THE GREAT SILENCE.
The months of April and May were happy ones. The weather was perfect,
as only California weather understands the art of being; the hills were
at their greenest; the wind almost forgot to blow; the fields blazed in
wild-flowers; day after day rose in cloudless splendor, and day after
day the Golden Gate shone like a sapphire in the sun.
Polly was inwardly nervous. She had the "awe of prosperity" in her
heart, and everything seemed too bright to last.
Both she and Edgar were very busy. But work that one loves is no
hardship, especially when one is strong and young and hopeful, and when
one has great matters at stake, such as the health and wealth of an
invalid mother, or the paying off of disagreeable debts.
Even the limp Mrs. Chadwick shared in the general joy; for Mr.
Greenwood was so utterly discouraged with her mismanagement of the
house, so determined not to fly to ills he knew not of, and so anxious
to bring order out of chaos, that on the spur of the moment one day he
married her. On the next day he discharged the cook, hired a better
one the third, dunned the delinquent boarder the fourth, and collected
from him on the fifth; so the May check (signed Clementine Chadwick
Greenwood) was made out for eighty-five dollars.
But in the midst of it all, when everything in the outside world danced
with life and vigor, and the little house could hardly hold its sweet
content,--without a glimmer of warning, without a moment's fear or
dread, without the precious agony of parting, Mrs. Oliver slipped
softly, gently, safely, into the Great Silence.
Mercifully it was Edgar, not Polly, who found her in her accustomed
place on the cushions, lying with closed eyelids and smiling lips.
It was half past five. . . . Polly must have gone out at four, as
usual, and would be back in half an hour. . . . Yung Lee was humming
softly in the little kitchen. . . . In five minutes Edgar Noble had
suffered, lived, and grown ten years. He was a man. . . . And then
came Polly,--and Mrs. Bird with her, thank Heaven!--Polly breathless
and glowing, looking up at the bay window for her mother's smile of
welcome.
In a few seconds the terrible news was broken, and Polly, overpowered
with its awful suddenness, dropped before it as under a physical blow.
It was better so. Mrs. Bird carried her home for the night, as she
thought, but a merciful blur stole over the child's tired brain, and
she lay for many weeks in a weary illness of delirium and stupor and
fever.
Meanwhile, Edgar acted as brother, son, and man of the house. He it
was who managed everything, from the first sorrowful days up to the
closing of the tiny upper flat where so much had happened: not great
things of vast outward importance, but small ones,--little miseries and
mortifications and struggles and self-denials and victories, that made
the past half year a milestone in his life.
A week finished it all! It takes a very short time, he thought, to
scatter to the winds of heaven all the gracious elements that make a
home. Only a week; and in the first days of June, Edgar went back to
Santa Barbara for the summer holidays without even a sight of his
brave, helpful girl-comrade.
He went back to his brother's congratulations, his sister's kisses, his
mother's happy tears, and his father's hearty hand-clasp, full of
renewed pride and belief in his eldest son. But there was a shadow on
the lad's high spirits as he thought of gay, courageous, daring Polly,
stripped in a moment of all that made life dear.
"I wish we could do something for her, poor little soul," he said to
his mother in one of their long talks in the orange-tree sitting-room.
"Tongue cannot tell what Mrs. Oliver has been to me, and I 'm not a bit
ashamed to own up to Polly's influence, even if she is a girl and two
or three years younger than I am. Hang it! I 'd like to see the
fellow that could live under the same roof as those two women, and not
do the best that was in him! Has n't Polly some relatives in the East?"
"No near ones, and none that she has ever seen. Still, she is not
absolutely alone, as many girls would be under like circumstances. We
would be only too glad to have her here; the Howards have telegraphed
asking her to spend the winter with them in Cambridge; I am confident
Dr. Winship will do the same when the news of Mrs. Oliver's death
reaches Europe; and Mrs. Bird seems to have constituted herself a sort
of fairy Godmother in chief. You see everybody loves Polly; and she
will probably have no less than four homes open to her. The fact is,
if you should put Polly on a desert island, the bees and the
butterflies and the birds would gather about her; she draws everything
and everybody to her magically. Then, too, she is not penniless.
Rents are low, and she cannot hope to get quite as much for the house
as before, but even counting repairs, taxes, and furnishings, we think
she is reasonably certain of fifty dollars a month."
"She will never be idle, unless this sorrow makes a great change in
her. Polly seems to have been created to 'become' by 'doing.'"
"Yet she does not in the least relish work, Edgar. I never knew a girl
with a greater appetite for luxury. One cannot always see the deepest
reasons in God's providence as applied to one's own life and character;
but it is often easy to understand them as one looks at other people
and notes their growth and development. For instance, Polly's intense
love for her invalid mother has kept her from being selfish. The
straitened circumstances in which she has been compelled to live have
prevented her from yielding to self-indulgence or frivolity. Even her
hunger for the beautiful has been a discipline; for since beautiful
things were never given to her ready-made, she has been forced to
create them. Her lot in life, which she has always lamented, has given
her a self-control, a courage, a power, which she never would have had
in the world had she grown up in luxury. She is too young to see it,
but it is very clear to me that Polly Oliver is a glorious product of
circumstances."
"But," objected Edgar, "that is not fair. You are giving all the
credit to circumstances, and none to Polly's own nature."
"Not at all. If there had not been the native force to develop,
experience would have had nothing to work upon. As it is, her lovely
childish possibilities have become probabilities, and I look to see the
girlish probabilities blossom into womanly certainties."
Meanwhile Polly, it must be confessed, was not at the present time
quite justifying the good opinion of her friends.
She had few of the passive virtues. She could bear sharp stabs of
misfortune, which fired her energy and pride, but she resented pin
pricks. She could carry heavy, splendid burdens cheerfully, but she
fretted under humble cares. She could serve by daring, but not by
waiting. She would have gone to the stake or the scaffold, I think,
with tolerable grace; but she would probably have recanted any article
of faith if she had been confronted with life-imprisonment.
Trouble that she took upon herself for the sake of others, and out of
love, she accepted sweetly. Sorrows that she did not choose, which
were laid upon her without her consent, and which were "just the ones
she did _not_ want, and did _not_ need, and would _not_ have, and could
_not_ bear,"--these sorrows found her unwilling, bitter, and impatient.
Yet if life is a school and we all have lessons to learn in it, the
Great Teacher will be unlikely to set us tasks which we have already
finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially
hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade
into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life
school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of
words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as
fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to
develop her bravery, when she was already brave?
Courage was one of the little jewels set in her fairy crown when she
was born, but there was a round, empty space beside it, where Patience
should have been. Further along was Daring, making a brilliant show,
but again there was a tiny vacancy waiting for Prudence.
The crown made a fine appearance, on the whole, because the large
jewels were mostly in place, and the light of these blinded you to the
lack of the others; but to the eye of the keen observer there was a
want of symmetry and completeness.
Polly knew the unfinished state of her fairy crown as well as anybody
else. She could not plead ignorance as an excuse; but though she would
have gone on polishing the great gems with a fiery zeal, she added the
little jewels very slowly, and that only on compulsion.
There had been seven or eight weeks of partial unconsciousness, when
the sorrow and the loneliness of life stole into her waking dreams only
vaguely and at intervals; when she was unhappy, and could not remember
why; and slept, to wake and wonder and sleep again.
Then there were days and weeks when the labor of living was all that
the jaded body could accomplish; when memory was weak; when life began
at the pillow, and ended at the foot of the bed, and the universe was
bounded by the chamber windows.
But when her strength came back, and she stood in the middle of the
floor, clothed and in her right mind, well enough to remember,--oh!
then indeed the deep waters of bitterness rolled over poor Polly's head
and into her heart, and she sank beneath them without a wish or a
struggle to rise.
"If it had been anything else!" she sobbed. "Why did God take away my
most precious, my only one to live for, when I was trying to take care
of her, trying to be good, trying to give back the strength that had
been poured out on me,--miserable, worthless me! Surely, if a girl was
willing to do without a father and sisters and brothers, without good
times and riches, willing to work like a galley slave, willing to
'scrimp' and plan and save for ever and ever; surely 'they' might be
willing that she should keep her mother!"
Poor Polly! Providence at this time seemed nothing more than a
collection of demons which she classified under the word "they," and
which she felt certain were scourging her pitilessly and needlessly.
She could not see any reason or justification in "their"
cruelties,--for that was the only term she could apply to her
afflictions.
Mrs. Bird had known sorrow, and she did her best to minister to the
troubled and wrong little heart; but it was so torn that it could be
healed only by the soft balm of Time.
Perhaps, a long while after such a grief,--it is always "perhaps" in a
great crisis, though the certainty is ours if we will but grasp
it,--perhaps the hidden meaning of the sorrow steals gently into our
softened hearts. We see, as in a vision, a new light by which to work;
we rise, cast off the out-grown shell, and build us a more stately
mansion, in which to dwell till God makes that home also too small to
hold the ever-growing soul!