business-like conversation as was needed to push the work forward; all
copper does not anneal with the same result, nor does all charcoal burn
with the same intensity; but after the plate, candlestick, candelabrum
or vase had begun to reach a half-recognizable shape, there would be a
lull.
“How is that Neddie fellow?” Bardek inquired. “I don’t see him hanging
about and making the smile of idleness. More ‘home-run,’ eh?”
She explained that he was busy with his medical courses and, further,
that Bea Wilcox had laid claims upon all his surplus time.
“Now, that is so much better,” honest Bardek nodded approval. “He is
nice boy; nice, clean boy. I like--when the day’s work is done--to take
him on my knee and sing sweet, sleepy songs, _‘Schlaf’, Kindschen,
schlaf’,’ und so weiter_.... But he smoke too many cigarette: so he
will not grow.”
“He is twenty-two, Bardek,” Gorgas rejoined, but not disclosing in her
tone any defense of Morris. “That is five years older than I.”
“You!” Bardek gazed at her. “Ha! You! Little Neddie will never be so
old as Miss Gorgas. You take by years? Ah, that such wrong way to make
measure. Today the whole world is one day older than yesterday, but is
every man of the world just one day older? _Ach, gar nichts!_ There are
some who have lived--ah! how they have lived while the slow hours of
last night moved away!--and there are some who have made one jump from
child to man, and there are some baby-women who have in that little
day turned to be mothers of babies, and there are some who have stood
just where they are, and others who have gone back from jus’ fool to
imbecile. The day, the month, the year, it is nothing. When I would
know the age I do not look in the calendar--_ach, nein!_--I look in
the eyes. Back of eyes, sprawling out nicely on soft, gray stuff, is
_you_! Jus’ there!” he tapped his forehead. “In little children, I have
seen, back there, wise old folks--you were jus’ such a little wise one
when you first came to me. Your Neddie is jus’ boy--nice, clean, fresh
boy. Oh, he will make nice man some day--if he grow up.”
It was difficult to know when Bardek spoke out of his serious opinions
or through a desire to stir up his listeners. In English, especially,
was he hard to fathom. Sometimes his auditors had laughed at the wrong
spot, had taken his most earnest talk as if intended for droll humor.
It was not prudent so to do; for then Bardek called on his heavy
artillery of irony and satire, and woe betide the weakling who stood
before him: the personal blemish of his opponent, moral or physical,
which society had agreed to ignore, was trotted out for inspection,
caparisoned with many unique beauties of language. To Gorgas, Ned
Morris had seemed quite a man; but she deferred questioning Bardek too
closely on that point.
Instead, she seemed to shift the subject.
“I envy you your freedom, Bardek,” she sighed. “When you want a thing,
you just go and take it. If you want to cut loose you can say, ‘Let her
go, Gallagher’ and boomp! you’re at the bottom. It takes courage, I
tell you. One has to just stop caring for everybody and what everybody
thinks. I can’t. I can’t be free. I’d like to break away and, if I
wanted to, eat my breakfast in the middle of Main street--in my bare
feet, too; but I couldn’t do it. Not that I care an awful lot about
what folks say. It isn’t exactly that; but I’d be scared stiff. I might
get as far as Main street with my oatmeal and roll, but my teeth would
be chattering so much from fright that I couldn’t get the breakfast
down.”
Bardek thought the matter over carefully. Then he eyed her seriously
and asked:
“Something in your mind, it troubles you, eh?”
“Oh, no.”
He was not convinced.
“When you have great troubles, tell somebody. Confession is good. That
what makes ol’ Mac such a fine man. He is always clean, is ol’ Mac.
Every Saturday night he stand in line and think of the bad in him--it
is not much, but no matter--then he soon be on his knees to tell the
father and when he come out he is all w’ite-wash inside. Ol’ Mac, his
mind is not always full of dead matters and ferments and things that
go bad. His mind is like my house after Mrs. Mac have come to slop hot
soap-water over everyt’ing. I know. Sometimes I, too, go to father and
tell him everything.... No troubles, eh?”
“Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Bardek; that is, nothing worth
telling.”
“Very well,” he nodded. “When you make confession you must want to do
it. Your inside will tell you it is time when.”
“That’s just what I want to know, Bardek,” she brought him back. “You
listen to what the ‘inside’ bids you do, and you never question what
the ‘outside’ would say. That’s freedom. I wish I had it.”
He worked for some time at his designing, as if he did not care to
discuss the matter further. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder
at her, staring into her eyes as if to see what was within.
“So you would be free?” he asked quietly. “Well, it is easy. But first,
you must know what freedom is--and that is hard. I have had many
thoughts about freedom and have changed my mind many, many times; and
just now I am not so sure as I was three, five, ten year ago. Once I
t’ink freedom is ‘do as you please.’ In America you say that so much,
‘I do as I please.’ It is vairy nice. But ‘as I please’ is sometime not
nice. For one, two, three minutes, yes. When you jump into nice, cold
water and swim when it is yet April, ‘Oh!’ you say, ‘it is fine!’ but
the next day you sneeze and for two weeks you have bad cold. That not
vairy nice, eh? Now, I think you have not freedom then. You put great
chains on you which keep you in house for two weeks when you would
please go out. Sometimes it is freedom to be wise and not do ‘as I
please.’
“You t’ink to sit in Main street and eat breakfast is freedom. You are
right, quite right, if that is what you do want. But also, you want
peoples to like you and not to laugh and touch the head and say, ‘What
a crazy, silly child!’ You must choose. Well, you find you didn’t want
to sit in Main street; not at all. It give you just what you don’t
want.
“Life is full of jus’ that. ‘To do as you please,’ yes, that is to be
free. But it is so hard to know what will please. You want swim in
April spring water? You do not want cold in head? You cannot have both,
my child. Freedom is to know what one to take. And who is to tell? It
is hard, vairy hard.
“Then there are the other peoples--the great crowd, of them I do not
think much--but of vairy few, my wife and those big boys, and you, Miss
Gorgas, and of ol’ Mac--well, of them I do care. To keep them happy
I must not have somet’ings. I _please_ not to have them. I want them
vairy much--oh, vairy much I want them--but so do I want to see the
good friends with smiling face. I have freedom--yes--but I lose much.
And it is good to lose.”
Gorgas was thinking how similar were the philosophies of Bardek and
Allen Blynn, although each expressed his point of view in different
ways. Here was an essential agreement on the mystic puzzle of human
conduct, and by men who looked upon life from nearly opposite angles.
It was as if Puritan and Cavalier, Stoic and Epicurean, Spartan and
Athenian had for once settled their eternal quarrel.
“How did you learn all this?” Gorgas asked.
“By much troubles and much pains,” he shook his head. “You get one
little cold in head. Ah! That is nothing. You learn so cheap! But I? I
have walked in blood.... _Nom d’une pipe!_ how I pay to know so little!”
Whatever were the experiences that Bardek conjured up, it prevented
further speech. So they hammered away for the remainder of that morning
without further discussion. Occasionally in the pauses she would hear
Bardek muttering his _nom d’une pipe!_--a sign of great perturbation.
And she was glad. Clearness had come into her thinking. In her mind
now she was certain of the track for a little way ahead. She had asked
about freedom because she meant to liberate herself from a great
thralldom, but she had feared the consequences; now that she had been
taught to face all the choices, all the possible results, she had
chosen and was content.
XXI
EVE’S CHOICE
Meanwhile Allen Blynn, packing up his belongings at the end of the
term, was far from either decision or content. The faculty of Holden
College had divided bitterly on the question of the introduction
of “electives.” Nowadays electives are accepted so serenely that
one forgets how sinful they were some twenty or more years ago; but
we shall not here touch the terrible battle which waged over the
contention of the conservatives that a college senior could not hope to
be a gentleman unless he had read the “Pseudolus” of Maccius Plautus.
It is enough to know that, led by the example of Eliot of Harvard,
Blynn had joined the sinful radicals and was openly preaching the “new
education.”
This young man, who could be so eloquent with Gorgas Levering on the
subject of Conservatism in Private Conduct, found himself an unwilling
Public Reformer in Education. In his private thoughts he bound the law
rigorously upon himself, but in public he was an impatient radical
demanding that Holden College should cease weeping sentimentally
over its eighteenth century past and begin to do its duty toward the
children of the present year of grace. He did not know that that sort
of inconsistency is alarmingly common. A man may be in favor of freedom
as regards his country, but not as regards the goings and comings
of his wife; a man may love his neighbor as himself on Sundays, yet
unmercifully send promissory notes to protest on Mondays.
Naturally the students were solid for the electives and against Maccius
Plautus and all his tribe, and with bonfires and shoutings they lauded
their spokesman on the faculty. But it was the newspapers that shot
the controversy out of its local setting and made it semi-national and
glaringly notorious. And it was not all due to the managing of Diccon.
Some men are naturally dramatic; all that they do is already good
“news”; and once in the headlines it is almost impossible to keep out.
Let a lawyer win a scandalous case or a clergyman defy his bishop; for
the remainder of his days he cannot so much as visit the zoological
garden without having the matter publicly heralded. The papers gave
space to the Holden reforms because Blynn was back of them. Blynn could
be counted on for spectacular things. “The Lady of the Interruption”
had made him a perpetual headliner!
It was a heavy-hearted young man, therefore, who travelled toward Mount
Airy the next morning, unable to escape some of the congratulations or
to avoid seeing his picture flaring on the inside page of newspapers
held by fellow passengers. He assumed the guilty skulk of an embezzling
cashier, fearful lest he should find some casual eye comparing him with
the photograph. He wondered what dreadful things they had said about
him, but dared not read. The newspaper “boys” liked him--all boys did;
they showed their affection by writing him up as if he were a pedagogic
Luther, and it made him almost ill. “Rumors” of the resignation of
President Galt and the election of President Blynn had been heard by
the astute scribe. Dear old Rumor, patron saint of reporters!
Diccon did his share in the home town; he wrote beautiful imitation
telegrams to his paper, briefly summing up the essential matter in
dispute and making out a clear victory for their fellow-townsman, whose
call to an important post in another city had been thus so thoroughly
justified.
Blynn protested, but Diccon claimed to be powerless. “You’re ‘news’
now, old man,” he explained. “Nothing on earth could keep you from
publicity. When newspapers begin to give you four or five thousand
dollars’ worth of free advertising, it is because they think it pays.
Once they have made you famous--”
“Infamous!” suggested Blynn.
“Same thing”; Diccon was undisturbed; “they’d do the same by you if you
scuttled a hospital and got off with the job. When they go in to make
you known to thousands of readers they have created customers for that
sort of news. Every time you’re mentioned after that, they are assured
of satisfied nods from their patrons. You are a continued story, a
never-ending serial.... And you can’t expect me to howl, can you? You
have made good, as I knew you would. Well, that cleans my slate. No one
can say I pulled for a friend. You happened to be my friend, but also
you happened to be the best man for the job.”
“Accident! accident!” cried Blynn; “accident and the absurdity of news
values.”
In that frame of mind he dropped in on the Leverings. Mrs. Levering
and Kate were sewing on the lawn at the rear in the shade of their
huge chestnut trees. Gorgas was in town purchasing materials for the
“smitty.”
The old familiarity was there in their greetings and something of
warmth due to the natural joy in another’s success; but there was also
a deferential treatment due to his newspaper fame, which made him
uncomfortable.
“My dear Professor Blynn,” Mrs. Levering beamed toward him, “I do wish
I could get courage to ask you to glance over the literary program of
our little club. We’re not at all satisfied with the plans for next
year; of course, we are all amateurs without taste or knowledge. But
I’m afraid you are so busy with--”
“Not at all!” Blynn broke in. “Do let me work with you. I should be
delighted. I have bushels of time and I’ll dig for you like a good
gardener, provided--you don’t call me ‘professor.’”
“Oh, you’re too modest.”
“Not at all; I’m too proud!” he laughed. “In America ‘professor’
and ‘doctor’ are the inferior titles; ‘Mr.’ is really the mark of
distinction. I like the way they say ‘Mr.’ Eliot in Cambridge.
Fancy saying ‘Professor’ Eliot or even ‘Dr.’ Eliot! It would be like
referring to Dr. George Washington! And he was an LL. D., too; both
Harvard and U. of P.; but who remembers that? I have been ‘professored’
all my life. You don’t know how I yearn--like a small boy--to be called
‘Mr.’”
“Mr.” was agreed upon by Mrs. Levering, although Kate demurred.
“We always call you ‘Allen Blynn’ when we talk of you here at home,”
she remarked thoughtfully. “I always say ‘Allen.’ You call me Kate;
perhaps I had better dub you--”
“‘Pete’--for Petruchio,” he joked. “You can’t tell, you know. Fine
weather like this, the germ is everywhere.” He was reminding her of his
theory that love was a contagion.
“I fear you are immune,” she looked up from her embroidery frame and
searched his face comically.
His eyes had the far-off stare of men who dream much. Your thinker is
no great lover, she thought. He is too busy with the affections of
his brain, the little loves of his own creation; even in their most
animated conversations they seem only to half attend to what is going
on about them.
“Please don’t say that,” Blynn protested. “Why, vaccination takes on
me terribly. I am awfully susceptible. You don’t know how I want to
be--uh--quarantined and posted as a dangerous case.”
Mrs. Levering arose. “Of all nasty talk!” she smiled. “Germs and
disease! I fear I don’t quite follow you two young persons. And,
besides, there is a garden in the back of the house that demands my
inspection. Ugh! How can you laugh in the same breath with germs!” She
moved off toward her garden.
“Where’s the child?” Blynn looked toward the “smitty.”
“What child?” Kate followed his gaze. “Oh, Gorgas? Child! You haven’t
seen her since spring, have you? That child is sprouting, I tell you.
She’s taller than I, by an inch or two. And her gowns! She’s been
spreading herself lately! Gracious! You won’t dare to call her child--”
“Why, she’s only seventeen!”
“In years, yes; but in experience and general get-up she is
twenty-five. Really, she’s quite stunning. It’s made me spruce up, I
can tell you.... But, I’m not sorry, you know.... I say, I’m not sorry.”
“Why?” coming back abruptly to the lady before him.
“If Bianca has enough swains Katherina may have a chance with the
left-overs.”
“Do you recall the advice I gave you the last time we were talking on
this subject!” Blynn leaned forward and grew earnest.
She nodded and exhibited her embroidery.
“This is all I’m fit for.”
“Don’t say that. It isn’t fair to yourself, and it isn’t true. I wish
you would let me take you in hand. I have had boys who have felt just
as you do, until I enticed them really to get started at something.”
She agreed that it sounded exciting, but Petruchio might come along;
one was never without hope; and then, smash! would go all the toil.
He pondered over that, and questioned why a woman’s occupation should
go smash! just because she married.
“Women don’t want any other occupation,” she confessed. “I don’t.”
“I bet a dollar it’s pure use and wont!” he exclaimed. “Nobody can tell
what is just custom and what is not, until after we’re dead a thousand
years. Women don’t throw themselves into careers with the same daring
energy as men, because they have to keep such a terrible look-out for
marriage. At any moment, from around the corner, as you once said,
their future may assail them. It’s almost as if a young man got up in
the morning a barrel-maker and by night found himself a deep-sea diver!
That’s disconcerting. I should think the excitement of guessing what
might happen would play havoc with that cooperage business.”
They speculated on the uncertainty of a girl’s life; uncertain until
some man decided for her.
“You see,” Kate explained. “A boy has his fortune to make and knows it
depends upon a lot of acquired qualities; and unless he’s exceptional
he can predict pretty well what that fortune is going to be. All that
he has to do is to look at his father. Now a girl, no matter what her
father or mother may be, has every chance in the world. A prince might
choose her--haven’t royal dukes married chorus girls?--or the grocer’s
apprentice, or the next governor of the State, or--the head of the
division of English.”
He acknowledged the point, but his mind was concentrated on something
else.
“And nobody may choose her at all,” he added significantly.
“But she won’t know that till she’s dead,” Kate responded gaily. “And
not even then, perhaps--‘There is hope beyond the grave,’ you know!”
“There’s my point,” he stuck out an argumentative finger, his earnest
eye quite showing that he had missed her light pleasantry. “She ought
to know it long before. She ought to face the fact of the million or so
of unmarried women--good, fine women, too. She ought to presume from
the very beginning--her mother should put it into her head--that in
all probability she will not marry. The dreams should be deliberately
shaken out of her; the years of pretty primping and ogling I would
abolish without a qualm. The women on parade! Ugh! I fly from them and
find shelter with the aged married ones.
“Now you,” he turned to her with such frankness as quite to disarm the
direct speech. “You live in a village, revolving in an eddy; it would
be a sheer accident if your mate found you.”
“I might take Eve’s choice,” she reflected. How amused she seemed!
“What was that?” he interrupted his argument. The phrase was new to him.
“The only man available.”
“Ah! Eve’s choice! The only man available and the man God created for
her. That’s a wonderful choice and a rare combination in history, you
must admit.”
No; she must face the facts. She was a member of the most
unmarriageable class of women, those who are neither rich nor poor, yet
who sit at home unknown.
Mrs. Levering could be seen occasionally hovering over her garden.
Once or twice she stood erect, her ample figure surrounded by all
the flowers of June, and surveyed with satisfaction the two earnest
young persons. A few more such _tête-à-têtes_, that was all. Let
them be together. Somehow, she felt that she had managed things
excellently. Some persons would take credit for the laws of nature.
If the sun should shine brightly on her lawn party she would accept
congratulations as if it were a right tribute to her cleverness.
“You’ll do, Allen Blynn,” Mrs. Levering remarked to a drooping
rose-bud. Allen was talking earnestly with head and hands. Kate seemed
to be looking absently away. “But Keyser Levering will have to be
spoken to,” she added. “I’m afraid she is too cold.”
Then she ordered Louisa to prepare a platter of sweet cakes and an iced
lemon drink, carefully concocted to suit the warm weather.
She might have recalled the order if she had known at that moment
Allen Blynn was proving to Keyser Levering that as marrying for her
was probably out of the question it behooved her instantly to find a
sensible life-job!
And she found it. By accident the work that she was destined to do
unfolded to her. And by the same accident Allen Blynn found his own
work.
XXII
TOP-O’-THE-HILL
Through the deep
Hood of the woods a murmur seemed to creep,
The Schuylkill whispering in a voice of sleep.
All else was still. The oxen from their plows
Rested at last, and from their long day’s browse
Came the dun files of Krisheim’s home-bound cows.
--From _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_.
As Mrs. Levering, flanked by Louisa and the refreshments, moved toward
them, Kate shifted the subject.
“Did you know I have been coaching the Croft boy?”
“No!” he was surprised. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it. Since
when?”
“Practically all winter.”
“Well! well!” he ejaculated. “I thought that chap was coming up strong.
You quite take the wind out of my sails. I had been giving myself all
sorts of kudos over that case. And here it’s you, all the time. How did
it happen?”
“He brought me over one of your letters,” she explained as she helped
with sugar. “Your stenographer by-the-hour had mixed up an important
direction. He disliked to ask you about it--you know how shy he is--so
he put it to me. I puzzled it out; we became very well acquainted and
began to hold regular irregular sessions together.... I enjoyed your
letters immensely. Once, you took him to task about a stupid error
which was really mine. He had a good laugh at me, I can tell you. Isn’t
he a pathetic little fellow?”
“He’ll be a great thinker some day,” Blynn avowed. “You’ll be proud of
your share in the making of him.”
Mrs. Levering was pleased to hear them discussing methods of pedagogy
so intimately.
“You’ll have Keyser turning school-mistress, yet,” she suggested. But
her smile showed that she had no such fear.
“And why not!” Blynn seized the idea. “Oh, I don’t mean the regular
kind; normal training, public school and all that sort of thing. That’s
fine, too; but it’s overcrowded with women, and the whole business is
set like a plaster cast. I almost despair of seeing any development
there; routine and habit have fastened themselves upon the institution.
I have dreams of another kind of teacher, something like Pestalozzi,
gathering his little ones about him and teaching them without ever
their being aware.”
He told them about Pestalozzi. When the scourge of war swept over
Switzerland in 1798 neither men nor women were spared. It was a
massacre. Pestalozzi’s heart went out to the children. In a ruined
convent on the shores of Lake Lucerne, he gathered the deserted little
ones about him and shared their sufferings. They had neither home nor
parents, and they were hungry. “I cannot fight,” he said; “I cannot
raise my hand against my brother; but the children of my brother, the
fatherless children, these I can serve, their piteous little bodies I
can save, and their starving desolate souls.” Blynn darted into the
library and brought out a book and read them Pestalozzi’s own story.
“‘My hand lay in their hand, my eye was their eye, my tears flowed with
their tears, and my laughter mingled with their laughter. They were out
of the raging world; they were with me, and I was with them. Their meat
was mine, their drink was mine. I had nothing, no friends, no servants;
I had them alone. When they were well I stood in their midst; when they
were ill I was at their side. I was the last who went to bed at night,
the first who rose in the morning. Even in bed I prayed and talked with
them until they were asleep,--they wished it to be so.’”
Blynn closed the book reverently. “They say he was an unhandsome man,
but that he had a wonderful transforming smile. He saw into the heart
of children. I should be happy if I were that sort.