In which to love much is to be much loved, and Kern's
Dearest Dream (but one) comes True.
Beyond the Great Gulf, there was news coming, too: coming with the click
of hoofs on cobble-stones, and the harsh clanging of a wagon; seeping
and spreading through the shabby street with mysterious velocity.
Windows rattled up; a word flew from lip to lip; people were running.
There came the Reverend George Dayne, of the Charities, and hard behind
him Labor Commissoner O'Neill, mopping his face as he ran. These two
were known to the neighborhood, with their right of going in, and no
questions asked. Out again came the ambulance surgeon, shaking his head
jauntily at all inquiries. Out lastly, after an interval, issued Mr.
Pond, and disappeared into the establishment of Henry Bloom, who was
known to have loaned his camp-chairs free, the day Doctor got up this
here Settlement....
Then stillness enveloped all. Nothing seemed to stir. And no one could
remember when he had seen those windows dark before.
Within, upstairs, the two men, alike only in this one tie, stood about,
waiting; waiting for Pond's return; waiting only because they were loath
to go. What little had been for their hands to do was done now.
The men of the yellow wagon, breathing hard as they came up the steps,
had sought out the bedroom. But Mr. Dayne said that a soldier should lie
in his tent. So they had made sure that the three-legged lounge in the
office was steady, and got a fresh counterpane from red-lidded Mrs.
Garland. Then, when Pond was gone, the other two had thought to make
ready against the arrival of Bloom. However, they were soon brought to
pause here, finding nothing to make ready with. There was an overcoat
hung in the clothes closet, but otherwise it was entirely bare; hangers
dangling empty. The men had found the sight somewhat sad.
But Mr. Dayne, who had been a parson before he was a Secretary, had said
no matter. Let him go in his patches upon his great adventure....
It had seemed natural to these two to be doing the last small services.
There was no family here; friends' love was needed. But now there was
only waiting....
Mr. Dayne, in Canal Street in his own business, had been at the Heth
Works in the first uproar. At intervals, he had told the story to the
others: a story of one machine too many unloaded on a strained floor; of
a dry beam breaking with a report like a cannon; of men and women
stampeding in the wild fear that the building was about to collapse. On
the second floor, but two had kept their heads; and the young doctor,
for all his bad foot, had been the quicker. It was supposed that the
base of the machine itself had struck him, glancing. Mr. Heth, found two
feet away, was buried by a litter of débris; his escape from death was
deemed miraculous. And when they brought him round, it was told that his
first word had been: "Vivian hurt?..."
Much remained puzzling: in chief the strange amiability of the master of
the Works toward the man he had once threatened to break for libel. They
had stood there chatting like friends, laughing.
But here Commissioner O'Neill could give little light. Last night his
friend had told him, indeed, with evidences of strange happiness, that
there was to be a new Heth Works at once. But he was mysteriously
reserved as to how this triumph for the O'Neill administration had been
brought to pass, saying repeatedly: "It's a sort of secret. I can't tell
you that, old fellow." But O'Neill remembered now one thing he had said,
with quite an excited air, which might be a sort of clue: "Don't you get
it, Sam?... It's all good. Everybody's good ... Why, I've known it all
the time."...
Now the two men had fallen silent. They were in the old waiting-room,
with the office door fast shut between. Royalty had slept in this room
once. It was decaying now, and bare as your hand but for the row of
kitchen chairs along the wall. The minister kept walking about; kept
humming beneath his breath. Once Sam O'Neill caught a line of that song:
_The victory of life is won._ A strange sentiment at this time
certainly; thoroughly clerical, though. It was a professional matter
with Dayne; only he, O'Neill, had been really close to V.V. And he was
continually burdened with a certain sense of personal responsibility for
it all....
"I'd like to have the doctor for that little girl in there," said Mr.
Dayne.
The Commissioner, who was getting really stout these days, cleared his
throat.
"How's she goin' to get on without him?"
"Ah, how?" said the clergyman, musing.
The stillness was like the silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was
the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher
beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred
rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot.
Stillness, death, loneliness, and destitution. They had picked him to
the bone, and left him....
And then, as thoughts like these saddened the thoughts of the two men,
there was heard as it were the whir of wings in his old hotel. And the
crows came.
I say the crows came. They came in their own way; but so they had always
come. Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and
straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant. But what mattered
things like this: since in his wings, which were only hairy arms that
needed soap, he brought the raiment? Such a pile of them, too, such
royal abundance. A fine black cutaway coat, a handsome pair of "extra"
trousers, shirts, and shoes, and, peeping beneath all, glimpses of a
pretty blue suit quite obviously as good as new.
There stood the wonder, silent and uncouth, in the doorway. Do you doubt
that Sam O'Neill and Mr. Dayne knew, the moment their eyes saw, that
here were the crows come? How they gazed and gazed, and how poor Mister
Garland, ever retiring of habit, squirmed and shifted over an
uneasy heart....
He did not care to talk with gentlemen, did not Mister; gentlemen of
that cloth particularly. Doubt not that in institutions men wearing such
vests as this had had their cleanly will of him on winter nights. So he
asked his question dumbly, with a movement of matted head and eyebrow;
and when Mr. Dayne answered in a curious voice, "Yes ... he's gone," the
last expectancy faded from the rough vague face. He sidled in, timid and
unwilling; laid his burden, speechless, upon a chair. And then he was
shambling furtively out the door again, when the parson's hand took
his shoulder.
"Why are you bringing them back now? He gave them all to you, didn't
he?"
The visitor spoke for the first time, suddenly, low and whining.
"'S a Gawd's truth, Reverend, I never hooked nothin' off him, an' I was
goin' to bring 'em back anyways. Nothin' wore at all, gents, you can see
yourself, cep a time or two mebbe outen that there derby...."
The man himself could see no point in it all except that gents had him
in charge; a threatening predicament. But Mr. Dayne's gentle suasion
prevailed. Out, gradually, came the little story which he was to tell
sometimes in after years, and think about oftener....
Mister was bringing back Doctor's things because he had never felt right
about taking them.
The cutaway coat had been the beginning of it all, it seemed. The gift
of so fine a Sunday coat had bewildered the recipient; he had been on
the point of handing it back right there. However, nature had conquered,
then and subsequently; there had accumulated a collection of clothing
secretly laid away in a place he had. The man had kept asking, he said,
out of habit--"more jest to see if he'd give 'em to yer like." But he
seemed to feel, in a certain dim way, that there was a sort of contest
on between him and Doctor.
"The innercent look he had to him, yer might say," he said, groping for
words to answer the high-vested inquisitor. "Like a child like. Never
scolded yer wunst.... Just up and give yer all yer wanted...."
The blue suit, given yesterday, seemed to have been conceived as a kind
of test case. The man appeared to feel that, once refused, a sort of
spell on him would be broken; he would then get out all his store and
wear them freely. So he had told a tall story in the office: how he was
surely going to settle down and be respectable this time, and was
obliged to have him a good nice suit fer to git started in.... And
Doctor had given him such a funny look that for a minute he thought sure
he had him. But no, the young man had laughed suddenly, as at a joke,
and said: "Well, you sit there, Mister, till I take these off...." Only
not to tell Mrs. Garland. Took him right back, sure did....
"So then I thinks," said Mister, the professional quaver returning to
his voice, "it's no better'n thievin' for to take off an innercent like
him, and thinks I, I'll git the lot of 'em, and give him like a
surprise. 'S a Gawd's truth, gents, like I'm tellin' yer. Nothin' at all
wore but mebbe that there derby, like I up and tole yer...."
His word had never been doubted: this passed invention. And he was
thanked, not chidden for his narrative, and Reverend said:
"He shall wear that suit for his burial...."
So the crows flitted out of the door again, their errand done; and
behind them was a deeper stillness than they had found.
The old waiting-room, a little dark at best, grew dimmer. Sunlight faded
from the ruined floor. The glorious afternoon was drawing in. The men
did not speak. And then in the lengthening silence, there floated up
small noises: a door creaking open; quiet feet upon the stairs; a faint
swishing as of a skirt.
The parson was standing by the half-open door.
"D'you think, sir," he spoke suddenly aloud, "there's any way to preach
to a man, like just being better than he is?"
O'Neill roused, but made no answer. He had been thinking of the day he
had seen this fellow Garland dodging down the hall with those trousers
there. Then, becoming aware of the footsteps, he said:
"Pond back ... Is it?"
But Mr. Dayne, looking out down the corridor, said no. After a pause, he
added, in a yet lower voice:
"It's young Cooney, from the Works ... And a lady."
A change had gone over the parson's kind face, making it still kinder.
His sense of surrounding desolation ebbed from him. People acknowledged
their heavy debt; paid as stoutly as they could. On the stairs there he
saw, coming, the daughter of the man whose negligence had taken to-day a
young life not easily to be spared.
"They're both friends of mine," added Mr. Dayne, gently. "Perhaps you
will excuse me a moment?"
And he stepped out into the hall, shutting the door quietly behind him.
* * * * *
So Mr. Dayne thought. But under the heavy veil she wore, this was less a
daughter than a woman: Cally, who had loved for a day and in the evening
heard that her love was dead.
The thought behind the venture had been Chas's. Nothing required him at
the House of Heth; he was for getting his sister and going to see what
help the Dabney House might need. And at the last minute, she had put on
her hat again, and gone too. Nothing that Mr. Dayne had felt about the
loneliness of this end could touch what Cally had felt. Of whom, too,
was help more required than of her, now or never any more? So they had
driven three from Saltman's to the old hotel, where she had thought to
come to a meeting to-day. And then Henrietta, who had come out from her
typewriter strong and white as ice, methodically sticking in hatpins as
she crossed the sidewalk; Hen, the iron-hearted, had quite suddenly
broken down; laying her cold face in Cally's lap, weeping wildly that
she would not bear it....
So Cally must brave the stairs without her, must speak to who might be
here. But she did not mind. Strength had come to her with the
consciousness that had returned all too quickly: the dead strength of
the inanimate. She was dark and cold within as the spaces between the
worlds....
And now the two cousins met Mr. Dayne in this strange endless corridor;
and knew that no services were asked of them.
They greeted with little speech. Mr. Dayne told of the simple
dispositions they were making. Chas explained how Mr. Heth had tried to
communicate with Mrs. Mason,--whom Mr. Dayne had quite overlooked, it
seemed,--but found that she was out of town; had telegraphed; how he
would have come down with them now, but had had to stop for the setting
of his arm. Uncle Thornton would come this evening....
"Ah, that's kind of him," said Mr. Dayne. "He must be in much pain...."
Then silence fell. There seemed nothing to say or do. How think that she
could serve--mitigate these numb horrors of pain and self-reproach?
All was over.
"Where is he?" said Cally, her voice so little and calm.
The clergyman told her. And then all three stood looking down the
corridor to the door at the end of it: a shut door marked in white
letters: DR. VIVIAN.... But nothing could hurt her now.
"We thought that was right," said Mr. Dayne.... "Will you go in for a
moment?"
Briefly the girl's veiled eyes met his. He was aware that a little
tremor went through her; perhaps he then understood a little further.
And he thought he had never seen anybody so beautiful and white.
He added in his comforting way: "There's no one at all with him except
the little girl here, Corinne, that he was kind to...."
Surely there was never a loneliness like this loneliness.
"I will go, if I may," said Cally.
Chas was eyeing her, unbelievably grave, turning his hat between his
hands. And then she remembered Hen, left alone, who would not be
comforted.