I
ALL the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes
reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had
been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a
circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They
had been young people with good qualities, and very much in love, but
they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small
income from her father--only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had
made all the difference in the world. A few memorable interregnums
between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn’t pinch and be
shabby and do housework, as the wives of some of his colleagues did.
Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter one.
Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn’t possibly have
imagined; his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early
death and posthumous fame--it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that
this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had
never heard, for “an extravagant and wheeling stranger.” The Professor
often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in
Brahms’ Requiem, attending the words, “_He heapeth up riches and cannot
tell who shall scatter them_!” The vehemence of this passage had seemed
to him uncalled for until he read it by the light of the history of his
own family.
St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn’t choose to
live his life over--he might not have such good luck again. He had had
two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many
years, and a second of the mind--of the imagination. Just when the
morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came
Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.
Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and
master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull
with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always
present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to
see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.
If the last four volumes of “The Spanish Adventurers” were more simple
and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of
Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great
drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not
spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the
scene of his explorers’ adventures. By the time he had got as far as the
third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy
with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very
curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails
and stones and water-courses tell only to adolescence.
Two years after Tom’s graduation they took the copy of Fray Garces’
manuscript that the Professor had made from the original in Spain, and
went down into the South-west together. By autumn they had been over
every mile of his trail on horseback. Tom could take a sentence from
Garces’ diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed
the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could
always find the route by which the priest had reached the next.
It was on that trip that they went to Tom’s Blue Mesa, climbed the
ladder of spliced pine-trees to the Cliff City, and up to the Eagle’s
Nest. There they took Tom’s diary from the stone cupboard where he had
sealed it up years ago, before he set out for Washington on his
fruitless errand.
The next summer Tom went with the Professor to Old Mexico. They had
planned a third summer together, in Paris, but it never came off.
Outland was delayed by the formalities of securing his patent, and then
came August, 1914. Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been
Tom’s teacher, stopped in Hamilton on his way back to Belgium, hurrying
home to serve in any capacity he might. The rugged old man stayed in
Hamilton only four days, but in that time Outland made up his mind, had
a will drawn, packed, and said good-bye. He sailed with Father Duchene
on the _Rochambeau_.
To this day St. Peter regretted that he had never got that vacation in
Paris with Tom Outland. He had wanted to revisit certain spots with him:
to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the
yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after rain; to stand with
him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the
bronze figures--Time, bearing away the youth who was struggling to
snatch his palm--or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might
have mattered to Tom, had not chance, in one great catastrophe, swept
away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.
And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his
old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to
him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He
couldn’t see Tom building “Outland,” or becoming a public-spirited
citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his
fine long hand with the back-springing thumb, which had never handled
things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he
lived, must have been put to other uses. His fellow scientists, his
wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It
would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of
false excuses. It would have had to “manage” a great deal of money, to
be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had
escaped all that. He had made something new in the world--and the
rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others.