LEARNING LESSONS
The wide range of standpoints is one of the most interesting studies in
this world. A man on a hill can look to the horizon in all directions,
and wonder about all the little black specks which he may see thereon,
and all on the horizon can see the little black speck on the hill and
draw their own conclusions as to what it may be. Ledge thought city
people lacking in intellect because of the way they "took the Falls,"
and the visitors thought the townspeople lacking because of the way in
which they "took the Falls." Mrs. Ray knew that Ingram and Lassie were
in love, and Ingram and Lassie didn't know it; and Ingram and Lassie had
been told by Mrs. O'Neil that Mrs. Ray would eventually marry Sammy
Adams, while Mrs. Ray herself not only didn't know that, but had
declared herself to be "dead set" against the proposition. The State had
appointed a commission, and Mr. Ledge was troubled over its results; and
all the while Creation, in the first of its creating, had settled the
outcome of the commission's task definitely and forever. And so they all
went merrily, blindly forward, Alva, like the evening star, moving
serenely in the centre, almost as unconscious of her own position in
people's eyes as the evening star is unconscious of telescopes. She was
happy in her ideal existence, and always hopeful of good to come for
others. Her aims were high and true, her sincerity splendid, and Lassie
was learning a great deal--more than either of them guessed, in fact.
And the second week was now going blithely forward, while Alva worked
and waited, hoping each hour for the telegram that should summon her to
bring her lover into the haven her love was building. But the telegram
came not.
"Lassie," she said, one noon, as they stood on the bridge looking down
into the tumbling waters below, "I wonder if I were ever like you, and I
wonder if you will ever be like me!"
"How so?"
"If you will ever be really in love? I can't believe that very many
people really know what love means,--that is, in the way that I mean it.
If they did, it could not possibly be a shock to any one to see me doing
what I am going to do. It would seem the only thing to do."
Lassie made no reply for a little, then she said, slowly: "When we love,
we look forward to life together generally; that is why people won't
understand you." She hesitated again. "I mean-that seems to me to be the
reason; perhaps I'm wrong."
Alva reflected, too, her eyes upon the autumn glory flaunting its color
over the deep gray shadows before her. "Even if one puts it all on the
material plan, I should think that the whole world would recognize by
this time that it isn't the man that a woman loves that fills her soul
with ringing joy; it's the way in which she loves the man. It's herself
and the effect of himself upon her thoughts that counts. It isn't the
house, but the life within the house that makes a home, you know."
Some shy, latent color rose up in Lassie's face. "I never thought about
it in just that way," she said; "but I suppose it's the truth."
"My dear, it is the truth. Of course it is the truth. No one to whom
sufficient has been revealed can doubt it. If you can't see it so, it is
because you are not yet old enough to comprehend. When I say 'old
enough' I don't mean the Lassie who is eighteen; I mean the Lassie who
began long before this mass of rock became even so stable as to be
shifting ocean sand. I mean the Lassie who departed out of God to work
in His way until she shall return to Him in some divine and distant
hereafter."
"Oh, Alva, you do say such queer things!"
"Perhaps; but you see I _know_ all this. It came to me through dire
hours of need. I've demonstrated its truth, step by step. Try to grasp
the idea."
"Do people ever think you crazy?" The question came timidly.
"Every one always thinks any one or anything that they can't understand,
crazy. Mrs. Ray thinks me crazy, and it's very difficult for me not to
consider her so."
"Alva!"
"Yes, really."
"I'll try to consider you sane."
"Thank you very much, dear." She smiled brightly. "Oh, Lassie, it's such
joy to have you to speak to. I was so choked and crowded with thoughts
before you came. It was so blessedly good that if I could not stay with
him, I could come to this quiet spot and have the house and you to help
me wait the days away. You see, Lassie, one has to be part body in
spite of everything, and it's so hard to keep your body up to your soul.
Sometimes it seems to me that all of a sudden I am drawn into a
whirlpool and cannot get hold of anything solid. I don't know just what
it is, but I imagine that I feel as they say the Saxons felt when they
saw the comet flaming in the year of the Conquest, that something
portends. And it seems to me so hard that I could not have stayed with
him. But they wouldn't hear to that."
Lassie pressed her hand. "I don't wonder at the way you feel," she said,
sympathetically; "there must be so much that is hard in your mind these
days."
"Words are poor to tell what I feel," said her friend; "that is what
binds me to him,--it is that he and I do not need to speak. We can feel
without translation."
"I wonder if I shall ever be loved like that," Lassie murmured
wistfully, and at her words the delicate flame illumined her face again.
Alva did not notice; she was looking down into the cleft beneath, and
watching the little river fret itself into foam and spray.
"Look!" she said suddenly. "Isn't it lovely in the noon sunlight? Fancy
the countless centuries on centuries that it must have taken the river
to cut itself this path. There was once a great lake on the other
side--the side above the bridge--and it is with the idea of restoring
that lake that the State is having this survey made. The difficulty is
that the State isn't geologist enough to know that the lake's outlet
flowed out there to our left, and that this river is comparatively a new
thing. If they remade the lake, the lake would be desperately likely to
remake its old outlet."
"Would it hurt?"
"Hurt! My dear, it would be another Johnstown Flood."
"Oh, dear! Do many know that?"
"Yes, dear; but it wouldn't drown the men who will own the water-power,
so what does it matter to this world of yours."
"But is that right--to look at anything in that horribly selfish way?"
"In what other way do rich financiers look at anything? But there will
come a time when a change will dawn. Look, dear, down there; see the
rainbow dancing on the spray. Well, that's the way that public opinion
is going to come in among us soon--in a rainbow of truth."
"It will be beautiful everywhere then?" Lassie asked, smiling.
"Very beautiful!" Alva stared down upon the writhing, leaping waters
below; "and I shall have given my all towards the dream's fulfilment.
And I shall have learned from him how to devote my life to the same
great ends that he served. Lassie, when one comprehends that not
happiness but usefulness is the end to be worked towards, then one
begins to see what living really means."
"How much it is all going to mean to you!"
"How much? Ah, only he and I can guess at that! There will be something
quite different from all the imaginings, in our sweet, sad days of work
and suffering and comforting. I dare not try to picture it to myself. I
only think often of how I shall pause here in my walks to come, and
steal a long look over this scene, so as to go home and describe it. He
loves beauty and he loves wood and water."
"You'll go back and forth across the bridge often then, won't you?"
"When I'm married, you mean?"
"Yes, when you're married."
"My dear, fancy what a joy Mrs. Ray will be to us. I shall go for the
mail expressly so as to tell all that Mrs. Ray said to me when I went
for the mail." She paused and smiled and sighed. "Lassie, I wish I were
strong enough not to mind one thing. I know so well--so very well--just
how it will look to every one,--above all to my parents, who are to be
driven half mad, even though I shall only ask a few months' freedom, in
return for all my life before and after. I wish that I might be spared
the sharp, keen realization of all that."
Lassie's eyes sought hers quickly. "But you have a right to do as you
please, Alva."
"Have I, dear? It seems to me sometimes as if I were the one person who
had no right to do as she pleases, not even in that which concerned her
most. You know that every one thinks that if a woman marries with a
prospect of years of happiness taken or given, she is justified in going
her own way. Any one would feel that, would understand that view. I
never could have done that, because my life was too heavily loaded with
burdens and responsibilities; and his was the same. It was because we
were so hopeless of happiness for so long that we do not cavil over the
wonder of what is offered us. Because if it had come in the form that it
comes to others, we must have refused it. It did come to us in that
form, and we did refuse it. It was only when it returned in a guise
that the world calls tragic, that we could accept it for our own."
"Yes, Alva, I understand," her tone was a cry, almost.
"Lassie, remember one thing, and don't forget it during any of these
hours that we shall spend together. If I read life by another light than
yours, it isn't because it was natural to my eyes. Once I might have
recoiled even more than you did, when I first told you. God's best
purposes for humanity require that we recoil from what seems unnatural.
But there are exceptions to all rules, and in return for two human lives
freely offered up on the altar of His world, He gives, sometimes, a few
days of unutterable happiness to their spirits. Lassie, he was big, he
was splendid; you know all that he was as every one else does. If I had
been young, if I had been ignorant enough to dare to be selfish, and if
he had been young and ignorant enough not to know how necessary he was
to thousands,--why, then, we might have been happy in the way that two
people out of a million sometimes are. But we had gone beyond all that,
or else we passed beyond it the instant we realized; at any rate, we
knew too well that I was bound hand and foot on the wheel of my life and
he was bound on his. We had to set our faces in opposite directions and
go on. Straight ahead. The world for which we sacrificed ourselves will
never even be grateful. The world could not have understood why we
should make any sacrifice; the world generally disdains those who do the
most for it. Isn't that so? If you tell any one in these days that your
first duty is to do right by your own soul, and that that means doing
what is best for all other souls, they stare. If I say to you that I
could bear to live alone and he could bear to live alone, because we
both knew absolutely that we had had centuries of one another and should
win eternity united, you'd stare, too."
"I wouldn't quite--" faltered Lassie.
"Don't try to, dear; only think how it is to him and to me now, when we
are to have this short, this pitifully short space of time together--to
have to take it in the face of such an outcry as will be made. When I
creep back into life again, with my heart broken and my dress black
always from then on, I shall be so notorious, such an object of
curiosity for all time to come, that my friends will prefer not to be
seen in public with me. When I think of my home-going to tell them, my
very soul faints. My father abhors any form of physical deformity; what
he is going to say to my marrying one who is so maimed and crushed that
he can not use his right hand, I can't think. And then there is my
mother, to whom sentiment and religion are alike quixotic. What will she
say?"
She was silent, and then she suddenly left the rail and moved on.
"Ah, well, if it could only stay bright like this until we came back
together! But that is impossible. What we shall see together will be the
snow lying softly over all, and the brown, curving line of the tree-tops
and the pink sunset glow in the west. He will lie in his chair and I
shall sit on a cushion thrown close beside him, and with that one hand
that they have left him pressed to my face, we shall look out over all
the wide, still world and talk of that future which no one can bar us
out of, except our own two selves. God can say 'Well done, thou good and
faithful servant,' but He proves in the saying that the doing and the
goodness and the faith all emanated from the one who served. Religion is
such a grand thing, Lassie; I can't understand any one with intelligence
choosing to be an atheist. And lately, since I have realized that the
real trinity is two who love and their God, I have been overcome at the
mysticism of what life really means. Oh, I'm truly very, very happy. As
I look over these hills and valleys, I think how all my life long I
shall be coming back here--not to weep, but to remember. I shall be left
lonely to a degree that hardly any one can comprehend, because for me
there will be no possible chance of any earthly consolation; but in
another sense I shall never know grief at all, for I know, with the
absolute knowledge that I have attained to, that grief like all other
finite things is unreal, and that my happiness is eternal."
They were now on the tracks quite near the hotel.
"I wonder if Mrs. Lathbun got a letter from her lawyer to-day," Lassie
said, changing the subject suddenly.
They went up the steps and opened the door, and there in the hall, on
her hurried way out to meet them, was Mrs. O'Neil, her face quite pale
with excitement.
"Oh, what do you think?" she cried, opening the door into the
dining-room; "come right in here. What _do_ you think?"
"What is it?" both asked together.
"The biggest surprise you ever got in your life. They're swindlers!"
Alva stepped in quickly and shut the door. "What?" she stammered; "who?"
"They're swindlers, both of them! It's all in the Kinnecot paper." She
held out a paper which she had in her hand to Alva. "You can read it; it
isn't a bit of doubt but what it's them."
Alva, turning quite pale, took the paper and read:
A PRETTY FOXY PAIR
Two women, claiming to be mother and daughter, came to the
Walker House in this village a few nights ago and inquired for
supper and a night's lodging, claiming they were very tired, as
they had walked over from Warsaw. Landlord Walker thought it a
little strange that they should have walked over when there
were two railroads that run from that village through here, but
said nothing and gave them supper and furnished them a room.
They remained in their room until about noon the next day, when
they paid their bill and left, taking the overland route for
Ledge, or in that direction. They registered at the Walker
House as Mrs. Ida M. Lathbun and Miss H. A. Lathbun, which are
the same names given by a pair who had been spending the summer
in the vicinity of Silver Lake and Perry. As stated above, they
came here from Warsaw, and our esteemed brother editor in that
place paid them the following compliment in a recent issue:
'A woman and daughter who are going from town to town, boarding
in one place until compelled to seek another because of their
inability to pay their board, have been found to be in this
town, coming here from Perry and Silver Lake, where their
record is one of unpaid bills. They are smart, clever, female
tramps, who have no income and no visible means of support.'
It is said at Silver Lake they stated they were expecting some
money, and would stay at one boarding-place as long as they
could, and when fired out would settle at another. They finally
went to Perry, and, when compelled to leave there, walked
across the country to Warsaw, stopping at Mr. Samuel Adams's
overnight, while en route.
The older Mrs. Lathbun is said to be an own cousin of Arthur
Rehman, who has been before the public for one escapade or
another for many years. She is said to have been well-to-do at
one time, and is living in expectations of more money from some
relative. The couple were fairly well dressed and intelligent
looking women.
Alva's hand holding the paper fell limply at her side. She looked at
Mrs. O'Neil and Mrs. O'Neil looked at her; while Mary Cody, who had come
in from the kitchen, and Lassie looked at them both.
"Well, what do you think of it?" Mrs. O'Neil said, finally.
"I can't believe it," Alva gasped; "it can't be true!"
"Just what I said! You know I said that right off, Mary Cody? But Jack
believes it. He's gone to Ledge Centre to see Mr. Pollock."
"Who is Mr. Pollock?"
"The lawyer."
"And where are they now?"
"Up-stairs. They never get up till noon, you know."
"How long have they been here?"
"Two weeks and a little over."
"Haven't they paid you anything?"
"Not a cent."
Alva became more distressed. "And the girl is so delicate, too," she
said.
"Delicate! I should think that she was. Every third day the old lady has
all my flat-irons wrapped in towels to put around her. And then, think
of it! October, and not a coat or a flannel have either of them got."
A slight shiver ran over Alva.
"You're cold," said Mrs. O'Neil; "come into the kitchen. Mary Cody, you
stand at the door and listen, for that old lady is a sly one."
Mary Cody stood at the door, and the other three went into the kitchen.
"Won't Mrs. Ray be pleased," said Mrs. O'Neil. "She was down at the
church, or I'd have gone right up to her with the paper. It was she that
set every one after 'em, because she was so crazy over their staying at
the Adams farm that night. She's so jealous of Sammy."
"Ow!" exclaimed Mary Cody, interrupting; "I hear the stairs creaking!"
Mrs. O'Neil grabbed the newspaper and thrust it back of a clothes
basket. The next instant Mrs. Lathbun, with an empty pitcher in her
hand, came in through the dining-room door.
The large, heavily-built woman, not stout but very robust in appearance,
had on her usual dress, and smiled pleasantly at them all in greeting.
"Was there any mail?" she asked, going to the stove and beginning to
fill her pitcher from the reservoir as she spoke.
"No," said Mary Cody; "I went myself."
"Dear me, how annoying," said Mrs. Lathbun; and then, having finished
filling her pitcher, she quietly retired again.
"To think maybe she'll be in the jail at Geneseo to-morrow!" Mary Cody
exclaimed, in an awestruck whisper.
Alva turned interrogative eyes towards Mrs. O'Neil.
"Yes, Jack is going to have them arrested," she said.
"Merciful heavens!"
"Isn't it awful? I'm sorry for them, myself."
"But--but suppose there's some mistake?"
"There can't be, Jack says."
Alva shut her eyes and stood still for a few seconds. "The poor
creatures," she said, softly and pitifully,--then: "How did you say you
came to find out about it?"
"A man from Kinnecot had the paper in the station, and Josiah Bates
brought him over to our bar this morning and asked Jack if he could see
how folks like that could get trusted. Jack said yes, he could see, and
then he told the man from Kinnecot that just at present he was trusting
the same people, himself."
"Oh, dear," Alva passed her hand wearily across her forehead; "it's
awful."
"Yes, isn't it? The man gave him the paper then. And Jack's first idea
was to take it right up-stairs to them, but then he thought they might
skip before he could have them arrested, so he decided to drive over and
see Mr. Pollock first."
"I can't make it seem true."
"No, I can't, either. Of course they never paid anything, but they're
nice people. I've liked them."
"Then they won't know anything about all this until they are really
arrested?"
"No," said Mrs. O'Neil; "they'll eat dinner just as calm as they've
eaten all their other dinners."
"Come, Lassie," said Alva; "that reminds me that we must get ready for
dinner, ourselves."
"Do you want to take the paper up-stairs with you?" Mrs. O'Neil asked;
"right after dinner I want to take it up to Mrs. Ray, but you can keep
it till then if you like."
"No, thank you," said Alva, with her strange, white smile; "I read it
all through."
When they were up-stairs Lassie exclaimed:
"There, now you see--"
But her friend stopped her with a gesture. "It's too terrible to talk
about," she said, simply. "I must think earnestly what ought to come
next."
Lassie became silent.