hands so tempestuously as to startle and hurt, but she laughed.
“All aboard!”
“Go quick!” he cried.
The conductor was impatient. Boom! boom! the big clock finished out its
twelve slow strokes.
“Many happy returns of the day,” he called after the moving train. She
said nothing, but she waved until the darkness enveloped her.
XXIX
“STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!”
“I’m not a bit sorry I came,” she said aloud as she fumbled around the
zigzag corners of two Pullmans until she reached her own drawing-room.
And she was not; she was most unreasonably elated; she had, she knew
not why, all the humming sensations of victory. It was unaccountable.
She sat on her couch and tried to fathom the meaning of her snug
contentedness. She retold the full day together, the “window-cracking,”
the luncheon in state, the jogs about strange streets, the applauding
crowd at the lecture, the garish Hungarian café, the confession and its
almost painful reception, and the tumultuous parting. She ought to have
been depressed, but she was throbbing with joy. “It was good, every
minute of it,” she said.
Mechanically she undid the wrappings from Allen’s birthday gift,
arranged the pillows and the light, and prepared to read. The outside
of the book was the simple adjustable cover of a college note-book, but
a gold-leafed title had been printed across the front:
Unclaimed Letters
She turned to the first page carefully, remembering,
Through hedge, over gate
Straight! straight! straight! straight!
There she found a subtitle: Letters to Gorgas Levering; to be delivered
into her hands on the twentieth anniversary of her birth; dictated from
time to time by the heart of an old comrade and withheld from the post
by his conscience. (Later note: “twentieth” amended to “eighteenth” but
under stern protest of said conscience.)
The first letter was dated June 17, 1888. It was a date she knew by
heart. Every year she had celebrated secretly the anniversary of the
meeting at the tennis-court. She read:
“Dear Gorgas Levering: You have given me a psychological shock: you
have unhinged my reason, let loose my emotions, and upset my moral
apple cart! You did all that, and you know nothing about it. When you
grow up--say, at twenty or twenty-one--I shall present you with this
document of evidence, and if you have any sense of decency at that
age you will be shocked too. No little girl of thirteen with a face
like a madonna should be allowed to tuck her legs under her pinafore
and impose upon a grown up man what shaves every day. (The seeming
irrelevancy of these remarks is not due to lunacy--although it is yet
disputed if the moon does not have something to do with it--but to
a fine scientific ardor. All the facts must be recorded and in this
case concealed legs is facts.)
“All my life I have stopped in the middle of experience and
recorded my feelings. I say, ‘Allen Blynn, you feel this way or
that way.’ This helps me to remember later; for all our lives we
are stuffing and changing and forgetting our former selves. Hence
I hereby solemnly affirm that if I had the courage to smash all
the conventions of my civilization and put a good-sized gash into
the moral code of my contemporaries, I, Allen Blynn, male, white,
and a voter, would have picked you up in my arms today at the
tennis-courts, hugged the daylight out of you, tossed you across
my shoulders, made straight for the nearest clergyman and married
you--with one hand across your mouth to prevent your squealing and
the other firmly grasping your struggling legs.
“That would be kidnapping--punishable by life imprisonment. I know
it. And also grand larceny. Of course it is. And something like
piracy. Right! Yet, I did none of these things; sheer cowardice held
my hands; but if to have murder in the heart is to be murderer, as I
believe, then I stand here convicted of the desire to own you, bag
and baggage, legs, and all.
“And you are thirteen years old, and I am twenty-three!
“It is shameful, isn’t it? But I am brazenly unashamed. That is the
Lord’s own psychological truth!
“Your kidnapper at heart,
“Allen Blynn.”
“And I wouldn’t have squealed a bit,” Gorgas crooned. “I’d have trotted
right along--in the lead, too. I bet he doesn’t know the shortest cut
to the parsonage.”
“June 21,” the next letter began.
“That was the Wednesday afternoon he first came to the house,” she
commented.
“Dear Gorgas Levering: Psychological facts are accumulating.
“Fact No. 1: I am still a criminal-at-large and more dangerous than
ever.
“Fact No. 2: I slipped back five years this afternoon and became
eighteen. The proof is we both had a gallumptious time mimicking the
neighborhood and acted like a pair of school children. Further proof
is that you continually did make eyes at me, and, in spite of all the
roaring protestations of something that’s left of my conscience, my
own did slip several times. They really did slip: they slid nearer
and nearer; from your chin they drew up to the tip of your nose;
clambered up, up, slowly, overran the mark, and perched perilously
on the right eyebrow; leaned over for a dizzy second and--slipped
into untold brown fathoms. Once I was nearly drowned. It was the most
terrifying sensation of my young manhood.
“Fact No. 3: I was mortally ashamed--put that down to my credit (you
were not, you rogue!) and resolved never to do it again. The Lord
have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.
“Fact No. 4: That gypsy scamp scares me into trembles. When you told
me of him I had murder in my heart, then and there; all the fierce
primitive desire to meet that beast and beat him into pulp. My voice
shook so when I asked you about him that I was certain you noticed
it. My nesting instincts are coming with a rush--and they are most
terrifying.
“Fact No. 5: In daylight I admit none of these things. I am very
moral and civilized in daylight. Only at night when I sit before this
white paper does my inward, honest self come to the fore and disport
his naked savagery.
“Fact No. 6: The two ‘me’s’ are fighting each other; daylight against
darkness. Daylight is going to win, or it’s all over with Allen Blynn
(see the state your rhyming’s put me in!)
“Still criminal,
“Allen Blynn.”
The next letters were full of vindictive hatred of Bardek. Allen had
gone to the old mill and found it deserted. He told how all his talk
on Elizabethan love with Kate as they drove along the Wissahickon was
only the outward voice speaking; within were throbbing anxious cries
for a little child off in the woods with--what sort of a man? The Lord
only knew. Elizabethan love--contagion, infection, plague and what
not--he had them all, a virulent case. With wide eyes Gorgas read of
his tramp back into the dark of Cresheim Valley and how he had seen her
forlorn little figure pacing thoughtfully beside “Gyp.” Only vigorous
conscience withheld his hands from touching her as she passed by.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,
twenty--terrible! a life-time of exile. Perhaps one might make it
nineteen--No! said Conscience, roaring outrageously. Well, twenty, then.
The “German days,” “French days,” and “Italian days” followed in
review, while Gorgas passed from thirteen to fourteen. His joy at
the discovery of the simple sincerity of Bardek flowed through the
pages, with just a hint of watchfulness. “He is a man, a free-thinker,
a free-lover, too, I suspect,” he warned her. “Look out for him,
child; but you need not do that. I am on eternal guard, now. He has
no conscience, that is certain; but in some matters neither have
I. If he makes a step toward you ‘I would eat his heart out in the
market-place!’ But I have faith in Bardek, an unreasoned thing, but
clear enough. Time will tell.
“And I’m watching you, too, Golden Child. Your brown eyes do not behave
themselves. They explore, explore, explore, until I am ready to reach
out my hand and close them against myself. And you continually do
pluck at my sleeve and touch my wrist nervously with the tips of your
hot fingers and send my blood slamming and jamming and ramming and
cramming like the waters go down at Lodore. You have no conscience,
either; that’s plain. Well, here’s where I begin my long vigil.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--it is life
imprisonment. I’ll be an old man! Shall we say nineteen then? Golly!
What a racket Conscience sets up!”
At another time he wrote briefly. “You stood in the narrow path today,
when we found that Bardek had gone, and reached out your arms to me. By
the Great Horn Spoon! By the Dipper and the Little Bear! _And_ the Pole
Star! _And_ the Pleiades! Don’t ever do that again! Zounds! Flesh and
blood, that’s all I’m made of! Fra Lippo Lippi said that. Fortunately
for you and me I’m flesh and blood plus a Conscience.”
“And I never guessed it!” Gorgas communed with herself. “If I had--”
The first touch of remorse seized her for the lost chances of life, and
a little anger at the laws of polite society, and a pang of jealousy
for that “other” whom he had so dubiously confessed.
“Why does he torture me with this book of letters?” she marvelled.
A few leaves slipped through her fingers; she turned impatiently
toward the concluding pages, but stopped. “I’ll play fair,” she said.
“Straight! straight! straight! straight!”
Morris came into the letters. Allen had noticed greedily their intimacy
and lamented the early bookishness that had prevented his ever being
more than a spectator at athletics. Some of the fierce passions of envy
seized him. He was gloriously frank. “I’m a half-man,” he exclaimed.
“They let me sit and spell out books and praised me until my vanity
led me further and further away from real life. Why couldn’t they have
driven me off to baseball and football and all that! The world praises
the pedant, but the young woman goes straight to a _man_. I have had
the education of a woman--and even women are repudiating it, nowadays.”
He was very unfair to himself in these despondent pages. Gorgas
quarreled with every line. She scolded him; told him what his real
qualities were and advised him to have more sense or she would skip.
It was the “Sorrows of Allen Blynn,” the aching of strong youth before
he has found his place, when he cries out upon his own unfitness for
any place at all. “These are just my growing pains, child,” he was wise
enough to write. “Don’t bother your little head about them; it’ll come
out all right eventually.” But it made her uncomfortable and weepy.
At the top of the next page a street address gave her a sudden
pleasurable thrill:
18/a Fürstenstrasse,
München, Deutschland.
“Oh!” Gorgas gasped in delight. “He really did write from Germany,
after all.”
“_Mein Kindschen_,” it began. “Frau Schloss talked of your letter
even before she would arrange the price of breakfasts and bed. There
has been a great to do over your letter. It came several days before
I arrived. And it was a bulky document--thick, extravagant American
letter-paper is to the German mind like feeding lamb chops to stray
dogs. And it lacked stamps mightily.
“The question that confronted the Frau Schloss, the Herr Schloss, the
Gemüse Frau, who keeps a green-grocery below stairs, and the Herr
Postman--the question that has stirred them for the past fortnight
is whether it is a safe investment to pay the overdue postage,
trusting that the Herr Professor would later make restitution plus
_trinkgeld_; or deny all knowledge of the Herr Professor and throw
the responsibility upon the efficient German postal service. Well!
They decided that the Herr Professor would be an easy American
mark, as he had been on former visits; so they paid out real money,
received the letter, and took the big risk that I might not have
recovered from the American madness of paying large sums with a smile.
“As I arrived in the Fürstenstrasse, Frau Schloss saw me from the
window above the green-grocery and hastened down the dark stair and
through the darker alley of a vestibule (where the Gemüse Frau keeps
her push-cart) to meet me breathless in front of the Vegetable Lady’s
display.
“‘I suppose I may have my old rooms?’ I asked, after the first formal
greetings.
“‘Oh, the letter, my honored Herr Professor!’ she began tragically.
“‘Ah!’ I caught her up. ‘I cannot have the rooms then? I’m sorry.’
“‘Yes! yes!’ she assured me, ‘Yes, honored Herr Professor. The rooms
are ready. And the letter is ready, too! It came a week ago. We have
kept it for you--’
“‘We have kept it,’ said Herr Schloss, emerging from the dark hall.
“‘--and have paid,’ beamed Frau Schloss anxiously.
“‘We have indeed paid,’ helped Herr Schloss.
“‘I have seen them pay,’ corroborated the Gemüse Frau, looming from
the dark doorway.
“Oh, they held me with a glittering eye, Frau Schloss, Herr Schloss,
and the Gemüse Frau, as I listened to their tale, awaited the
bringing forth of the letter and stood silent and noncommittal
throughout the profuse explanation of each glaring governmental mark
that announced money due.
“‘Bless my soul!’ I cried in English; ‘it’s from Gorgas.’ And I
ripped it open right before them, ejaculated my joy in their very
faces--we were still on the sidewalk in front of the house--thanked
them in flowery German and passed rapidly by to my old rooms without
so much as a hint of payment.
“They followed me.
“‘Is it then an important letter?’ anxiously inquired the Frau
Schloss.
“‘Important?’ I echoed. ‘It is worth a million Dutch thalers.’
“Then I saw their faces. ‘Oh’ I sensed their trouble. ‘My best
thanks for your thoughtfulness; pray, accept this little token,’ and
I passed the lady the sum of twelve cents--a silver fifty-pfennig
piece--a Bavarian ransom. As the postage amounted to only twenty-five
pfennig, this gave the family a clear rake-off of six American cents.
Ah! there was joy in the Schloss family that night, and for days
the Gemüse Frau shone by reflected glory. Thrift! What would we
Americans in Germany do without thrift in the Germans!
“I am purposely keeping away from your letter. All this introductory
setting is to tantalize myself, to force myself to be calm and see
things straight. At the slightest excuse I could gush forth on these
pages a quantity and quality of sentiment that would make your
six-page outcry seem quite sensible and respectable. (And it is
neither, you know, _mein Kindschen_.) You tell me things here that I
know only too well. Maybe that’s why I am in Germany. You hint that
I could marry you by crooking my little finger. Down here in Bavaria
they often do that sort of thing at exactly your age--fifteen and
one-half. But if I should do it, or encourage you to think that I
might even want to do it--well! I have read enough Italian literature
to know that there is a particularly private pit in Hell reserved
for those chaps. So I am going to perform a bit of moral cruelty
which makes me ill to think of--and is bound to make me iller as the
days and nights go by--I am going to ignore your truthful little
confession; act brutally as if you had never penned it; pretend that
I never could guess how you would count the days it takes for a
letter to cross the ocean, arrive at Hamburg, drift down to Munich;
how you would count again the days it takes a reply to come up to
Hamburg and sail to New York; how for days and days and months and
months you would watch for the postman, trying all the while to look
unconcerned, and find each day--silence. You are not the kind of
child to grow busy with your playthings and forget. I know how you
will suffer--worse now, perhaps, than if you were older. And I make
you suffer because there is no other way.
“There is no other way; I may make no explanation. If I told you
the truth you would probably take the next steamer for Europe; and
if I acted the way I feel, I’d probably meet you half way over. And
I can’t write you a lame acknowledgment that I have received your
letter, have it on file and will attend to your order in due course.
The coldest thing I wrote would burn with the lie that it carried
and you would guess and be tempted by me. No. I am like a man in
love with his friend’s wife. There is nothing to do. I must keep the
faith--which means, in this case, silence.
“It is so horrible, the thing I must do, that I almost forget how
you have paid in advance for my necessary brutality. This fragile,
badly-spelled, pink-rose-leaf confession of yours, so delicately
real, like a half-opened cherry-bud, warm, fragrant, potent with
all that is to be! I could send it back to you, _mein Kindschen_,
and say, ‘All that you own here, I confess again to you. Speak; and
whatever you say, that will be but the echo of myself.’
“And I shall say nothing. But my heart is full of pity, _mein
Kindschen_.”
They were crossing the river above New York city before she had been
able to finish three-quarters of the book; the cars were shifted
carefully and tenderly to a flat-bottomed ferry; in a few moments they
were being towed down the river to Jersey City. She could look out of
her window and see the lights of the river and hear the water lapping
the sides of the boat. Much meditation had gone with each page; and she
was reluctant to come to the impending end.
Leopold appeared in the letters. “I am playing a losing game, I
know,” he wrote. “While I wait and look fatherly (and get called _mon
père_--ugh!) someone else, less scrupulous--and a blamed sight more
natural!--will reach out and take you.... _Nom d’une pipe!_... My word
is given, however, and I will not break it. _Hier stehe ich, Gott mir
helfen, ich kann nicht anders_; so said Luther, or something like that,
on a matter that seems to me less important!”
Almost immediately after this he was rowing most gloriously with
Conscience and bringing the years down to eighteen. “Something ought
to be knocked off for good behavior,” he argued; “every decent prison
allows that. But there’s the final stand. One step this side--one
minute even, and I’d never forgive myself. Seventeen, eighteen! Two
years of acting-grandfather, playing the wise old professor, _so_
interested in education! Rats!”
Now he was leaving abruptly for Holden, decamping in the night, fleeing
before the attack of the tempter. The devil had got into him; the Old
One needed vigorous exorcising.
The Old One came in for a long essay. The devil was God’s ally, he
found out; Lucifer tried men out, tested them, showed up the flaws,
taught them exactly what to amend, reject or add. Spiritual perfection
was not possible without a healthy, vigorous tussle with the Old One.
“I know when he is coming,” he claimed; “first, I hear the cries of the
old mystery-play devils, ‘Out haro! Out haro! Out! out! out!’ just like
a pack of yelping dogs on a hot scent. Then I find my heart, blood,
lungs, vertebræ, stomach, legs, and sympathetic nervous system all
going back on me. The flesh and the devils are old cronies, you know.
‘Out! out! Out haro! Out! out!’ he howls, nearer and nearer; my whole
physical ‘me’ tugs and yowls and bites at the leash.
“Then the real ‘me’ takes a fresh grip and holds fast. I slip and slide
a little, but dig my feet in the stones, and pray--”
“I know. I know,” nodded Gorgas.
“--Then I throw the thong over my shoulders,” Allen went on, “turn my
back on the fiend and drag that other part of ‘me,’ heart, stomach, and
all, straight up on firm ground. Every step’s a better one.”
“My legs get away from me,” Gorgas commented ruefully. “They just took
me off to Boston. And I’m not a bit sorry--and _that’s_ funny, too.”
Seventeen was the hardest year. The grown-up gowns were not lost on
him. “Attire of the devil’s making,” he wrote. “A snare of the Old
One,--_Retro, Sathanas!_ Get thee behind me. Not a minute before the
hour set, or all my life I shall feel depraved.”
The Old One argued with him. He gave a part of the debate:
“Old One: Why grow solemn-faced over so simple a matter! She’s a woman
and you’re a man.
“Allen B.: She’s a child and I _am_ a man, thank the Lord, full-grown
and in control of himself.
“Old One: (sneering) Are you a man? Oh, no, you’re not. You’re neither
male nor female. You’re a pedagogue.
“A. B.: (wincing) _Touchez bien!_ A hit! Whatever I am, I am going to
be decent.
“Old One: (artfully) All the unnatural things and all the disagreeable
ones are decent. In Constantinople it isn’t decent for a woman to show
her lips. Man invented that word, ‘decent.’ With God there is no decent
or indecent. He made ’em all, the good and the bad. Don’t you know your
Browning? He made you, Allen Blynn, what you are.
“A. B.: And he made you, you canker! And he made me strong to fight
you. _Retro!_ Imp of Darkness! ’Raus!
“Old One: _Are_ you so strong?
“A. B.: No!... Get out!
“Old One: Neither is Leopold--Leopold, your bosom-friend--
“A. B.: (smiting him) Back to hell, you miserable liar! Back! Back!
“Old One: (retreating) Ho! ho! ho! ho! Out haro! out haro! ho! ho!
Neither is Leopold!... Leopold!... Leopold!”
On other pages he was full of hope. The dream had come true. He was
planning out his life with her. “We must make this go right,” he said.
“The world is writing its books against us. Every little novelist
and every little playwright is hinting dark things against marriage.
They sneer at all the habits of the race and cry, ‘Liberty for the
emotions.’ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they tempt, ‘and also thy
neighbor’s wife. Marriage is servitude and a restriction; let’s wallow
and be natural.’ Liars and servants of the Old One, every mother’s
son. But we must watch carefully. Marriage is like any other attempt
at living; it must be tended and watched and fed, not squandered or
tossed about. We’ll spend our store of affection like other gifts, not
lavishly all at once in one mad spree, but with rare economy; and we’ll
keep adding new funds to the old by sharing associations together. We
must not begin to have separate interests or even different friends.
Marriage is a wonderful art; the ideal is ever beyond achievement, but
it is worth striving for.... Did you say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?
“I have two complete and separate lives,” he wrote further; “the one
I live in the day-time, serious, mature, full of windy arguments of
state, books, religion, literature, education; the one I live at night
when the hurlyburly of the day is done and I travel these pages with
you. My very style is different in these two personalities. In the
broad light of day I am somewhat stilted and over-oldish for one so
young; here with you sitting sleepy-eyed in the chair before me, I
am lithe and bold and gay and boyish. There are no sweethearts in the
day-time for Allen Blynn. And that’s a good thing, too; or he couldn’t
do a proper day’s work. Sometimes you do bob in, but I rise politely,
put on my spectacles, usher you firmly to the door and bid you a
pleasant but peremptory ‘good morning.’ Sometimes you slip in by the
window, and then I am done for.”
The “Lady of the Interruption” came in for a comment or two. “You
have a wrong notion of that Lady; and I have encouraged it; you
ask such persistent questions about her eyes and her hair and her
dresses--about all of which I know nothing. She is at least fifty, but
I have carefully concealed that from you. Your wide-open eyes see a
life-partner there and I affect to wonder if it might not be. That’s
playing the game square--a little too square, perhaps. At any rate it
is right penance for all my sins of desire; and it pleases Conscience
mightily and makes the Old One howl.”
Those dictated letters to the family! Great Scott! How self-conscious
and bookish they were. Daylight wrote every line of them, affirmed
Allen Blynn.
* * * * *
Dawn was slowly touching the edge of a New Jersey pine wood; but Gorgas
was not at all aware of that. Never had sleep seemed so foreign to her
needs.
Breathlessly she read on until within a page or two of the end.
“What does he mean? What does he mean?” she fingered the scant leaves
that remained. “He said there was another--‘There is--and there isn’t
at all,’ he said.”