|WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue,
the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder.
“Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will
put it in music, the schema thus--The wronged cry for justice!
They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory!
Allegro-mezzoforte!”
And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs.
Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.”
And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying
sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring
herself either to countenance crime.
“This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist
to Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People
will ask our position.”
Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about
Wood and Hicks, really?”
“My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked.
“Scrumptious!” said Alberta.
Mrs. Tillotson hesitated.
“I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.”
It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the
throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to
Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, a reference furnished her by Berry.
“Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.”
Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider.
“Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't
countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.”
“Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the
breach of necessary laws.”
“Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself.
“But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by
nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example,
and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of
technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An
unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent
crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful,
inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.”
“G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks----”
“Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed
and smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.”
“G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this
keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to
be erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here
than he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck,
whose knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless
as possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson
scared him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts,
and he knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson
posed, that Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive
pocket, and finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were
rather good.
The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and
Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried:
“Camilla Champney! She's coming in!”
While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent
and familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice,
and then nearly a year before.
When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing
eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling
interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs.
Tillotson appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of
rituals; they tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he
said, in the place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who
substituted ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence
followed anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit,
therefore peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought
Mrs. Tillotson might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted
his scorn. Mrs. Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his
scorn.
Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted
and Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large
houses and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin
Street. The crowds increased as they drew nearer the business
section--late afternoon crowds hurrying home.
“I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said
stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's
your gift.”
Camilla was radiant for a moment.
“It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr.
Hennion was right.”
“Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be
men's conventions.”
“Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.”
“Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He _couldn't!_” She was radiant
again.
“Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs.
Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“But I like Alberta!”
She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood.
The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left
through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred
windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet
young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked
into its black secrecy.
“Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't
matter, and besides--I don't know how to ask you--but there's something
I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The
Inner Republic'!”
She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now.
“I thought it was different--from the other books--that is--I thought
there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.”
“The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?”
“Not more, but besides.”
“And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man
ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he
ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask
for are extensive.”
Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently.
They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a
few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden
and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous,
weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between
the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent
once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither
they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of
Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great
red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was
surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy
trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a
steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space.
Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted
as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in
asking for explanatory notes.
A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse
began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman
at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some
quarrelling children.
Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at
the rebuff.
“I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell
me--because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life--because
I thought,--you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't
mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.”
Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old
fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the
grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated
above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the
sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little
wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there
are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of
dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that
will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully
and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's
hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the
maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the
discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad
arteries throbbing faintly.
Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her.
“I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry.
Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”
“I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if
she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to
believe. And perhaps she would understand.”
“Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you
understand? This is what I mean.”
“But you do understand now!” said Camilla.
“Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood
murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder
would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You
asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore.
Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like
two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty
years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I
dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once.
Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead
or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man
than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore
me in two.
“I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been
a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and
miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a
dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy.
Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about
those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The
reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's
hysteric.”
“I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank
admiration.
The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying
softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty
unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and
folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps
and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street
grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the
fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them.
“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come
you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the
genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me
to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a
schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every
day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old
disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in
the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it
is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till
we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are
wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a
debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered
and foolish as you like.”
Camilla laughed happily.
“Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what
you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.”
He glowered a little.
“Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I
think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like
thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like
Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I
suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him
in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is
illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be
legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the
two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I
think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't
care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified
habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better
laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality.
The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood
stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then
illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't
belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you,
because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems
better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin?
Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I
felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights
of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably
no less so. Wood was a likeable----”
“The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt
politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the
classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me?
I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks
confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that
he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they
would look apart.”
Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or,
“confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance
of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him--a man new, at least,
and original--conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and
held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen,
poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about.
Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long
morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for
any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was
conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks
to flying signals of excitement.
Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness
soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and
lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney!
“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have
been a lyric poet.”
He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now
rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla
choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well,
with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the
surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked
up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street.
“No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney.
I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight,
but she always thrashes him.”
“How dreadful!”
“Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of
things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she
can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom
Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a
foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the
qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs.
Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested
in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things
found not altogether worshipful--egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies,
weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond
most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in
getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man
walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black,
restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the
moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother
whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than
doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close
love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each
seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other.
The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age
of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons,
into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland
Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where
everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were,
what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window
and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation
as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a
balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person
then.
Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every
book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in
the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed
to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and
longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes
spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it
seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship
carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and
impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with
the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it
seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The
impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring
haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.
Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German
and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street
seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats,
cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail
of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges.
“Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked.
“I love it.”
“Reason enough for its cheerfulness.”
“I've loved it for ages.”
“But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee.
“You needn't insist on it.”
“Not if I think it important?”
“Oh, never at all!”
“But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.”
“Better owe it than pay it in small coin.”
“Then I offer a promissory note.”
“You mean--you will tell me more about----” Camilla paused and dropped
her voice.
“Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.”
It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in
the springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light,
and small tinklings of wit are thought poetical.
Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The
paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood
idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to
Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him.
“Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.”
“'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully.
“Can't help it.”
Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed.
“I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.”
He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the
Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions.
“What is it, Dick? What have you done?”
Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting.
“Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder
with his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we
forget about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.”
Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla
went up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the
gangs of workmen.
“You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm
not quite clear how you were right, but you were.”
“Right about the whole business?”
“No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm
adopting your scruples.”
Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on.
“Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a
sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh.
“I'm a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you.
Would it be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?”
“Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.”
“Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.”
“Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?”
implying that he knew what the paragraphs would be.
“Never saw him that I know of.”
“Well--I don't see where you're concerned.”
Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what
Aidee meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity
of dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself
liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious
scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were
not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else.
Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the
bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within
him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the
disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about
the place. Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their
open window.