ANOTHER DAY
The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon
another world.
The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the
horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as
usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less
recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had
given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new
significance. Really this was Magna Charta. All those who, tired and
sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home
upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something
had been done. Each might have told you in his way that a new web of
human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom.
Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to
become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the
failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.
There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who
classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to
tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials
themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an
ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called
intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no
better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from
the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is
Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured,
to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase
it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their
veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as
much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who
sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or
on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.
Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains
admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was
another day.
In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often
problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of
youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to
engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination. They told the boy
that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the
myriad stars. He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the
Edge. No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the
figures be conclusive. They told him of the positive and negative
poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres
of force. Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told
him--men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told
him--that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was
Love. He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world
indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since
ever time began. But it seemed to him that this union must never be
that of mere chance. There could be but one way right and fit for the
meeting of the two halves of life. He looked about him in the little
village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the
women who were there for them to marry. They had never sailed across
seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own
souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?" Seeing that this was
the way of human beings, he was ashamed. It aroused him to hear of
this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a
given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry,
and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who
forthwith did marry her. To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there
should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be
sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found. With
some men this delusion lasts very late. With some women it endures
forever. For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in
the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.
With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there
came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's
nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands. Thus he found
himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled
and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with
that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be
himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many
broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history. Franklin
wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to
achieve. And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to
find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the
weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved
stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself.
To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not
yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when
the image comes.
Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning
after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a
chamber of the stars. The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles
of joy and beauty. The curtains at the windows, cracked and seamed,
made to him but a map of the many devious happinesses which life should
thenceforth show. The noises of the street were but music, the voices
from the rooms below were speech of another happy world. Before him,
radiant, was that which he had vaguely sought. Not for him to marry
merely the neighbour's daughter! This other half of himself, with feet
running far to find the missing friend, had sought him out through all
the years, through all the miles, through all the spheres! This was
fate, and at this thought his heart glowed, his eyes shone, his very
stature seemed to increase. He wist not of Nature and her ways of
attraction. He only knew that here was that Other whose hand,
pathetically sought, he had hitherto missed in the darkness of the
foregone days. Now, thought he, it was all happily concluded. The
quotient was no indefinite one; it had an end. It ended here, upon the
edge of the infinite which he had sought; upon the pinnacle of that
universe of which he had learned; here, in this brilliant chamber of
delight, this irradiant abode, this noble hall bedecked with gems and
silks and stars and all the warp and woof of his many, many days of
dreams!
Mr. and Mrs. Buford had for the time excused themselves by reason of
Mrs. Buford's weariness, and after the easy ways of that time and place
the young people found themselves alone. Thus it was that Mary Ellen,
with a temporary feeling of helplessness, found herself face to face
with the very man whom she at that time cared least to see.