|The old book-shop on Cripple Street in the city of Hamilton was walled
to its dusky ceiling with books. Books were stacked on the floor like
split wood, with alleys between. The long table down the centre was
piled with old magazines and the wrecks of paper-covered novels.
School arithmetics and dead theologies; Annuals in faded gilt, called
“Keepsake,” or “Friendship's Offering”; little leathern nubbins of books
from the last century, that yet seemed less antique than the Annuals
which counted no more than forty years--so southern and early-passing
was the youth of the Annual; Bohn's translations, the useful and
despised; gaudy, glittering prints of the poets and novelists; all were
crowded together without recognition of caste, in a common Bohemia.
Finding a book in that mystical chaos seemed to establish a right to it
of first discovery. The pretty girl, who sat in one of the dim windows
and kept the accounts, looked Oriental but not Jewish, and wore crimson
ribbons in her black hair and at her throat. She read one of the
Annuals, or gazed through the window at Cripple Street. A show-case
in the other window contained stamp collections, Hindoo, Chinese, and
Levantine coinage.
Far back in the shop a daring explorer might come upon a third window,
gray, grimy, beyond which lay the unnamable backyards between Cripple
and Academy Streets. It could not be said to “open on” them, for it was
never opened, or “give a view” of them, being thick with gray dust. But
if one went up to it and looked carefully, there in the dim corner
might be seen an old man with a long faded black coat, rabbinical
beard, dusky, transparent skin, and Buddha eyes, blue, faint, far away,
self-abnegating, such as under the Bo-tree might have looked forth
in meek abstraction on the infinities and perceived the Eightfold
Principle. It was always possible to find Mr. Barria by steering for the
window. So appeared the old bookshop on Cripple Street, Mr. Barria, the
dealer, and his granddaughter, Janey.
Nature made Cripple Street to be calm and dull; for the hand of man,
working through generations, is the hand of nature, as surely as in
nature the oriole builds its nest or the rootlets seek their proper
soil. Cripple Street ran from Coronet to Main Street and its paving was
bad. There were a few tailors and bookbinders, a few silent, clapboarded
houses.
But two doors from the corner on Coronet Street stood Station No. 4, of
the Fire Brigade, and Cripple Street was the nearest way to Main Street,
whither No. 4 was more likely to be called than elsewhere. So that,
though nature made Cripple Street to be calm and dull, No. 4, Fire
Brigade, sometimes passed it, engine, ladder, and hose, in the splendor
of the supernatural, the stormy pageantry of the gods; and one Tommy
Durdo drove the engine.
Durdo first came into Mr. Barria's shop in search of a paper-covered
novel with a title promising something wild and belligerent. It was a
rainy, dismal day, and Janey sat among the dust and refuse of forgotten
centuries.
“My eyes!” he thought. “She's a peach.”
He lost interest in any possible belligerent novel, gazed at her with
the candor of his youthfulness, and remarked, guilefully:
“I bet you've seen me before now.”
“You drive the engine,” said Janey, with shining eyes.
“Why, this is my pie,” thought Durdo, and sat down by her on a pile
of old magazines. He was lank, muscular, with a wide mouth, lean jaws,
turn-up nose, and joyful eyes. The magazines contained variations on the
loves of Edwards, Eleanors, and other people, well-bred, unfortunate,
and possessed of sentiments. Durdo was not well-bred, and had not a
presentable sentiment in his recollection. He had faith in his average
luck, and went away from Mr. Barria's shop at last with a spot in the
tough texture of his soul that felt mellow.
“J. Barria, bookdealer,” he read from the sign. “J! That's Janey, ain't
it? Hold on. She ain't the bookdealer. She ain't any ten-cent novel
either. She's a Rushy bound, two dollar and a half a copy, with
a dedication on the fly-leaf, which”--Tommy stopped suddenly and
reflected--“which it might be dedicated to Tommy.”
It came near to being a sentiment. The possibility of such a thing
rising from within him seemed impressive. He walked back to No. 4
thoughtfully, and thrust himself into a fight with Hamp Sharkey, in
which it was proved that Hamp was the better man. Tommy regained his
ordinary reckless cheerfulness. But when a man is in a state of mind
that it needs a stand-up and knock-down fight to introduce cheerfulness,
he cannot hope to conceal his state of mind.
Cripple Street drowsed in the sunshine one August afternoon. A small boy
dug bricks out of the sidewalk with a stick. It seemed to emphasize the
indifferent calm that no one took that interest in Cripple Street to
come and stop him. The clangor of the fire-bells broke across the city.
For a moment the silence in Cripple Street seemed more deathly than
before. Then the doors of the tailors and bookbinders flew open. The
Fire Company came with leap and roar, ladder, engine, and hose, rattle
of wheels and thud of steam. Passing Mr. Barria's Durdo turned his head,
saw Janey in the door, and beamed on her.
“Hooray,” he shouted.
“It's Tommy's girl,” thundered Hamp Sharkey, from the top of his
jingling ladders. Fire Brigade No. 4 cheered, waved its helmet, wherever
it had a hand free, and in a moment was gone, leaving the drift of its
smoke in the air, the tremble of its passing, and Janey flushed and
thrilled. Hook and ladder and all had hailed her with honor as Tommy's
girl. A battalion of cavalry, with her lover at the head, dashing up to
salute, say, her battlemented or rose-embowered window--both terms occur
in the Annuals--and galloping away to the wars, might have been better
theoretically, but Janey was satisfied. She had no defence against such
battery. Power, daring, and danger were personified in Tommy. He had
brought them all to her feet. This it was to live and be a woman. She
turned back into the dim shop, her eyes shining. The backs of the dusty
books seemed to quiver and glow, even those containing arithmetic,
dead philosophies, and other cool abstractions, as if they forgot their
figures and rounded periods, and thought of the men who wrote them, how
these once were young.
Durdo found it possible, by spending his off hours in Mr. Barria's shop,
to keep cheerful without fighting Hamp Sharkey. A row now and then with
a smaller man than Hamp was enough to satisfy the growing mellowness of
his soul. His off hours began at four. He passed them among the Annuals
and old magazines in a state of puzzled and flattered bliss. He fell so
far from nature as to read the Annuals where Janey directed, to conclude
that what was popularly called “fun” was vanity and dust in the mouth;
that from now on he would be decent, and that any corner or hole in the
ground which contained Janey and Tommy would suit him forever. No doubt
he was wrong there.
Mr. Barria's memories of all that had befallen him within or without, in
the journey of this life, before his entry on the Path of Quietness, and
his consciousness of all external objects and occurrences since, were
clear enough, but only as little white clouds in the open sky are clear,
whose business it is to be far away and trouble us with no insistent
tempest. They never entered the inner circle of his meditation. They
appeared to be distant things. He had no sense of contact with them.
His abstractions had formed a series of concentric spheres about him.
In some outer sphere lay a knowledge of the value of books as bought and
sold, which enabled him to buy and sell them with indifferent profit,
but it entered his central absorption no more than the putting on and
off of his coat.
He was not absorbed in books. He did not seem to care for them, beyond
the fourscore or more worn volumes that were piled about his table by
the gray window, many of them in tattered paper covers bearing German
imprints, some lately rebound by a Cripple Street bookbinder. He did not
care for history or geography, not even his own. He did not care where
he was born or when, where he was now, or how old.
Once--whether forty years gone or four hundred, would have seemed to him
a question of the vaguest import--he had taught Arabic and Greek in a
university town, which looks off to mountains that in their turn look
off to the Adriatic Sea. There was a child, a smaller Julian Barria.
Somewhere about this time and place he began explorations in more
distant Eastern languages. The date was unnoted, obscure, traditional.
The interest in language soon disappeared. It was a period of wonder and
searching. After the moral fierceness of the Arab and Mohammedan, the
Hindoo's and Buddhist's calm negations and wide mental spaces first
interested him by contrast, then absorbed him. He began to practise the
discipline, the intense and quiet centring on one point, till the sense
of personality should slip away and he and that point be one. There was
no conviction or conversion, for the question never seemed put to him,
or to be of any value, whether one thing was true and another not true.
But the interest gradually changed to a personal issue. All that he now
heard and saw and spoke to, objects in rest or in motion, duties that
called for his performance, became not so much vaguer in outline as more
remote in position. In comparison with his other experiences they were
touched with a faint sense of unreality. The faces of other men were
changed in his eyes. He sometimes noticed and wondered, passingly, that
they seemed to see no change in him, or if any change, it was one that
drew them more than formerly to seek his sympathy. He observed himself
listening to intimate confessions with a feeling of patient benevolence
that cost him no effort, and seemed to him something not quite belonging
to him as a personal virtue, but which apparently satisfied and quieted
the troubled souls that sought him.
About this later time--a reference to the histories would fix the date
at 1848--a civil war swept the land, and the University was closed. The
younger Julian Barria was involved in the fall of the revolutionists and
fled from the country. The late teacher of Greek and Arabic crossed
the ocean with him. It was a matter of mild indifference. He gave his
sympathy to all, gently and naturally, but felt no mental disturbance.
Neither did the change of scene affect him. Everywhere were earth
beneath and sky above, and if not it were no matter. Everywhere were
men and women and children, busy with a multitude of little things,
trembling, hurrying, crying out among anxieties. It was all one, clear
enough, but remote, touched with the same sense of unreality, and like
some sad old song familiar in childhood and still lingering in the
memory.
The book-shop on Cripple Street at one time dealt also in newspapers and
cigars. They were more to the younger Barria's talent, more to his
taste the stirring talk of men who live in their own era and congregate
wherever there are newspapers and tobacco. Afterward he went away into
the West, seeking a larger field for his enterprise than Cripple Street,
and the newspaper and cigar business declined and passed away. The
show-case fell to other uses. The elder Barria sat by the square rear
window, and the gray dust gathered and dimmed it. Ten years flowed like
an unruffled stream; of their conventional divisions and succeeding
events he seemed but superficially conscious. Letters came now and
then from the West, announcing young Barria's journeys and schemes, his
marriage in the course of enterprise, finally his death. The last was in
a sprawling hand, and said:
“Jules missus is ded to an thars a kid. Jules sez take her to the ol man
Jake when ye go est in the spring. I am Jake. He is wooly in his hed
sez he but he is a good man sez he. He got a soul like Mondays washin
on Tewsday mornin sez he spekin in figgers an menin you. Them was Jules
last word.”
The large, bony person called Jake, slouch-hatted and rough-bearded,
brought the child in time, and departed, muttering embarrassment. She
stood among the Annuals and old magazines with a silver dollar from
Jake clasped in each hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in her
tiny pocket, probably representing young Barria's estate and the end of
Jake's duties as executor. She might have been two or three years old.
That was not a matter of interest to Mr. Barria, in whose conception the
soul of every creature was, in a way, more ancient than the hills.
She seemed to believe in his good intentions and came to him gravely.
She did not remember any mother, and for her own name it had apparently
been “chicken” when her father had wanted her, and “scat” when he did
not. Mr. Barria envied a mind so untrammelled with memories, and named
her Jhana, which means a state of mystical meditation, of fruitful
tranquillity, out of which are said to come six kinds of supernatural
wisdom and ten powers. The name sometimes appeared to him written
Dhyana, when his meditations ran in Sanskrit instead of Pali. Cripple
Street called her Janey, and avoided the question with a wisdom of
its own. It had grown used to Mr. Barria. Scholars came from near-by
universities to consult him, and letters from distant countries to Herr,
Monsieur, or Signor Doctor Julian Barria, but Cripple Street, if it
knew of the matter, had no stated theory to explain it and was little
curious. His hair and beard grew white and prophetic, his skin more
transparent. A second decade and half a third glided by, and Janey and
Tommy Durdo sat hand in hand among the Annuals.
“You must ask him, Tommy,” Janey insisted, “because lovers always ask
parents.”
“An' the parents is horty and they runs away hossback. Say, Janey, if
his whiskers gets horty, I 'll faint. Say, Janey, you got to go 'n ask
my ma if you can have me.”
“Would she be haughty?”
Janey always bubbled with pleasure, like a meadow spring, when Tommy
“got on a string,” as he called it, fell to jesting circumstantially.
“You bet. She'd trun you down. An' yet she's married second time, she
has,” he went on, thoughtfully, “an' she didn't ask my consent, not
either time. I would n't a given it the first, if she had, 'cause dad
was no good. I'd a been horty. I'd a told her he wa'n't worthy to come
into any family where I was comin', which he wa'n't.”
“Oh, Tommy!”
“Yep. Dad was more nuisance'n mosquitoes.”
Mr. Barria came out of the distant retreat of his meditation slowly, and
looked up. It did not need all the subtle instinct of a pundit to read
the meaning of the two standing hand in hand before him.
Tommy looked and felt as one asking favors of a spectre, and Mr. Barria
had fallen into a silent habit of understanding people.
“Little Jhana iss a woman so soon?” he said softly. “She asks of her
birthright.”
He rose and looked quietly, steadily at Tommy, who felt himself growing
smaller inside, till his shoes seemed enormous, even his scalp loose and
his skull empty.
“Mr.--”
“It's Tommy Durdo,” said Janey.
“You will always remember to be a little kinder than seems necessary,
Mr. Durdo? It iss a good rule and very old.”
“He didn't ask whether I was a burglar or a lunatic by profesh,”
grumbled Tommy, later. “Ain't a reasonable interest. He might a asked
which.”
“Never mind,” said Janey. “I'll tell that.”
There were four rooms over the shop, where the three lived in great
peace. Tommy never made out whether Mr. Barria thought him a burglar or
a lunatic. As regards Janey he felt more like a burglar, as regards Mr.
Barria more like a lunatic. He dodged him reverentially. Only at the
station, where his duties kept him for the most part, did he feel like
a natural person and a fireman. He confided in Hamp Sharkey, and brought
him to the shop and the little up-stairs sitting-room for the purpose
of illustration. Hamp's feelings resembled Tommy's. They fell into naïve
sympathy. Hamp admired Tommy for his cleverness, his limber tongue,
the reckless daring of his daily contact with Mr. Barria and Janey, two
mysteries, differing but both remote. She was not like the shop-girls on
Main Street. Hamp would carry away the memory of her shining eyes lifted
to Tommy's irregular, somewhat impish face, and growl secretly over his
mental bewilderment. Tommy admired Hamp for his height and breadth and
dull good-nature.
On an afternoon in the early summer the fire-bells rang call after call.
Engine No. 4 went second. The freight houses by the harbor were burning,
and the tall furniture factory that backed them. About dusk the north
wall of the factory fell into the street with a roar and rattle of
flying bricks.
The book-shop was dark in the centre. The two lamps in the front windows
were lit, and Mr. Barria's lamp in his hidden corner.
It came upon Mr. Barria in his absorption that there had been a moment
before the sound of the trampling of heavy feet in the front of the
shop, and a sudden cry. The trampling continued and increased. He came
forward with his lamp. Men were crowding up the narrow stairs that began
in the opposite corner. One of them swung a lantern overhead.
“'Twere a brick,” said some one in the dark centre of the shop. “Took
him over the ear. Dented him in like a plug hat.”
“Where's some water?”
“Knocked her over quicker 'n the brick.”
“Sh! What's that?”
“It's the old man.”
The light of the lamp, lifted in Mr. Barria's hand, fell over his
head with its flowing white hair, rabbinical beard, and spectral face.
Three-men, one of them a policeman, drew back to one side of the shop,
looking startled and feebly embarrassed. On the other side the window
lamp shone on Janey, where she lay fallen among the old Annuals.
He lifted her head and muttered:
“Jhana, Jhana.”
The three men slipped through the door; those above came down; a doctor
bustled in, satchel in hand, and after him several women; Janey was
carried up; the shop was empty, except for Mr. Barria sitting by his
lamp and muttering softly.
“She could not find it, the peace that is about, and her little
happiness it would not stay beside her.”
Presently the doctor spoke over him.
“I think Mrs. Durdo should be taken to the hospital. St. James, you
know. It's not far.”
“You think--”
“She is approaching confinement, and the shock, you know.”
“Whatever iss desirable, Herr Doctor. There iss no need, sir, of the
economy in respect to--to whatever iss desirable.”
“Quite right, Mr. Barria. Quite right.”
This was in June. Late in the fall Janey came back from St. James's
Hospital, pale, drooping, and alone.
She sat in a black dress by the front window and kept the accounts as
before, gazed through the dim panes at Cripple Street, which was made
by nature to be dull, but read the Annuals no more, which was perhaps a
pity.
Mr. Barria from the rear of the shop watched Janey, sitting among the
Annuals and looking out on Cripple Street. He had not entered on the
Path himself as a cure for sorrow and suffering; he had come to it from
another direction. Yet the first purpose of its system had been the
solution of these. It was written:
“Sorrow and suffering will be overcome when this thirst for life is
quenched, which makes for continuance, and that desire of separateness
and hunger after selfhood are put aside. They will fall away as drops
from a lotus leaf.”
And Janey was a type of them as they walk abroad. The measure of her
trouble was the measure of the yearning and attainment that had been
hers.
“Desire not more then of yearning or attainment, of sight or touch,
of life in variety or abundance, but desire none at all, and turning
within, the dwelling you build there dwell in it, until both desire and
separateness shall in turn disappear.”
He went forward and drew a chair beside her.
“Little Jhana,” he said, “there wass once a woman and young who brought
her dead child to the wisest of men, and asked so of him, 'Do you know
one medicine that will be good for this child?' It was the custom then
for the patients or their friends to provide the herbs which the
doctors require, so that when she asked what herbs he would wish, and
he answered, 'Mustard-seed,' she promised with haste to bring it, for it
wass a common herb. 'And it must come,' he said, 'only from some house
where no child, no hussband, no wife, no parent, no friend hass died.'
Then she went in great hope, carrying the dead child; but everywhere
they said, 'I have lost,' and again, 'We have lost,' and one said, 'What
iss this you say; the living are few but the dead are many.' She found
so no house in that place from which she might take the mustard-seed.
Therefore she buried the child, and came, and she said, 'I have not
found it; they tell me the living are few and the dead many.' And he
showed her how that nothing endured at all, but changed and passed into
something else, and each wass but a changing part of a changing whole,
and how, if one thought more of the whole, one so ceased to be troubled
much of the parts, and sorrow would fade away quietly.” Janey stared at
him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. There was a certain comfort always
in Mr. Barria himself, however oddly he might talk. She dropped her head
on his knee and whispered:
“I don't know about all that. I want Tommy and the baby.”
He touched her hair with thin fingers gently. “Then I wonder, little
Jhana,” he said, looking to the magazines and Annuals, “if you have
found among these one, a poet of the English, who calls it to be better
to love and lose than not to love.”
“I don't know. I don't remember.”
He smoothed her hair again and went away. The winter passed and the
spring came with a scatter of sunshine and little showers. Janey still
sat by the window. If she had been able to generalize, to see that Tommy
and the baby represented hunger after life, and that this was the root
of sorrow, it would perhaps have still seemed to her that love and loss
were the better choice. Perhaps not. But she could not generalize. Her
thoughts were instincts, fancies, and little shining points of belief.
She could not see herself in any figure of speech; that she was one of a
multitude of discordant notes in the universe, whose business it was to
tune themselves to the key of a certain large music and disappear in its
harmony, where alone was constant happiness. It did not seem to mention
Tommy or the baby, and if not there was no point in it.
Spring slipped away. Cripple Street was filled to the brim with bland
summer. Janey went every day to the cemetery with flowers. In September
she began to come back with flowers in her belt.
It was a rainy, dismal day in October. Mr. Barria had a remote sense of
hearing Janey's laugh. It seemed to him there was a strange presence
in the shop. He peered out, and saw Hamp Sharkey outlined against the
window, large, slow-moving, and calm, a man who seemed to avoid all
troubles of the flesh by virtue of having enough flesh, and solid bone
beneath. Janey looked up at him and laughed. Around her were the old
Annuals, containing the loves of Edwards and Eleanors.
Mr. Barria leaned back in his chair. Some untraced suggestion led him
to counting his years idly. He made them out to be nearly eighty.
They seemed suddenly to rest on his shoulders like a weight. If one
considered them at all, they were heavy, the years. And for this human
life, it was only intelligible in the abstract. Of its details there
were too many.
The shop grew duskier, and the rain beat on the windows with an
incessant pattering, a multitude of tiny details, sounding accordingly
as one might listen. For either it would seem a cheerful, busy sound of
the kindly water, humble and precious and clean, needful in households,
pleasant in the fulness of rivers, comfortable, common, familiar; or it
was the low sigh of the driven rain, the melancholy iteration and murmur
of water circling like everything else its wheel of change, earth and
ocean and sky, earth and ocean and sky, and weary to go back to its
vague, elemental vapor, as before the worlds were shaped.
Mr. Barria turned back to his volume, bound in gray paper with a German
imprint. To his ears the sound of the two voices talking became as
abstract as the rain. Hamp Sharkey's laugh was like the lowing of a
contented ox, and Janey's, as of old, like the ripple of a brook in a
meadow.