Katie was back home; or, more accurately, she was back at Wayne's
quarters, where they could perhaps remain for a month or two longer.
And craving some simple, natural thing, something that could not make the
heart ache, she went out that afternoon to play golf. The physical Kate,
Katie of the sound body, was delighted to be back playing golf. Every
little cell sang its song of rejoicing--rejoicing in emancipation from
the ill-smelling crowds, return to the open air and the good green earth.
It seemed a saving thing that they could so rejoice.
Katie was reading the little book on man's evolution which the man who
was having much to do with her evolution had--it seemed long ago--sent
her in the package marked "Danger." She had finished the book about women
and was just looking through the one on evolution on the day Caroline
Osborne's car had stopped at her door. That began a swift series of
events leaving small place for reading. But when, that last day they were
together in Chicago, she asked him about something to read, he suggested
a return to that book. There seemed wisdom and kindness in the
suggestion. The story of evolution was to the mind what the game of golf
was to the body. With the life about her pressing in too close there was
something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all
the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all--were
suffocating her--something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air
after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds--made
her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more
vital--imperative--but she had more space in which to see them, was given
a chance to understand them rather than be blindly smothered by them.
For a number of years Katie had known that there was such a thing as
evolution. It had something to do with an important man named Darwin. He
got it up. It was the idea that we came from monkeys. The monkey was not
Katie's favorite animal and she would have been none too pleased with the
idea had it not been that there was something so delicious about solemn
people like her Aunt Elizabeth and proper people like Clara having come
from them. She was willing to stand it herself, just because if she came
from them they did, too. She had assumed all along that she believed in
Darwin and that people who did not believe in him were benighted. But the
chief reason she had for believing in him was that the church had not
believed in him. That was through neither malice nor conviction as
regards the church, but merely because it was exciting to have some one
disagreeing with it. It had thrilled her as "fearless," She had always
meant to find out more about evolution, she had a hazy idea that there
was a great deal more to it than just the fact of having come from
monkeys, but she led such a busy life--bridge and things--that there was
never time and so it remained a thing she believed in and was some day
going to find out about.
Now she was furious with herself and with everybody connected
with her for having lived so much of her life shut out from the
knowledge--vision--that made life so vast and so splendid. It was like
having lived all one's life in sight of the sea and being so busy walking
around a silly little lake in a park that there was no time to turn one's
face seaward. She wondered what she would think of a person who said the
little toy lake kept her so busy there was never a minute to turn around
and take a good look at the sea!
Katie had always loved the great world of living things--the fishes and
birds--all animals--all things that grew. They had always called to her
imagination--she used to make up stories about them. She saw now that
their real story was a thousand-fold more wonderful--more the story--than
anything she had been able to invent. She would give much to have known
it long before. She felt that she had missed much. There was something
humiliating in the thought of having lived one's life without knowing
what life was. It made one seem such a dead thing. Now she was on fire to
know all about it.
She smiled as it suggested to her what her uncle had said a few days
before of the fresh paint. She supposed there was some truth in it, that
one who was conserving the past must find something raw and ludicrous in
her state of mind. Her passion to fairly devour knowledge would probably
bring to many of them the same amused smile it had brought to her uncle.
But it was surprising how little she minded the smile. She was too intent
on the things she would devour.
Her glimpse into this actual story of life brought the first purely
religious feeling she had ever known. It even brought the missionary
fervor, which, as they sat down to rest, she exercised upon Worth, who
had been proudly filling the office of caddy. She told him that she was
going to tell him the most wonderful fairy story there had ever been in
the world. And the thing that made it most wonderful of all was that,
while it was just like a fairy story in being wonderful, it was every bit
true. And then she told him a little of the great story of how one thing
became another thing, how everything grew out of something else, how it
had been doing that for millions of years, how he was what he was then
because through all those years one thing had changed, grown, into
something else.
As she told it it seemed so noble a thing to be telling a child, so
much purer and more dignified--to say nothing of more stimulating--than
the evasive tales of life employed in the attempt to thwart her
childish mind.
Worth was upon her with a hundred questions. _How_ did a worm become
something that wasn't a worm? Did it know it was going to do it? And why
did one worm go one way and in a lot of million years be a little boy
and another worm go another way and just never be anything but a worm?
Did she think in another hundred million years that little bird up there
would be something else? Would _they_ be anything else? And why--?
She saw that she had let herself in for a whole new world of whys. One
thing was certain: if she were to remain with Worth she would have to
find out more about evolution. Her knowledge was pitifully incommensurate
to his whys.
But it was beautiful to her the way his mind reached out to it. He was
lying on his stomach, head propped up on hands, in an almost prayerful
attitude before an ant hill. Did she think those little ants knew that
they were alive? Would they ever be anything else? He wanted to be told
more stories about things becoming other things, seemed intoxicated with
that idea of the constant becoming.
"But, Aunt Kate," he cried, "mama told me that God made me!"
"Why so He did, Worthie--that is, I suppose He did--but He didn't just
make you out of nothing."
He lay there on the grass in silence for a long time, looking at the
world about him--thinking. After a while he was singing a little song.
This was the song:
"Once I was a little worm--
Long--long--ago."
Katie smiled in thinking how scandalized Clara would be to have heard
the story just told her son, story moving him to sing a vulgar song about
having been a horrid little worm. It would be Clara's notion of propriety
to tell Worth that the doctor brought him in his motor car and expect his
mind, that wonderful, plastic little mind of his, to be proper enough to
rest content with that lucid exposition of the wonder of life.
The time was near for Clara's six months of Worth to begin. Katie had
promised she would bring him to her wherever she was; and Clara was in
Paris and meaning to remain there. It meant that Worth would spend the
winter in Paris, away from them; from time to time--as the custom of the
city dictated--he would be taken for perfunctory little walks in the
_Bois_ and would be told to "run and play" if he asked indelicate
questions concerning the things of life.
In the light of this story of the ways of growth the arrangement about
Worth seemed an unnatural and a brutal thing.
She did not believe that, as a matter of fact, Clara wanted Worth. The
maternal passion was less strong in Clara than the passion for
_lingerie_. But she wanted Worth with her for six months because that
kept him from Wayne and Katie for six months and she knew that they
did want him.
The poor little fellow's summer had not been what Katie had planned. Part
of the time he had been with his father and part of the time with
her--that thing of division again, and as neither of them had been happy
any of the time Worth had had to suffer for it. He seemed to have to
suffer so much through the fact that grown-up people did not know how to
manage their lives.
Suddenly he sat up. "Aunt Kate," he asked, "when's Miss Ann coming back?"
"I don't know, dear."
"Well where _is_ she?"
"She's been--called away."
"Well I wish she'd come back. I like Miss Ann, Aunt Kate."
"Yes, dear; we all do."
"She tells nice stories, too. Only they're about fairies that are just
fairies--not worms and things that are really so. Do you suppose Miss Ann
knows, Aunt Kate, that she used to be a frog?"
Katie laughed and tried to elucidate her point about the frog. But she
wondered what difference it might not have made had Ann known that, as
Worth put it, she used to be a frog. With Ann, fairy stories would have
to be about things not real. All Ann's life it had been so. It suddenly
seemed that it might have made all the difference in the world had Ann
known that the things most wonderful were the things that were.
Or rather, had the world in which Ann lived cared to know real things for
precious things, the desire for life as the most radiant thing that had
ever been upon the earth. Ann would have found the world a different
place had men known life for the majestic thing it was, seen that back of
what her uncle called the "splendid heritage of the country's
institutions" was the vastly more splendid heritage of the institution of
life. Letting the former shut them from the latter was being too busy
with the toy lake to look out at the sea.
Seeing Ann as part of all the life that had ever been upon the earth she
became, not infinitesimal, but newly significant. Widened outlook brought
deepened feeling. Newly understanding, she sat there brooding over Ann
anew, pain in the perfection of her understanding.
But new courage. Life had persisted through so much, was so triumphant.
The larger conception lent its glow to the paling belief that Ann would
persist, triumph.
"Aunt Kate," Worth burst forth, "let's take the boat and go up and find
the man that mends the boats."
Aunt Kate blushed. "Oh no, dearie, we couldn't do that."
"Why we did do it once," argued Worth.
"I know, but we can't do it now."
"I don't see why not."
No, Worth didn't see.
"I just want to ask him, Aunt Kate, if he knows that he used to live
in a tree."
"Oh, he knows it," she laughed.
"He knows everything," said Worth.
"Worthie, is that why you like him? 'Cause he knows everything? Or do you
like him--just because you like him?"
"I like him because he knows everything--but mostly I like him just
because I like him."
"Same here," breathed Aunt Kate.
The man who mended the boats was coming to see her that night. Perhaps
golf and evolution should not grow arrogant, after all.
He had been strange about coming; when she talked with him over the
'phone he had hesitated at the suggestion and finally said, with a
defiance she could not see the situation called for, that he would like
to come. In Chicago he had once said to her: "There's too much gloom
around you now for me to contribute the story of my life. But please
remember that that was why I didn't tell it."
She wondered if the "story of his life" had anything to do with his
hesitancy in coming to see her. Surely he would have no commonplace
notions about "different spheres," though he had mentioned them, and with
bitterness. He was especially hostile to the army, had more than once
hurt her in his hostility. She would not have resented his attacking it
as an institution, that she would expect from his philosophy, but it was
a sort of personal contempt for the army and its people she had resented,
almost as she would a contemptuous attitude toward her own family.
She had contended that he was unjust; that a lack of sympathy with the
ends of the army--basis of it--should not bring him to a prejudiced
attitude toward its people. She maintained that officers of the army were
a higher type than civilians of the same class. He had told her, almost
roughly, that he didn't think she knew anything about it, and she had
replied, heatedly, that she would like to know why she wouldn't know more
about it than he! In the end he said he was sorry to have hurt her when
there was so much else to hurt her, but had not retracted what he had
said, or even admitted the possibility of mistake.
It seemed that one of the worst things about "classes" was that they
inevitably meant misunderstanding. They bred antagonism, and that
prejudice. People didn't know each other.
Considering it now, she wondered, though feeling traitorous to him in the
wondering, if the man who mended the boats might shrink from anything so
distinctly social as calling upon her.
Their meetings theretofore had been on a bigger and a sterner basis; she
had missed a few of the little niceties of consideration, a few of those
perfunctory and yet curiously vital courtesies to which she had all her
life been accustomed as a matter of course from her army men; but it had
been as if they were merely leaving them behind for things larger and
deeper, as if their background was the real world rather than world of
perfunctory things. From him she had a consideration, not perfunctory,
but in the mood of the things they were sharing. That sense of sharing
big things, things real and rude, had swept them out of the world of
artificial things. Now did he perhaps hold back in timidity from that
world of the trivial things?
She put it from her, disliking herself as of the trivial things in
letting it suggest itself at all. Expecting him to be just like the
men she had known would be expecting the sea to behave like that lake
in the park.
That night she put on her most attractive gown, a dress sometimes gray
and sometimes cloudy blues and greens, itself like the sea, and finding
in Katie a more mysterious quality than her openness would usually
suggest. Feeling called upon to make some account to herself for dressing
more than occasion would seem to demand, she told herself that she must
get the poor old thing worn out and get something new.
But it was not a poor old thing, and the last thing Katie really wanted
was to succeed in getting it worn out.
As she dressed she was thinking of Ann's pleasure in clothes. There were
times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was
understandable--lovable--after having been to Centralia, after knowing.
So many things were understandable and lovable after knowing.
She wished she might call across the hall and ask Ann to come in and
fasten her dress. She would like to chat with her about the way she had
done her hair--all those intimate little things they had countless times
talked about so gayly.
She walked over into Ann's room--room in which Ann had taken such pride
and pleasure. Ann had loved the things on the dressing-table, she had
more than once seen her fairly caressing those pretty ivory things. She
wondered if Ann had anything resembling a dressing-table--what she
wore--how she managed.
Those were the little worries about Ann forever haunting her, as they
would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the
immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that
sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the
centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be
getting enough to eat.
There was a complexity in her mood of that night--happiness and sadness
so close as at times to be indistinguishable--the whole of it making for
a sense of the depth of life.
But their evening was constrained. Katie blamed the dress for part of it,
vexed with herself for having put it on. She had wanted to be
attractive--not suggest the unattainable.
And that was what something seemed suggesting. He appeared less ill at
ease than morose. Katie herself, after having been so happy in his
coming, was, now that he was there, uncontrollably depressed. They talked
of a variety of things--in the main, the things she had been reading--but
something had happened to that wonderful thing which had grown warm in
their hearts as they walked those last two blocks.
Even the things of which they talked had lost their radiance. What did it
matter whether the universe was wonderful or not if the wonderful thing
in one's own heart was to be denied life?
From the first, it had been as if the things of which they talked were
things sweeping them together, they were in the grip of the power and the
wonder of those things, wrung by the tragedy of them, exalted by the
hope--in it all, by it all, united. It was as if the whole sea of
experience and emotion, suffering and aspiration, was driving, holding,
them together.
So it had been all along.
But not tonight. It was now--or at least so it seemed to Katie--as if
those forces had let them go. What had been as a great sea surging around
their hearts was now just things to talk about.
It left her desolate. And as she grew unhappy, she forced her gaiety and
that seemed to put him the farther away.
The two different worlds had sent Ann away; was it, in a way she was
unable to cope with, likewise to send him away?
Watts passed through the hall. She saw him glance out at the soldier
loweringly and after that he grew more morose, almost sullenly so.
It seemed foolish to talk of one's being free when held by things one
could not even see.
It was just when she was feeling so lonely and miserable she wished he
would go that the telephone rang and central told her that Chicago was
trying to get her.
It was in the manner of the old days that she turned to him and asked
what he thought it could be.
The suggestion--possibility--swept them back to the old basis, the old
relationship. Katie grew excited, unnerved, and he talked to her
soothingly while she waited for central to call again.
They spoke of what it probably was; her brother was in Chicago, Katie
told him, and of course it was he, and something about his own affairs.
Perhaps he had news of when he would be ordered away. Yes, without doubt
that was it.
But there was a consciousness of dissembling. They were drawn together by
the possibility they did not mention, drawn together in the very thing of
not mentioning it.
As in those tense moments they tried to talk of other things, they were
keyed high in the consciousness of not talking of the real thing. And in
that there was suggestion of the other thing of which they were not
talking. It was all inexplicably related: the excitement, the tenseness,
the waiting, the dissembling.
Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand
on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant--something stealing back
to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie's eyes
just then.
The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his
eyes from her face.
When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver
he lay a steadying hand upon her arm.
At first there was nothing more than a controversy as to who had the
line. In her impatience, she rose; he rose, too, standing beside her.
"Here's your party," said central at last.
Her "party" was Wayne.
But something was still the matter on the line; she could not get what
Wayne was trying to tell her.
As her excitement became more difficult to control the man at her side
kept speaking to her--touching her--soothingly.
At last she could hear Wayne. "You hear me, Katie?"
"Oh yes--_yes_--what is it?"
"I want to tell you--"
It was swallowed up in a buzzing on the line.
Then central's voice came clear and crisp. "Your party is trying to tell
you that _Ann_ is found."
"Oh--" gasped Katie, and lost all color--"Oh--"
"Katie--?" That was Wayne again.
"Oh _yes_, Wayne?"
"I have found her. She is well--that is, will be well. She is all
right--going to be all right. I'll write it all to-morrow. It's all over,
Katie. You don't have to worry any more."
The next instant the telephone was upside down on the table and Katie,
sobbing, was in his arms. He was holding her close; and as her sobs grew
more violent he kissed her hair, murmured loving things. Suddenly she
raised her head--lifting her face to his. He kissed her; and all the
splendor of those eons of life was Katie's then.