revelation in which the God of
yesterday gives willing place to the better God of to-day--only here
does the God of to-day say, 'Thou shalt have no other God before me but
the God of to-morrow who will be more Godlike than I. Only in this way
can we keep our God growing always a little beyond us--so that to-morrow
we shall not find ourselves surpassing him as the first man you would
meet out there on the street surpasses the Christian God even in the
common virtues. That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted,
Nance--faith in a God that a fearless man could worship."
He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent
look still in his eyes. By it she realised how far away from her he
was--realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation. He smoked a
while before speaking.
"Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long
time--the years went before I knew it. At first I stayed with this
healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they
found him dead. He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that
he would live until he accomplished it. But there he was, dead for want
of a little food. Then I stayed a long time alone--until I began to feel
that I, too, had something for the world. It began to burn in my bones.
I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn't saved
it--not even knowing it was lost. But I kept thinking--a man can be so
much more than himself when he is alone--and it seemed to me that I saw
at least two things the world needed to know--two things that would
teach men to stop being cowards and leaners."
Her sympathy was quick and ardent.
"Oh, Bernal," she said warmly, "you made me believe when you believed
nothing--and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me
believe again! And you've come back with a message! How glorious!"
He smiled musingly.
"I started with one, Nance--one that had grown in me all those years
till it filled my life and made me put away everything. I didn't accept
it at first. It found me rebellious--wanting to live on the earth. Then
there came a need to justify myself--to show that I was not the mere
vicious unbeliever poor grandad thought me. And so I fought to give
myself up--and I won. I found the peace of the lone places."
His voice grew dreamy--ceased, as if that peace were indeed too utter
for words. Then with an effort he resumed:
"But after a while the world began to rumble in my ears. A man can't cut
himself off from it forever. God has well seen to that! As the message
cleared in my mind, there grew a need to give it out. This seemed easy
off there. The little puzzles that the world makes so much of solved
themselves for me. I saw them to be puzzles of the world's own
creating--all artificial--all built up--fashioned clumsily enough from
man's brute fear of the half-God, half-devil he has always made in his
own image.
"But now that I'm here, Nance, I find myself already a little
bewildered. The solution of the puzzles is as simple as ever, but the
puzzles themselves are more complex as I come closer to them--so complex
that my simple answer will seem only a vague absurdity."
He paused and she felt his eyes upon her--felt that he had turned from
his abstractions to look at her more personally.
"Even since meeting you, Nance," he went on with an odd, inward note in
his voice, "I've been wondering if Hoover could by some chance have been
right. When I left, Hoover said I was a fool--a certain common variety
of fool."
"Oh, I'm sure you're not--at least, not the common kind. I dare say that
a man must be a certain kind of fool to think he can put the world
forward by leaps and bounds. I think he must be a fool to assume that
the world wants truth when it wants only to be assured that it has
already found the truth for itself. The man who tells it what it already
believes is never called a fool--and perhaps he isn't. Indeed, I've come
to think he is less than a fool--that he's a mere polite echo. But oh,
Bernal, hold to your truth! Be the simple fool and worry the wise in the
cages they have built around themselves."
She was leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of all save that her starved
need was feasting royally.
"Don't give up; don't parrot the commoner fool's conceits back to him
for the sake of his solemn approval. Let those of his kind give him what
he wants, while you meet those who must have more. I'm one of them,
Bernal. At this moment I honestly don't know whether I'm a bad woman or
a good one. And I'm frightened--I'm so defenseless! Some little soulless
circumstance may make me decisively good or bad--and I don't want to be
bad! But give me what I want--I must have that, regardless of what it
makes me."
He was silent for a time, then at last spoke:
"I used to think you were a rebel, Nance. Your eyes betrayed it, and the
corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they'd go
further up before they went down--as if you'd laugh away many solemn
respectabilities. But that's not bad. There are more things to laugh at
than are dreamed of. That's Hoover's entire creed, by the way."
She remembered the name from that old tale of Caleb Webster's.
"Is--is this friend of yours--Mr. Hoover--in good health?"
"Fine--weighs a hundred and eighty. He and I have a ranch on the
Wimmenuche--only Hoover's been doing most of the work while I thought
about things. I see that. Hoover says one can't do much for the world
but laugh at it. He has a theory of his own. He maintains that God set
this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another
universe or something. He says that when the Creator glances back at us
again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its
clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for
all--enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war
than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer,
in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, the matter of
worshipping Him has made most of the war and other deviltry--the hatred
and persecution and killing among all the little brothers--he will laugh
aloud before he reflects, and this little ballful of funny, passionate
insects will be blown to bits. He says if the world comes to an end in
his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and
perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about
Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or
Transubstantiation or 'communion in two kinds' or something. He insists
that a sense of humour is our only salvation--that only those will be
saved who happen to be laughing for the same reason that God laughs when
He looks at us--that the little Mohammedans and Christians and things
will be burned for their blasphemy of believing God not wise and good
enough to save them all, Mohammedan and Christian alike, though not
thinking excessively well of either; that only those laughing at the
whole gory nonsense will go into everlasting life by reason of their
superior faith in God."
"Of course that's plausible, and yet it's radical. Hoover's father was a
bishop, and I think Hoover is just a bit narrow from early training. He
can't see that lots of people who haven't a vestige of humour are
nevertheless worth saving. I admit that saving them will be a thankless
task. God won't be able to take very much pleasure in it, but in strict
justice he will do it--even if Hoover does regard it as a piece of
extravagant sentimentality."
A little later she went in. She left him gazing far off into the night,
filled with his message, dull to memory on the very scene that evoked in
her own heart so much from the old days. And as she went she laughed
inwardly at a certain consternation the woman of her could not wholly
put down; for she had blindly hurled herself against a wall--the wall of
his message. But it was funny, and the message chained her interest. She
could, she thought, strengthen his resolution to give it out--help him
in a thousand ways.
As she fell asleep the thought of him hovered and drifted on her heart
softly, as darkness rests on tired eyes.