1
THE woman awed him quite as much as in the open boat. The turning
of her profile to the sea had for Bellair a significance not to be
interpreted exactly, but it had to do with firmness and aspiration
and the future. Fleury was in their minds more than in speech. She
could speak of him steadily, and this during the sensitiveness of
convalescence which is so close to tears. Perhaps they found their
deepest joy in the child’s fresh blooming. The ship’s people were an
excellent company.
Bellair’s mind adjusted slowly, and by a rather intense process, to
the fact of the Stackhouse wallet. It was all that the great wanderer
had said. The woman accepted the lifted condition, but it seemed hard
for her faculties to establish a relation with temporal plenty. Fleury
had given them each a greater thing. They were one in that--keen and
comprehensive; indeed their minds attacked with vigour and ardour this
one thought: somehow to help in drawing off the brimming sorrows of the
world.
It came all at once to Bellair that this was no new conception. He had
heard and read of _helping_ all his life. A touch, queerly electric,
had come over him as a boy, when a certain old man passed, and some
one whispered in the most commonplace way, “His whole thought is for
others.”... He had read it in many books; especially of late, the note
had been sounded. It was getting into the press--some days on every
page. All the cultic and social ports, into which he had sailed (like a
dingy whaler, he thought) had spoken of brotherhood, first and last.
Did a thing like this have to be talked by the few for several thousand
years before it broke its way into the conception of the many, and
finally began to draw the materials of action together? It had not been
new in certain parts of the world two thousand years ago when Jesus
brought the perfect story of it, and administered it through life and
death. Had there been too much speech and too little action since; or
did all this speech help; the result being slow but cumulative, toward
the end of the clearly-chiselled thought on the part of the majority
that would compel the atoms of matter into action, making good all
thoughts and dreams?... He knew men who sat every Sunday listening
courteously to more or less inspired voices that called upon them to
_Love One Another_; yet these men, during the next six days, moved as
usual about their work of rivalry and burning personal desire. Why was
this?
The answer was in his own breast. He had made a mental conception of
the good of turning the force of one’s life out to others, but he had
not lived it; had never thought seriously of living it, until now that
the results had been shown him, as mortal eyes were never given before
to see. That was it; men required more than words. Would something
happen to bring to all men at last the transfiguring facts as they had
been brought to him in the open boat--squarely, leisurely, one by one?
He was not different from many men. Given the spectacle of the fruits
of desire and the fruits of compassion side by side, as he had been
forced to regard them--any one would understand.
The woman was one of those who had got it all long ago. She had ceased
to speak of it much, but had put it into action. The child was a part
of her action, and his own love for her--that new emotion, deeper than
life to him. She had mainly ceased to speak.... Action and not speech
had been the way of Fleury, his main life-theme, his first and last
words. Formerly Fleury had spoken, and then emerged into the world of
action. It had been tremendous action--for them. These things never
die.
“That’s the beauty of them,” he said aloud. “These things never die.”
“You were thinking of _him_?” the Faraway Woman said.
* * * * *
The _Fomalhaut_ left them at Auckland--insular, high and breezy
between its harbours and warm to the heart, from the southern summer.
They took the train to Hamilton, near where she had lived....
“It seems so long since I was a part of the life here,” she told him,
as they climbed a hill by the long road--the same upon which Olga’s
Guest had come, “and yet it really isn’t. You can see--how little the
Gleam is. He was born here.... There was so much to learn. It has been
like a quick review of all life. When I think of it--and feel the child
alive, unhurt--oh, do you know what it makes me want to do?”
Bellair was thinking of Fleury. He sensed her emotion, as he shook his
head.
“It makes me want to work for you.”
Bellair placed her saying to the account of her fine zeal for the
good of the nearest. He was very far from seeing anything heroic in
his part of the ten days.... They had paused on the little hill back
of the settlement where she had lived. With all her coming home, she
met no acquaintance while he was with her. It was as if she had come
to look, not to enter.... But there were two days in which she went
forward alone, and Bellair got a foretaste of what it would mean to be
separated. It called to him all the strength that he had earned.... The
Faraway Woman came back to Hamilton where he waited--as one who had
hastened. The child was asleep, and they walked out into the streets
together....
They were alone again as in that first night on board the _Fomalhaut_
when Fleury left them.
“Do you want to stay to make your house near the Hamilton road?” he
asked.
She regarded him quietly, her eyes fixed upon his face with an
incommunicable yearning.
“No.”
“Do you mean to stay in New Zealand?”
Again she held him with her eyes, before answering:
“It may be well for me here, as anywhere. I could not stay in America.”
The sun was setting. It was she who broke the silence:
“_You_ must go away?”
“Yes. You knew that from _him_?”
“From what he said--yes.”
“He told me not to stay too long.”
“Perhaps he saw it all. Perhaps he saw something that would keep you.”
“He saw a very great deal.”
They had been gone two hours. Her steps quickened, when she thought
of the child.... “Yes, I may as well stay in Auckland,” she said.
“Do you know, I should like to stay by the sea--to be near it, for
remembering----”
That seemed to come very close to Bellair’s conviction--that her whole
life was turned to the saint who had passed.
“A little house by the sea,” he said, his mind picturing it eagerly to
relieve the greater matter.
“Just what I was thinking--a little place out of Auckland on the
bluffs--overlooking Waitemata--where one could see the ships coming
in----”
“Will you let me help you find it, and arrange your affairs?”
“Nothing could be happier for me--if you would.”
“We’ll go back to Auckland to-night, and start out looking from there.”
Mainly they followed the shore during their days of search; but
sometimes they found woods and little towns. There was no coming to
the end of her; she put on fresh perfections every day, and there were
moments in which he was meshed in his own stupidity for not seeing
the splendour of her at the first moment. He became possessed of a
healthful wonder about women--how men like himself wait for years for
some companion-soul, finally believing her to be in the sky, only to
find that _the nearest_ was waiting all the time. The world is so full
of illusions, and a man’s mind is darkest when it seems most clear.
The days were like entering one walled garden after another, always
her spirit vanishing at the far gate. Beside him was a strong frail
comrade, loving the water and air and sky and wood, as only a natural
woman can love them--her eyes shining softly, her lips parted and red
as the sleeping child’s. He was struck with the miracle of her mouth’s
freshness. It was like the mouth of a city-bred woman, a woman who had
forced her way for years through the difficult passages of a man’s
world, who had met the fighting of the open, and the heavier-line
fighting of solitude.... Here Bellair’s diffidence intervened.
Moreover, it was a mouth that could say unerring things.
“She is a fine weave,” he would say, after the partings at night.
She held through every test. The enthralling advance guard never
failed--that winged immortal something ahead. Often in some little inn
or in the hotel at Auckland during the nights, he found himself in
rebellion because he could not go to her. Always in the open boat he
had awakened to find her there, and on the night that Fleury passed,
she had asked to have him within call--but those times were gone. The
world had intervened that little bit.... There was one summer day
and a bit of forest to enter, a moment surpassing all. Her arms and
fingers, her eyes and breast were all fused with emotions. She gave him
back his boyhood that afternoon in a solemn wordless ceremony, but all
his diffidence of boyhood came with it.
The woods were full of fairies to her; there were meanings for her eyes
in the drift of the wind over the brown pools. She caught the woodland
whispers, was a part of sweet, low vibrations of the air.... Her eyes
had come up to his, fearless and tender; yet for the life of him, he
could not have been sure that they wanted anything he could give.
For the first time he marvelled now at the genius of self-protection
which women have put on, instinct by instinct, throughout all this age
of man, this age of muscle and brain, in which the driving spirit of
it all has no voice.... There was one branch above her that was like
hawthorn, and full of buds. The little Inverness cape that she wore was
tossed back, and her arms were held up to the branches.... Strangely
that instant he thought of her story--the coming of The Guest--the
thought she had held all the years, the strange restless beauty of its
ideal--the mothering beauty of it that seemed to him now endless in
power. Such a mystery came to him from her arms--as if she were holding
them up to receive perfection, some great spiritual gift.... It was
startlingly native to her, this expectancy--the pure receptivity of it,
and the thought of beauty in her mind. A woman could command heaven
with that gesture, he thought, and call to earth an archangel--if her
ideal were pure enough.
A sudden gust of love came over him for her child. He thought he had
loved it before, but it was startling now, filling him, turning his
steps back toward the place where it lay....
2
And all the time that they were searching widely from Auckland for
their house, a little Englishwoman, growing old, sat waiting for
them within an hour’s ride from the city. They found her at last
and her stone cottage, rarely attractive in its neglect; and from
the door-yard, an Odessian vista of sky and harbour and lifted
shore-line.... They had even passed it before, their eyes turned
farther afield. Bellair couldn’t ignore the analogy of the nearest
woman, nor the stories of all the great spiritual quests--how the
fleeces on a man’s doorstep turn golden, if he can only see.
“I knew some one would come,” the little woman said. She had a mole on
her nose and eyes that twinkled brightly. “In fact, I prayed.”
Bellair smiled and thought of Fleury’s saying--that those who turn back
two thousand years would find Him.... She had kept a boarding-house,
and now the work was too much. Besides, the children of a younger
sister back in the home in Essex were calling to her.
“They need me in England,” she repeated. “And here, I have been unable
to keep up the little house. I am too old now. My young men were so
dear about it, but I was not making them comfortable. One’s heart
turns home at the close----” She thought they did not understand; and
explained all the meanings carefully--how in age, the temporal needs
are not so keen, and the mind wanders back to the elder places....
Bellair stood apart, knowing that the two women could manage better
alone.... The cottage faced the east a little to northward, and had
been built of the broken rocks of the bluff and shore, its walls twenty
inches thick and plastered on the stone within. The interior surprised
them with its size, two bedrooms facing the sea and two behind, beside
the living room (for dining, too, according to the early design) and
the kitchen. They took it as it was, furniture and all, and loved the
purchase.
For several days she remained with them, helped and explained and
amplified--suggesting much paint. Each day for an hour or so, there
were tears. She had found her going not so easy, and the process was
slow to accustom herself to the long voyage; the sense of detachment
could not be hurried. She wanted them to see her whole plan of the
place. Her dream had been to have evergreens cut in patterns and
flower-beds in stars and crescents. Meanwhile with her years had grown
up about her the wildest and most natural garniture of the stone
cottage; vines and shrubs, the pines putting on a sumptuousness of low
foliage altogether unapproved.
Gradually it was all forgotten but the long voyage, and Bellair could
help in making the details of that as simple and desirable as possible.
In fact, he went with her to the ship....
“She was dear to us, and we shall miss her always,” the Faraway Woman
said that night.... She would never come back. It was a parting, but
the very lightness of it moved them. They wondered if they had done all
they could.
“I’m so glad the means were not at hand for her to paint the
stone-work,” Bellair said firmly.
“I’m afraid she would think we lack interest,” the woman added, as she
glanced at the smoky beams of the ceiling. The years had softened them
perfectly.
“She wanted them washed the very first thing,” said Bellair, “and
varnished. If she had stayed much longer we would have been forced to
paint something.”
In the days that followed, a softness and summery bloom came
continually to the Faraway Woman’s eyes. His heart quickened when
she turned to him. They moved in and out from the cottage to grounds,
again and again.
“It’s unreal to me,” she would say. “I wonder if it will ever seem
ours? I know it won’t, while you are away. I could live here fifty
years until I seemed a part of the cottage and grass and trees, and I
would feel a pilgrim resting----”
“It is part of you now, and always has been,” he said. “You are at home
on high ground and you must have the sea-distance. They belong to you.
I think that is what made you so hard for me to understand.”
“Was I hard for you?”
“I was so fresh from the little distances and the short-sight of
things--from looking down----”
“I wonder if any one ever was so willing to be seen on his worst side?”
she asked. “I really believe you know very little about yourself.... He
saw--the real side.”
“He saw good everywhere,” said Bellair.
“... I wonder why I was strange to you at first?” she repeated, after a
moment. “You were not strange to me.”
“Not when I spent so much time at the great cane chair?”
“No. You seemed to be studying. I could see that you didn’t belong
there. You appeared to be interested in it all--as if he were a part of
the ship----”
“And you didn’t seem to belong at all to my eyes,” he told her. “You
belonged out in the distances of ocean. You came closer and closer
during the days in the open boat--but here you belong. It seems to me
that you have come home--and how I wish I could stay, too.”
“I wish you could stay--but I know that there is unfinished work in New
York.”
“I wonder how _he_ knew?” Bellair questioned.
“He saw very clearly. He was not flesh at all--that last day----”
“After the night--when he prayed.... You saw him that night?”
“Yes.”
Her innate sense of beauty startled him afresh every day. All that he
idealised was an open book to her. Bellair had planned his house in the
New York room. The greatest houses are planned so, by those who suffer
and are confined. It had not come to him in the form of this stone
cottage by the sea. This was not his dream that had come true here,
although in many ways it was fairer than his dream. Very plainly, this
little rock-bound eyrie was of her fashioning--the very atoms of it,
drawing together to conform with the picture in her mind. He loved the
place better so. Perhaps her thought of a home had been the stronger.
“It is almost perfect now,” she would say. “The neglect has made
it right. A few roses, some bee-hives, vines and perennials--the
rest is just clearing and cleansing. I could go over all the leaves
and branches with a soapy sponge. The rest is to prune and thin and
cleanse--so the sunlight is not shut from anywhere altogether--so it
all can breathe----”
He caught the picture in her mind--foliage cut away for the play of sun
and wind everywhere--the chaste and enduring beauty of leaf and stone
and moving water. And now appeared a bit of her nature quite as real:
“And then those extra two rooms, I could rent them and give board----”
“Oh, but you don’t have to.”
“I have always had much to do. I must have work now.”
She had no realisation of property; material poverty was a part of her
temperament. She was superbly well, and could only remain so by the
expenditure of ample energy. Bellair saw the Martha soul, the mother of
men, a breadgiver. He thought of the passion of men for the vine-women,
and of the clinging sons they bear.... He lingered over a ship, and
another. They toiled together like two peasants in the open, the baby
sitting in the sun, the house ashine within. She would have only the
simple things. She loved fine textures, but only of the lasting fabrics
in woods and wares. She was content to carry water and trim lamps.
She loved the stones and the low open fires. Often she turned away
seaward, as he had seen her from the _Jade’s_ rail, and from the bow
seat of the open boat. Once in the garden, he made the child laugh, to
bring back her eyes, and she said:
“I love it so here, but I don’t want to love it, so that it would hurt
terribly, if it were taken away.”
This was but one side. There were other moments, in which Bessie and
New York and all that he and the Faraway Woman had been, seemed fused
into a ball of mist whirling away, and they stood together, man and
woman, touching sanity at last in a world of power and glory. It was
not then a time for words.... Once their hands went out together, and
holding for a moment, Bellair had the strange sense of the self sinking
from him. He could not feel his hand or any part of his being--as if it
were a part of her, two creatures blent into one, and an indescribable
rush of something different than physical vitality.
And once sitting with her under the lamp in the evening, he drew again
that sense of peace that had come in the queer darkness on the deck of
the _Jade_. It had to do with the mountains--as if they had finished
with the valleys, and were ascending together in the strong light of
the mountains.
And then there was passion--that plain, straight earth drive. Bellair
was strange about this with the Faraway Woman. This passion was like
the return of an old hunting companion, so natural in the wilds, but
strange and out of place in his newly-ordered life. It had come from
the Unknowable, and he had supposed it lost in that wilderness. It
dismayed him that _she_ should call it forth, but she called from him
everything day by day, and no day the same. He had lost much of the
old, but not that passion. And the nature of it which she called had
a bewildering beauty.... But there was much to keep the old native of
the wilds from really entering. The world would have called Bellair’s
idealism _naïve_; and there was something of Fleury in the very
solution of their lives--not a finger-print of passion in all that
relation. There was the Unfinished Story of Ogla’s Guest. Finally there
was the Gleam.
Life was very full and rare to Bellair, but there seemed always a new
ship in the harbour flying Blue Peter for California.... In the main,
they forgot themselves, as unwatched man and woman, slept under the
same roof and had their food together; at least, Bellair forgot it for
hours at a time. It seemed the very nature of life; the purity of it
all so obvious.... One afternoon he came up from the city in a cool
south wind; a grey afternoon, the sunset watery and lemon-hued. He was
thinking of the ship that would float Blue Peter to-morrow. The homely
scent of damp bark burning quickened his senses, as he crossed the
yard, and he heard her singing to the child. Somehow the woodsmoke had
brought back to him a Spring day in the northern woods--grey light and
dark pools, all foliage baby-new, a song-sparrow pair trilling back and
forth from edge to open....
He saw her in one of the rare flashes of life. She was sitting by the
fireplace, the nearest window across the room. Her figure was softened
in the deep grey light to the pure sensousness of motherhood--except
her face, hands and boots, and that which she held. These were mellowed
in the faintest orange glow from the firelight. Her back was curved
forward, her face bent to the baby’s head, held high in the hollow of
her arms. The dress was caught tightly about her ankles--a covering
pliant almost as a night-robe, but that was a mystery of the shadows.
She was like the figure of some woman he had seen somewhere--some woman
of the river-banks, but this a Madonna of the firelight. He passed on,
and waited before speaking.
3
They went a last time to the city.... There was a place for a chair,
and they had seen an old urn in a by-street which belonged near the
Spring. They felt that these products of men had to be just so, and
that they had earned a great boon in being given a part at stone
cottage. The things that were brought there must endure; must reason
together in long leisure concord, putting on the same inner hue at the
last and mellowing together as old friends, or old mates. This time,
Bellair’s eyes did not meet the city quite as before; it was not as
a stranger exactly, who rambles through a port while his ship lies
in the offing. His real berth was an hour’s ride back from the city
and made of stone. Perhaps later he would find work to do here.... A
child passed them in the store, and brought the change after their
purchase--a boy of twelve or fourteen, his face old with care. It made
Bellair think of Davy Acton at Lot & Company’s. They bought a bit of
glass, a bit of silver, some linen and a rug, and rode home with their
arms full.
Another letter had come from one of the Island headquarters of
Stackhouse, in answer to Bellair’s inquiry concerning affairs. The
papers in the wallet had given him clues to the various insular
interests; and the replies, without exception, represented the
attitudes of agents ready and open to authority from without.
Stackhouse had left no centre of force that appeared to have vitality
enough to rise in its own responsibility. Bellair saw that sooner or
later he must make a visit to these different interests, and that
the place of the wallet for the time being, at least, amounted
to headquarters. He wrote as explicitly as possible in reply to
the letters, promised to call in due course, established a freedom
where his judgment permitted, but felt the whole vast business very
loosely in hand. New York was first, and it became very clear to him,
especially on this night, that New York must be entered upon without
further delay. There was a thrill of dismay in the thought of the weeks
that had passed, and the dreaming. Dreams were good. He had needed
these days; great adjustments and healings had taken place. It had
been the pleasant lull between the old and new, the only rest his life
had known, in fact. All its beauty was massed into the period--but the
dreams must be turned into action now.
A man may stay just so long in joy. There are moments in every life
when the hour strikes for parting. The lover does well to leave his
lady then quickly. There is an understanding in the world that the
woman invariably whispers, _Stay_, but very often an organisation of
force that makes austerity possible, does not come from the man alone.
If the moment of parting passes, the two still lingering together, a
shadow enters between them, blurring their faces for each other’s eyes,
dimming the dream.
It does not come from without. The train missed, the passage paid for
and not connected, the column that marches away, one set broken,
the sentry post to which a strange figure is called--these are but
matters to laugh at afterward. The shadow comes between them from their
own failure. It is slow to lift. In the final elevation of romance,
there shows one sunken length.... There is the moment of meeting and
the moment of parting; that which lies between, whether an hour or
generation, forms but the equal third, for the great love intervals of
human kind are not measured by time, but by the opening of the doors
of the heart. By the very laws of our being, the doors draw together
against rapture prolonged. The man who crosses the world to live
one day with his sweetheart, sees her at last in the doorway or the
trysting-place as he cannot see her again; and in the tear of parting,
something different of her, something that has been occulted, clears
magically for his eyes. It must not blind him to remain, for it is her
gift to abide with him over the divide. It passes, not to come again
if he remains; rapture falls into indulgence; the fibre of integrity
weakens and lets them down into mere mortals. Man is not ready for
the real revelation of romance in whom a master does not arise at the
stroke.
* * * * *
That night there was a _mew_ at the door. They had finished tea and
were sitting by the fire. The woman opened the door and a young
tabby-puss walked leisurely in, moved in a circle about the room, tail
held high. Chair and table and lounge, she brushed against, standing
upon her toes, eyes blinking at the fire. The woman brought a saucer of
milk. The visitor drank, as if that were all very well, but that she
could have done well enough until breakfast. Apparently it was not her
way to land upon friends in a starving condition. Before the fire, she
now sat, adding a point to her toilet from time to time, inspecting it
carefully and long. Finally she turned to the woman, hopped upon her
knee and settled to doze. She had accepted them, and they called her
_Elsie_.
“Little-Else-to-do,” said the woman.
They stood beside the child’s bed later that night.
It rained, and the home closed in upon them with its cheer and humble
beauty. He saw her hand now in everything--even the rungs of the chairs
shone in the firelight. The hearth was swept. Her face--it was a place
of power, and such a fusion of tenderness was there, the eyes pure
and merciful. All that he had known before her coming was unfinished,
explanatory. She had shown him what a human adult woman should be in
this year of our Lord. His soul yearned to her; his whole life nestling
to this place of hers--as her stone cot nestled to the cliff.... She
was always very quiet about her love for the child when he was near.
That was because he loved the Gleam so well.... Yet he had seen the
Firelight Madonna.
“You have made it all I can do--to go away,” he said.
“I have thought of that--I might have made it easier. I have thought of
that,” she repeated. “And yet--we were so tired. We seemed to need to
be ourselves. It has been beautiful--to be ourselves----”
It seemed to him that she came nearer, but that was impossible for the
child was between.... Just then his mind finished the other picture--of
her arms held up to the hawthorn buds--a babe of his own in those
arms! He would have fought to prevent its coming, but it visualised
of itself. Had it been that which enchanted the woodland?... He was
silent. She had become even more to him for this instant. He would not
call it other than beautiful, now that it had come. She was more than
ever the heart of mystery--the Quest. She knew all these things--love
and maternity she knew; even the passionate fluting of Pan had
quickened her eyes; and where she abode, there was the genius of Home.
So slowly had it come--perhaps this was not all. For weeks he had
stood by--day after day, the heart of her becoming more spacious and
eloquent; one miracle of the woman after another--finally, to-night
the mystery of all life about her, for his eyes. Yet to her it was no
mystery; she was _of it_, rhythmically so. She knew the dream--and the
life that comes at last to quicken it. She could love; she could live;
she could wait. She loved God--but loved Nature, too. She was spirit,
but flesh, too. She was powerful in two worlds....
So Bellair stood with bowed head, and though Bessie was forgotten,
Fleury was not. It was still with him that Fleury and the Faraway Woman
were fashioned for each other.... “She may be so wonderful to me,
because she trusts me to understand----” such was the essence of his
fear. It kept his heart dumb.... That night she brought a pitcher of
water and placed it upon the hearth, looked up and found him watching.
“For the fairies,” she said.
* * * * *
That changed him a little, brought her nearer to words of his; though
the effort to speak was like lifting a bridge. She was leaving for her
room when he managed:
“Day after to-morrow--the steamer. May we not talk to-night?”
He saw her stop. Then she was coming toward him so gladly.
“Yes--you want the rest of the story?”
“Yes.... I have been sorry that _he_ couldn’t hear it----”
She stood before him, tall and white.
“I think you are like me,” she said in a moment. “I think you have
something behind you that you do not tell--something that made you
what you are--yet greater than you seem to yourself.... I would have
told you while _he_ was with us, but you know how the days passed and
we could not hold our thoughts together. Then there were times when
we could not even use our voices.... Do you know that the world is
wonderful--that the thousands about us do not even dream how wonderful
it is--how tremendous even miseries are? Sometimes I think that the
tragedies we meet are our greatest hours.”
“You have met them,” he said, a part of her spirit almost. “I have
seen them in your eyes. It gave me the sense of shelter with you and
limitless understanding---”
“I am thankful for that,” she whispered. “When we have understanding,
we have everything. Those who in their childhood are made to suffer
horribly are often the ones who reach understanding. Sometimes they
suffer too much and become dulled and dumb. Sometimes in the very ache
of their story, which can be so rarely told, they risk the telling to
some one not ready. It aches so, as its stays and stays untold. Oh, the
whole world craves understanding, and yet if we tell our story to one
who is not ready--we hurt them and ourselves, and add unto our misery.
There are moments set apart in life in which one finds understanding,
but the world presses in the next day, and the story does not look so
well. The spirit of it fades and the actions do not seem pure when the
spirit is out--so one loses a loved friend. Oh, I am talking vaguely.
It is not my way to talk vaguely--but to-night--it is like a division
of roads, and a story is to be told---”
“Do you think the story will diminish in my mind to-morrow?” he asked.
“No--not you. I have seen you through the sunlight and the dark looking
into my eyes for it. If I thought it would diminish in your mind--yes,
I would tell it just the same. It must be told--but life would not be
the same. Even this, our little stone cot, would not be the same. I
should have to become harder and harder to hold--to follow the Gleam----
“... I shall be Olga in the rest of the story,” she was saying. “For
I am Olga.... The truth is, I have no other name. There is one that
I used, and another that I formerly used--but they are not mine. You
shall see.... My father prospered with the sheep-raising, and slowly on
the long road that you have seen, houses came one by one, until at last
there was a village about us. My father was like the village father,
and my mother the source of its wisdom in doctoring and maternal
affairs--she had learned by bringing forth. But I was not of them--they
all saw that. The coming of plenty, the coming of the people, the
coming of men to woo my sisters, and the maidens my brothers brought
for us to see, before they took them quite away--none of these things
were so real to me as the coming of my Guest when I was such a little
girl. And none remembered that--not even my mother. Until I ceased to
speak of it, they tried to make me think it was a dream. But I knew
that rapture. It had changed me. I was always to search for it again. I
was always looking for another such night--for that afterglow again. I
was the last child and the silent one.
“But all that had to do with children was intimate and wonderful to
me.... I remember once when we were all girls at home together, and
they were talking--each of what she should have for her treasure from
the household--one walnut, one silver, one an inlaid desk--and they
turned to me laughingly, for I was not consulted as a rule, I said I
wanted the little hickory cradle in an upper closet. It was one of
those household days which girls remember.... All was happier then.
The little cradle seemed like a casket in which jewels had come to my
mother--seven times. We had all smiled at her first from that hickory
cradle.... I went up stairs to look at it--a dim place full of life and
messages to me. I was weak; my arms ached; and it was so dear that I
dare not say that it was mine.... My father said the cradle must belong
to the eldest girl.
“... I began to sense the terrible actuality of life through the
mating of Lois, ten years older, with a countryman who came for her.
For sisters, Lois and I had always been far apart, and this stranger
who wished to marry her, had nothing to do with life as I dreamed
it--a child of twelve. To many, Lois was the loveliest of us--large,
calm, dark and quiet, very well, slow of speech, but quick to smile.
Had you visited our house then, you would have remembered my father’s
patriarchal air, the smile of Lois, and the maternity that brooded
over us all. The rest you would get afterward--a variety of young
people with different faults and attractions--I the grey one, last to
be noted. Lois was given credit for more than she was. I do not love
brain or power, but I seem to love courage. Lois had something to take
the place of these--not courage--and no, not power nor brain. She had
sensuousness and appetite.
“One night I seemed to see what the whole house was straining for--a
kind of process of marriage continually afoot. Just now it was Lois.
I remember my father being called into the front room where Lois and
Collinge had been for an evening--his face beaming when he came forth,
and my mother’s quiet sanction. There were conferences after that,
dressmaking, the arrangement of money affairs. And I was suddenly ill
with it. To me, there could be no trade or public business. To me, it
had to do with a child and that was consecrated ground. Oh, you must
see it had to be different. I wanted it like a stroke of lightning.
I did not understand but I wanted it like that--like a flight of
swans--and not talk and property transactions. To me it had to do with
rain and frost and the tides and the pulses of plants--the silent
things. I did not understand--but knew that children came to those who
took each other.
“I remember one supper; the countryman talked--talked of the marriage
day--the breakfast, the ceremony--the end and the dusk, and turned to
Lois with sleepy half-folded eyes. She was smiling and flushed--and I
looked from face to face at the table, at my sisters--and I rushed away
because I could find nothing pure.... Some one said my mother never
looked prettier.... I remember the flood of honeysuckle perfume that
came to me in the torture of hatred, as I passed through the distant
hall.... And then later from the top of the stairs, Lois and my mother
were talking, and Lois said:
“‘You know, Mother, we will not have children for the first three
years, at least----’”
“I was somehow below by her in the lower hall. She seemed a rosy pig
upstanding, marked red and flaming.... And that night long afterward,
my mother found me and said, ‘You are getting beyond me, Olga.’ ...
But I could only think of men and women copying the squirrels,
filling their bins, dressing their door-yards, reaching for outer
things--and it was back of my very being--back of the mother and the
patriarch--back of the shepherding and the folding--back of _me_.
I hated life with destroying hatred--Lois wanting the seasons, but
unwilling to bring forth fruit, accepting the countryman’s idea of
life.... Can you see that it had the look of death to me?”
Bellair could only bow his head. To him the woman was revealing the
grim days through which she had won her poise and power.... She was
telling another incident with the same inclination--for the thought
of being a mother had been the one master of her days. He seemed to
see the child, the girl, the younger woman about her--a grey-eyed,
red-lipped girl, with a waist that was smaller and smaller as she
gained in inches from fifteen to eighteen--madness for mothering,
passionate in that, but not passionate for sensation--her face
sometimes so white, that they would ask her mother, “Is Olga quite
well?”... Yet teeming with that intensive health that goes with small
bones and perfect assimilation--that finds all to sustain life in fruit
and leaves ... books, light sleeping, impassioned with the lives of
great women and the saints--one of those who come to the world for
devotion and austerity and instant sacrifice; yet for none of these
apart; rather a fruitful vine, her prevailing and perennial passion
for motherhood.
“And yet I almost ceased to breathe,” she was saying, “when I came to
understand man’s part in these things. I felt _myself_ differently
after that--even children--but from this early crisis which so many men
and women have met with untellable suffering, emerged a calm that could
not have come without it. The travail brought me deep into the truth.
For all great things the price must be paid--how wonderfully we learned
that in the open boat. There are sordid processes in the production of
all fine things--even in the bringing forth of a Messiah.”
She paused, as if she saw something enter the eyes that had listened
so fervently. Bellair cleared his voice. “I remember something _he_
said,” he told her. “That matter is the slate--spirit the message that
is written. The slate is broken, the message erased, but _eyes_ have
seen it, and the transaction is complete. For the spirit has integrated
itself in expression----”
“I think he said it, for you to tell me now,” the Faraway Woman
whispered.
“Only _he_ could have halted your story,” Bellair added.
“... I told you when my Guest came in the afterglow, of the house
of our nearest but distant neighbour; now I am telling you of years
afterward, when there were many houses between on the long road, and
my playmate Paul had gone away to Sidney. Lois had long been married. I
was seventeen--and so strangely and subtly hungering--for expression,
for something that I did not know, which meant reality to me, but which
was foreign and of no import to all about me. Often at evening I stared
up the long road.... I remember late one night in the nearest house,
the soft wind brought me the cry of a child. It was so newly come and
it was not well. I went to it just as I was, though the people had just
moved in and were strange to us. It was thirst--as we know. I went to
it, as we would have gone to a waterfall. The door of their house was
locked, but I knocked. The father came down at last. The lower rooms
were filled with unpacked boxes. I told him why I had come. He talked
to me strangely. He went upstairs and sent the mother down to me. It
did not seem as if I could live through that night--and not have my
way. She put her arms about me, led me upstairs to a room that was
not occupied--save a chair by the window. I stood there waiting until
she returned with the child.... I saw lights back in our house when
they missed me--voices, but I could not go. In the early light I heard
the woman saying to my mother: ‘... We really needed her so. Baby was
restless, but he is much better and quiet with her. They are very happy
together.... Yes, she is safe and well.’”
The Faraway Woman left him now to go to the child.
4
Returning, she put the kettle on, and made tea in the earthen pot. To
Bellair her coming into the room again was a replenishment--as if she
had been gone for hours; and this started a pang deep in his heart,
which presently suffused everything when he realised that his ship had
come for him. It was past midnight.... In reality it was to-morrow that
his ship would sail.
“You listen wonderfully,” she said.
“It seems all about the little Gleam,” he answered. “It makes
everything significant about the open boat.... I forget to swallow----”
They laughed together.
“Do you know, I can hardly realise when we are here--that this is New
Zealand?” she said presently, “that only a little way back is the long
road and the river and the ravine--the neighbour’s house and ours and
the other houses between.... I will tell you the rest very quickly--and
oh, let me tell you first, I am not afraid. In spite of all I know, I
am not----”
She was bending forward across the table.
“... I was a woman when Paul came back from the distant city--and came
first of all to me. He was changed--something excellent about his
face and carriage, and something I did not understand at all, his
face deeper lined, his voice lower, his words ready. I did not think
about him when he was away. In the first evenings we passed together,
I had only an old-time laugh for him. I kissed him with something
like affection. We were permitted to be alone together, and I saw the
old look upon my father’s face--that I had hated so. That look--even
before the playmate thing had departed from me. Then I began to _see_
Paul--something I could not like nor understand, a readiness of words,
and he was not wise enough to make them ring deeply. I seemed to be
studying in him the novelty of a man--through the eyes of a girl.
“One night we were together in my father’s house. It was our Spring and
raining softly on the steps. The grass seemed full of odours, and the
vines trembling with life. He kissed me there. It seemed that I hardly
knew. I was looking over his shoulder into the dark, and I saw a little
white face. It was like a rain-washed flower ... and to me it was quite
everything.
“... Everything that I had known and loved--compensation for all that I
had missed and hungered for. Only the little face--but I knew the arms
were held out to me.
“Paul knew nothing of this. He was not to blame. It was not he, who
carried me away. He was merely being the man he fancied--playing the
thing as the world had taught him--showing himself fervent and a man.
I could have laughed at his kisses.... I have nothing against him.
It was his way.... But once he kissed me--and it came to me that he
was the way--that he must join his call to mine.... I could do all
but that--I need not love him. Can you understand--it seemed as if
everything was done but that--that the little face had already chosen
me.... I sent him away, and I remember long afterward I was standing on
the porch alone. It rained.”
Bellair realised now that she was watching him with something like
anguish. A different picture of her came to him from that moment--filed
for the long days apart--the rapt look of her mouth, and the pearl
in her hair that brought out the lustre of whiteness from her
skin--full-bosomed, but slender--slender hands that trembled and moved
toward him as she spoke.... It was something for him--as if he had
always been partly asleep before--as if she had brought some final
arousing component to his being.
“... My mother did not ask but once. When I told her--the horror came
to me that she would die. I had not thought of it before. I had thought
that it was mine--had seen very little of Paul. In fact, he had come
several times, when I would not see him.... She called my father--and
it was all to be enacted again. For a moment, I thought he would strike
me. The most dreadful thing to them all was that I was not ashamed.
They felt that I was unnatural....
“There was one high day in that little upper room. It was all like a
prayer, when they would suffer me to be alone and not wring me with
their misery--but this one high day, I must tell you. I stood by
the window in the watery light of the sun from the far north. That
moment the Strange Courage came. I felt that I could lead a nation,
not to war, but to enduring peace; as if I had a message for all my
people, and a courage not of woman’s, to tell it, to tell it again and
again--until all the people answered. It was then that I understood
that a man’s soul had come to my baby, and that it was not to be a
girl, as I had sometimes thought.
“And then the rest of the waiting--days of misery that I can hardly
remember the changes of--yet something singing within me--I holding
it high toward heaven as I could--singing with the song within. After
weeks, it suddenly came to me what they wanted to do to hide their
shame--to take the little child half-finished from me--to murder it--to
hide their shame.
“Then I told them that it had not occurred to me to marry Paul--that
I did not love him--that I had loved the little child. I told them
that I did not believe in the world--that I did not believe I had done
wrong--that I did not believe our old preacher who stayed so long at
the table could make me more ready for the child. I told my father that
I did not believe in marrying a man and saying that I would have no
children for three years. I told him that I was mad for the child--that
I was young and strong and ready to die for it ... that my baby wanted
me, and no other. I would have gone away, but they would not let me do
that. They kept me in an upper room. Paul had gone away ... and after
months my father went to find him. It was sad to me--sadness that
I cannot forget in that--my father taking his cane and his bag and
setting out to find the father--heart-broken and full of the awfulness
of being away from his home. He had not been away for years.... And
my mother coming timidly to my room.... And then I went down like
Pharaoh’s daughter to the very edge of the water--for, for the Gleam!”
Her eyes were shining and she laughed a little, looking upward
as if she saw a vision of it, and had forgotten the room and the
listening--her eyes as close to tears as laughter.
“... And when I came back--it was all so different. I could pity
them--my heart breaking for my father and mother, who had not the
wonder, and only the fears. They were passing out--after doing their
best as they saw it, for many, many years together--and I had brought
them the tragedy, the crumbling of their house--a shame upon the
patriarch of the long road, a blackness upon her maternities.... It was
my father’s thought to bring Paul to me. As if I would have taken him,
but he came--my father having given him much money.... Oh, do not be
hard upon him. There is wildness in him and looseness, but the world
had showed him the way and he was young. I said to him (it was within
ten days after the coming and my father and mother were gone from the
room), ‘I would not think of marrying you, Paul, but do not tell them.
As soon as I am ready, I shall go away with you, and they will not be
so unhappy--and as soon as we are well away, you shall be free. And you
may keep the money, Paul.’
“... And now it is like bringing you a reward for listening so well. I
tell you now of a moment of beauty and wonder--such as I had known but
once before, and was more real to me than all the rest. It made that
which was sorrowful and sordid of the rest seem of little account....
It was early evening in the upper room and still light. An old
servant who loved me was in the room, and the Gleam was sleeping--the
fourteenth day after his coming. The woman helped me to a chair and
drew it to the window, and all was hushed. Even before I looked out, an
unspeakable happiness began to gush into my heart.
“The ravine was crowding with darkness, but the long road was full
of light. The houses between seemed to dwindle but the distance was
full of radiance--that perfect afterglow again. Not for twenty years
had there been such a sunset, and now the sky was massed with gold of
the purple martin’s breast, and the roof of Paul’s house was like two
open leaves of beaten gold--everywhere the air filled with strange
brightenings. The fragrance from the fields arose to meet the heaven
falling from the sky.
“I tried to make believe, but the road was empty. The Guest would never
come again, and yet on such a night as this, he had come to me--like
a saint that has finished his work, like a Master coming down a last
time. All the room and the house was hushed behind me.... But the long
road was empty.
“The old servant at last could bear it no longer. Perhaps she thought
I did not breathe. Softly she crossed the room to the cradle, lifted
the Gleam and placed him in my lap--as if to call me back. Breath came
quickly at the touch of him, and she must have heard a low, joyous
sound as I felt the child. With one hand I held him, patting his
shoulder softly, slowly, with the other, until the ecstasy of long ago
flowed into my being.
“There was a moment that I should have asked her to take the Gleam
from me--had I been able to speak. It was such a moment that I had run
out under the stars. But as I patted the tiny shoulder, the burden of
the ecstasy passed, and a durable blessedness came--the calm of great
understanding.
“The road--of course it was empty--for he had come.... I thought I had
told the old servant, but a second time I seemed to see her anxious
face bending so near in the dusk.
“‘Why, don’t you see?’ I whispered. ‘He was looking for his mother when
I found him.’”
* * * * *
That was the end of the story--the rest just details that an outsider
might ask: How she went away with Paul for the sake of her father; how
he remained with her during the long voyage to America, but as nothing
to her, more and more a stranger of different ways from hers--how he
gave her but a little of the money her father had put in trust for her
keeping--and rushed away to dig his grave in the city.... Then just a
glimpse of her need and her labour and longing for the Island life--a
dream, the _Jade_....
5
The final morning, Bellair took the babe in his arms and let himself
down the rocky way to the shore. The trail was empty behind him, and
the cottage shut off by the group of little pines, pure to pass through
as the room of a child. And here were rain-washed boulders warming
in the morning sun, and before his eyes the blue and deep-eyed sea.
It rolled up to his feet, forever changing with its stories and its
secrets, very cool about them all to-day, full of mastery and leisure.
Bellair sat upon a stone and looked at the child: “I wish you could
tell me, little man ... but you are not telling. You know it all, like
the sea--but you do not tell.... And I’ll see you so many times, when
I’m away,--see you like this and wish many times I could hold you. For
we were always friends, good friends. You didn’t ask much.... And you
were fine in the pinch, my son.... That little cry I heard, that little
cry.... He loved you, and promised great things for you. I’ve come to
believe it, little man, for I know your mother. That’s good gambling,
from where I stand.... He knew it first. He knew it all first. And you
didn’t tell him.... Oh, be all to her, little Gleam--be all to her, and
tell her I love her--when she looks away to the sea. Tell her, I’ll be
coming, perhaps.... I didn’t know I’d ever be called to kiss a little
boy--but it’s all the same to you ... and take care of her for me.”
They were standing together a last time before his journey. The
carriage had been waiting many minutes. The child was propped upon the
lawn, and Elsie was picking her steps and shaking her paws that met
the dew under the grass. His eye was held over her shoulder to the
weathered door of the stone cottage. It was ajar and coppery brown,
like the walls above the young vines. And over her other shoulder, too,
was the brilliant etheric divide of the sea. He had to go back and
stand a moment in the large room. The wind and the light came in; the
vine tendrils came trailing in. He saw her books, her pictures, her
chair, her door....
He stood beside her again, and tried to tell her how moving these weeks
had been.
“Yes, we have seen both sides, and this was the perfect side. We saw
the other, well----”
“And you are not caught in either--that’s what thrills me most,” said
he. “I am always caught--in hunger and thirst and fear and pain--in
beauty and possessions. But you have stood the same through it
all--ready to come or go, ready for sun or storm----”
“After years of changes and uncertainty, one comes to rely only upon
the true things.”
“I shall want to come back--before the first turn of the road,” he
said. “I think I am hungry for the little house now----”
She put her arms about him. His heart was torn, but there was something
immortal in the moment.
“This shall always be your home,” she said. “You may come back
to-night--to-morrow--in twenty years--this is your house. I shall
be here. I shall teach _him_ to know and welcome you.... We are
different. We are not strangers. We have gone down into the deep ways
together. We shall always know each other, as no one else can, or as we
can know no others. So we must be much to each other--and this is our
home. You will never forget.... Oh, yes, you must come back--just as
you must go away----”
Sentence by sentence, softly, easily spoken; not with a great beauty
of saying, but with a bestowal of the heart that compelled his finest
receptivity. And she had held him as a mother might, or as a sister, or
as a woman who loved him. There was something in her tenure, of all the
loves of earth. He looked deeply into her eyes, but hers was the love
that did not betray itself then in the senses. He could not know, for
he would not trust his own heart.... But this he knew, and was much to
ponder afterward: This which she gave, could not have been given, nor
have been received, before the days of the open boat. So strange was
the ministry of that fasting.
They kissed, and hers so gladly given, failed of the secret; yet
revealed to him a love that sustained, and sent him forth a man--such
as Bellair had not been.