In Which We Go Down the River and Return
A loud wind blew up the river, cold, sombre, insistent. The river seemed
to tremble in waves and shiver in wrinkles under the monotonous
threatening of the wind, the stars to be fretful in their bleak spaces.
"Forever is a long time." Helen wrapped her cloak more closely.
"Dead!" The wind stated it coldly, insistently, and did not mind how
fiercely she denied it. It was only the surface of the river that
trembled and glimmered so. The inevitable reality was the current
below--dark, steady, and leading downward to that sea from which the
cold wind came with insistent statement. If men and women were incidents
to powers beneath and influences over them, like the myriad tiny
flickers born of coincidences between the divinity of the stars and the
toil of the river; if one only carried for a short time this little
torch of courage in a night without horizon; and behind the surface of
things "their substance and third dimension," in Gard's phrase,
stretched away into a ghostly distance; yet it was inborn in Helen to
carry her torch high, to lay lance in rest and challenge the ghostliest
shadow in sight, to be herself personal and definite, to accuse even
abstractions of personality, to make a vivid world of nearby things and
live vividly within it.
In that world, life had seemed mainly to consist of purpose and
achievement; but on the wide river between the crouching shores that
night--with the wind calling continually. "Dead, dead"--wishes,
resolves, and actions to follow them, how shrunken and chilled they
seemed, if one were only an accidental wrinkle on the river, possibly a
glimmer if a star happened to look that way!
"It is not true!" She went in and saw lamps swinging the length of the
saloon, where men were asleep on the sofas and the floor.
The engines throbbed and the paddle-wheels creaked and splashed near the
window of her state-room. She lay awake, and yet seemed to hear sounds
like a moaning organ, to see Gard's face floating, white and motionless,
in black water, and moving down seaward with a tide that she tried to
block with her hands. She started up, choking and sobbing, and heard the
engines throb, the paddle-wheel creak and splash.
It was still dark when the steamer drew in to a wharf. Lights were
moving about. There were three or four houses, a flag flapping sulkily
in the wind, a train of cars and a puffing engine, a line of black
bluffs against the sky. It was misty dawn when the train started south,
and full sunrise when she stepped from the train with Mavering and saw a
house with high porch on a hill; below, near a grove, the brigade
hospital tents. The big, hurrying surgeon said: "Move him! Good God!--I
beg your pardon--yes. It's run mighty low. It needs warming and coaxing.
There's da--I beg your pardon--there's very little of either here. This
is the first time in six weeks the army of the Potomac has had any luck,
to my knowledge." He looked at Helen suddenly, dropped his gallantry,
and continued, gravely: "As to the chances, since you ask me, I suspect
there are complications. But as an alternative to nights as cold as
this, I should say, do almost anything." A moment's silence, and he
went on: "They lie around here, about five hundred to an acre, several
acres of them. That's the trouble. However, I knew Captain Windham. I
admired him--this is the tent. I hope you have everything you need. Give
him brandy and milk. The train goes back about eight. Good-bye." The big
surgeon hurried away.
Mavering stepped in behind her, looked around, and said: "Exactly. The
pirate's gone." Helen did not hear him. A pile of straw and some
blankets, a black cloak, the white face against it, like one drowned and
going seaward with a tide. She dropped on her knees and bent over it.
"Will you get the things," she half whispered, looking around--"a
stretcher and some men? Please take my purse and come back in time for
the train."
Mavering went out. In the way of descriptive adjectives he thought
"fierce" was the word. She looked "fierce." "And," he reflected. "I dare
say a man may turn out a domestic cat if he were half drowned and
properly stroked and not too old. _Quien sabe?_ If the anchorite comes
to, I'm gambling my gray hairs he's tamed. Gray hairs are distinctly a
misfortune."
Helen leaned close over. The "must" and "shall" that absorbed her seemed
straining at her eyes and lips. She felt as if she were lifting a
weight. "You _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay"--struggling to keep the
white face from going down in the suck of an undertow, drawn under by
some blind power that knew no measures of values or who loved and
remembered and who forgot.
Measure of values! Your bullet goes forth in a pointed manner, appears
to be determined, purposeful, greatly in earnest, and buries itself in a
sand-bank, or the brain of a scholar--all one to the bullet, all one to
the rifleman who knows nothing of the matter, all one to the per cent.
of averages, to the flowing laws and far-off events of the universe.
"But you _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay." So tiny a torch to shake with
such insistence at the wide night and call on its hurrying storms to
stop! Enter demurral and private petition to those high courts and
abstract legislatures! "The constitution does not provide for you in
person."
"Then amend it. It should. It does me wrong. What are laws for if not
for justice?"
"They are not at the call of human justice."
"Ah, then, not justice! But have pity, or forget and go by! Only let me
keep him. I love him. I will not let him go."
The protest seems almost as persistent as the law. After all, it might
be itself a law or an amendment in process of making, this protest. But
if Gard Windham should not go on that adventure and exploration,
inferred by Mavering to be, perhaps, Arctic in character, and should
linger back to life in the course of event and not by virtue of an
amendment, probably Helen would not care how it came about.
She did not care how the men with the stretcher looked, how they took
off their caps or whispered. The moving train and the steamboat were
vague things aside. Both were crowded, but no one spoke to her. It
seemed to be arranged, recognized, and admitted.
A group gathered about Mavering on deck, who said: "Why, it appears to
me a situation that doesn't admit of remark. It looks like a case of
stand off and clear the road. It has that distinguished appearance." And
there was a murmur of assent.
The wounded, sitting or lying about on both decks and in the cabin, were
wretched and sinister sights. Some babbled in delirium; a few, like
Gard, were sunk in torpor, unconscious of their issues. The steamer
ploughed through splashing and gurgling water. The driven, wintry clouds
streamed across the sky, gray and ragged as battle-torn banners. Hawks
floated over the river, graceful in their savage hunt over the
double-decked steamer loaded with human pain bound for the hospitals.
And Helen noticed and remembered nothing of it. She seemed to herself
more like a ghost alone with Gard, who was another ghost. Empty space
was around them, the existence of both so tenuous that it consisted only
of the faint pulse-beat in his wrist, which she held. This beat was the
measure of the flight of time, and the slender thread that bound the
world together. It used to seem to her that Gard was too intangible,
almost unreal. One could not say what he was like. What did he mean by:
"I don't care whether I'm an admirable person or not; I'm a partially
illuminated point, floating along I don't know where or why. What's the
use of caring? There's too much before and after?" Or: "Every one lives
in a dungeon; he doesn't know any other dungeon than his own?" And when
he used to play the organ in Saint Mary's and fill the great church
with mystical voices, he had seemed to her something not of the daily
world, but of a world partly like the one in which she built her own
fanciful castles; only it was wider and more peculiar, and the powers in
it were strong and strange. However apart from Gard himself her idea of
him may have been, it was one which this long watch beside him, the
touch of the slow pulse, and the knowledge of how closely he now at
least moved along the frontier of shadows, only made more intimate. The
organ was not needed to interpret him. She felt that she knew what he
was like. She thought the pulse-beat spoke, as the organ used to speak,
with the same swift, immediate presence, and that, when she whispered
"You _must_ stay," it throbbed an answer: "You mean, come back. You've
no idea how far it is down here, and very curious. But maybe I can, if
you'll hold your end of whatever it is." And so the crowd and the
murmur, the babbling in delirium of the man on the next stretcher, the
laboring of the steamer ploughing up stream, the passing of hours, all
seemed moved apart from her. Sometimes the distant consciousness would
seem to almost or quite return, and look out at her under wavering
eyelashes. The lips moved, and she fancied they said, "I knew you were
there." She became aware, at the same time, that the steamer had
stopped, that the stretchers were being carried out in procession, and
that over her stood Mavering, Rachel, and Thaddeus Bourn; and of these
she was hardly aware enough to be surprised at Thaddeus. When they came
to the house with the white door, and he drew her aside a moment, she
half resisted in a dazed way, and felt as if not to be close to Gard
were against nature and reason. Thaddeus drew her into the sitting-room.
The men had carried Gard to the room beyond. They had set down the
stretcher and were moving him.
"In point of fact," began Thaddeus, "I've come to take you home. Your
mother is--a--not so well. I fear it is quite serious. I wrote you, but
it did not at that time seem serious. A woman of astonishing placidity,
my dear, which I have sometimes felt tempted to recommend, in fact, to
your imitation. But the circumstances are such now that it would not. I
might say, be in good taste. Her condition is, I regret to say--seems to
be--but perhaps to-morrow."
He was not sure she heard him.
"Oh yes, to-morrow."
To-morrow might be what it liked if he would let her go now. She slipped
away. The men came out and left the house. Rachel followed with Mavering
and closed the door. After a time Thaddeus said:
"Relative to a certain estate, Mrs. Mavering, in which you and I made
investments, undertook a trusteeship, has it not, in your opinion, been
administered somewhat--a--speculatively? It appears to me to be loaded,
I might say, with liabilities. I do not see that the--a--securities are
ascertained."
"Oh! but I think he will get well."
"Granted--and then?"
"He _must_ care for her."
"Granted--a--it would seem probable, and then?"
He deliberately refrained from looking at Mavering, who was examining
Thaddeus, his gold-rimmed glasses and accurate tailoring, with
speculative interest.
"I doubt whether you can argue from me," said Mavering, serenely. Rachel
flushed and Thaddeus protested.
"Oh, I beg--"
"Not at all. It is admitted that the garb of civil society has never
fitted me. Any coat will go on me, but none will fit to the satisfaction
of fashion. But as to the anchorite, I would not argue a parallel. I
suspect he will cut his coat to newer fashions than mine--possibly than
yours. My dear sir, I'm an egoist and you're an egoist."
"True," murmured Thaddeus, "a social egoist."
Mavering stopped long enough to reflect that he liked this Thaddeus
Bourn, a man apparently with conversations in him.
"Very good. And so it occurs to me in passing that I may be the more
elementary, anterior type; and, say, Morgan Map, a still further
elementary, anterior, antediluvian--"
"Excellent!" cried Thaddeus; "excellent choice of phrase! My idea
exactly! I said a primary, primitive, primordial."
"Good words, all of them--descriptive and discreet."
The two smiled at each other with appreciation.
"Map might do," continued Mavering, "if he had all the room there was.
He needs more room, properly for his state of culture, even than I do.
Now the anchorite--I refer to Captain Windham--is, if an egoist,
possibly a fourth kind; I am inclined to think--to question--whether we
might not argue him even in advance in continuance of this theory,
which. I perceive you agree with me, is not without interest."
"But," said Thaddeus, distinguishing, marking precision with his
eye-glass, held between two fingers, "as regards, now, a definition."
"I leave it to your more discriminating choice. I contribute this
observation, however, that when the anchorite wants more room he is apt
to climb into the air for it, instead of quarrelling with his neighbors
on the earth."
Mavering took his leave. Rachel went to the window and stood looking
after him. Thaddeus polished his glasses, and thought that Mavering was
evidently a man with conversation in him.