What _is_ the boy's name? It must be queer if you laugh every time you
think of it. Don't forget to tell me.
Your letters leave me breathless with things to say back. I suppose
that's inspiration, to make people feel full of new ideas, and that
you're crammed with it. In the first place I'm in a terrible hurry to
tell you that something really big has touched the edge of my anaemic
life, and that I have recognized it; I'm pleased that I recognized it.
Listen--please--this is it. Robert Halarkenden; I must tell you who he
is. Thirteen years ago my uncle was on a camping trip in Canada and
one of the guides was a silent Scotchman, mixed in with French-Canadian
habitants and half-breed Indians. My uncle was interested in him--he
was picturesque and conspicuous--but he would not talk about himself.
Another guide told Uncle Ted all that anyone has ever known about him,
till yesterday. He was a guardian of the club and lived alone in a
camp in the wildest part of it, and in summer he guided one or two
parties, by special permission of the club secretary. This other guide
had been to his cabin and told my uncle that it was full of books; the
guide found the number astounding--"_effrayant_." Also he had a garden
of forest flowers, and he knew everything about every wild thing that
grew in the woods. Well, Uncle Ted was so taken with the man that he
asked the secretary about him, and the secretary shook his head. All
that he could tell was that he was a remarkable woodsman and a perfect
guide and that he had been recommended to him in the first place by Sir
Archibald Graye of Toronto, who had refused to give reasons but asked
as a personal favor that the man should be given any job he wished.
This is getting rather a long story. Of course you know that the man
was Halarkenden and you are now to know that my uncle brought him to
Forest Gate as his gardener. He thought over it a day when Uncle Ted
asked him and then said that he had lived fifteen years in the forest
and that now he would like to live in a garden; he would come if Uncle
Ted would let him make a garden as beautiful as he wished. Uncle Ted
said yes, and he has done it. You have never seen such a garden--no
one ever has. It is four acres and it lies on the bluff above the
lake; that was a good beginning. If you had seen the rows of lilies
last June, with pink roses blossoming through them, you would have
known that Robert Halarkenden is a poet and no common man. Of course
we have known it all along, but in thirteen years one gets to take
miracles for granted. Yesterday I went down into the wild garden which
lies between the woods and the flowers--this is a large place--and I
got into the corner under the pines, and lay flat on the pink-brown
needles, all warm with splashes of September sunlight, and looked at
the goldenrod and purple asters swinging in the breeze and wondered if
I could forget my blessed bones and live in the beauty and joy of just
things, just the lovely world. Or whether it wouldn't be simpler to
pull a trigger when I went back to my room, instead of kicking and
struggling day after day to be and feel some other way. I get so sick
and tired of fighting myself--you don't know. Anyhow, suddenly there
was a rustle in the gold and purple hedge, and there was Robert
Halarkenden. I wish I could make you see him as he stood there, in his
blue working blouse, a pair of big clippers in his hand, his thick,
half-gray, silvery thatch of hair bare and blowing around his scholar's
forehead, his bony Scotch face solemn and quiet. His deep-set eyes
were fixed with such a gentle gaze on me. We are good friends, Robin
and I. I call him Robin; he taught me to when I was ten, so I always
have. "You're no feeling well, lassie?" he asked; he has known me a
long time, you see. And I suddenly sat up and told him about my old
bones. I didn't mean to; I have told no one but you; not Uncle Ted
even. But I did. And "Get up, lassie, and sit on the bench. I will
talk to you," said Robin. So we both sat down on the rustic bench
under the blowy pines, and I cried like a spring torrent, and Robin
patted my hand steadily, which seems an odd thing for one's uncle's
gardener to do, till I got through. Then I laughed and said, "Maybe
I'll shoot myself." And he answered calmly, "I hope not, lassie."
Then I said nothing and he said nothing for quite a bit, and then he
began talking gently about how everybody who counted had to go through
things. "A character has to be hammered into the likeness of God," he
said. "A soul doesn't grow beautiful by sunlight and rich earth," and
he looked out at his scarlet and blue and gold September garden and
smiled a little. "We're no like the flowers." Then he considered
again, and then he asked if it would interest me at all to hear a
little tale, and I told him yes, of course. "Maybe it will seem
companionable to know that other people have faced a bit of trouble,"
he said. And then he told me. I don't know if you will believe it; it
seems too much of a drama to be credible to me, if I had not heard
Robert Halarkenden tell it in his entirely simple way, sitting in his
workingman's blouse, with the big clippers in his right hand. Thirty
years before he had been laird of a small property in Scotland, and
about to marry the girl whom he cared for. Then suddenly he found that
she was in love with his cousin--with whom he had been brought up, and
who was as dear as a brother--and his cousin with her. In almost no
more words than I am using he told me of the crisis he lived through
and how he had gone off on the mountains and made his decision. He
could not marry the girl if she did not love him. His cousin was heir
to his property; he decided to disappear and let them think he was
dead, and so leave the two people whom he loved to be happy and
prosperous without him. He did that. Two or three people had to know
to arrange things, and Sir Archibald Graye, of Toronto, was one, but
otherwise he simply dropped out of life and buried himself in Canadian
forests, and then, just as he was growing hungry for some things he
could not get in the forest, my uncle came along and offered him what
he wanted.
"But how could you?" I asked him. "You're a gentleman; how could you
make yourself a servant, and build a wall between yourself and nice
people?"
Robin smiled at me in a shadowy, gentle way he has. "Those walls are a
small matter of dust, lassie," he said. "A real man blows on them and
they're tumbling. And service is what we're here for. And all people
are nice people, you'll find." And when, still unresigned, I said
more, he went on, very kindly, a little amused it seemed. "Why should
it be more important for me to be happy than for those two? I hope
they're happy," he spoke wistfully. "The lad was a genius, but a wild
lad too," and he looked thoughtful. "Anyhow, it was for me to decide,
you see, and a man couldn't decide ungenerously. That would be to tie
one's self to a gnawing beast, which is what is like the memory of your
own evil deed. Take my word for it, lassie, there was no other way."
"It seems all exaggerated," I threw at him; "there was no sense in your
giving up your home and traditions and associations--it was
unreasonable, fantastic! And to those two who had taken away your
happiness anyhow."
I wish you could have heard how quietly and naturally Robert
Halarkenden answered me. He considered a moment first, in his Scotch
way, and then he said: "Do not you see, lassie, that's where it was
simple, verra simple. Houses and lands and a place in the world are
small affairs after love, and mine was come to shipwreck. So it seemed
to me I'd try living free of the care of possessions. I'd try the old
rule, that a man to find his life must lay it down. It was verra
simple, as I'm telling you, once I'd got the fancy for it. Laying down
a life is not such a hard business; it's only to make up your mind.
And I did indeed find life in doing it, I was care-free as few are in
those forest years."
I think you would have agreed with me, Mr. McBirney, that the
middle-aged, lined face of my uncle's gardener was beautiful as he said
those things. "Why did you leave the forest?" I asked him then; you
may believe I'd forgotten about my bones by now.
"Ah, you'll find it grows irksome to be coddling one's own soul
indefinitely," he confided to me with the pretty gentleness which
breaks through his Scotch manner once in a while. "One gets tired of
one's self, the spoiled body. I hungered to do something for somebody
besides Robert Halarkenden. I'd taken charge of a lad with
tuberculosis one summer up there, and I'd cured him, and I had a
thought I could do the same for other lads. I wanted to get near a
city to have that chance. I've been doing it here," and then he drew
back into his Scotchness and was suddenly cold and reserved. But I
knew that was shyness, and because he had spoken of his secret good
deeds and was uncomfortable.
So I was not frozen. "You have!" I pounced on him. And I made him
tell me how, besides his unending gardening, besides his limitless
reading, he has been, all these years, working in the city in his few
spare hours, spending himself and his wages--wages!--and helping,
healing, giving all the time--like you----
I felt the most torturing envy of my life as I listened to that. _I_
wanted to be generous and wonderful and self-forgetting, and have a
great, free heart "of spirit, fire, and dew." _I_ wanted the something
in me that made that still radiance of Robert Halarkenden's eyes. You
see? "I"--always "I." That's the way I'm made. Utterly selfish. I
can't even see heavenliness but I want to snatch it for myself. Robin
never thought once that he was getting heavenliness--he only thought
that he was giving help. Different from me. And all these years that
I have been prancing around his garden of delight in two hundred dollar
frocks--oh lots of them, for I'm rich and extravagant and I buy things
because they're pretty and not because I need them--all these years he
has been saving most of his seventy-five dollars a month, and getting
sick children sent south, and never mentioning it. Why, I own a place
south. I'm not such a beast but that--well, very likely I am a
beast--I don't know. Anyhow, I've consistently lived the life of a
selfish butterfly. And I cling to it. Despise me if you will. I do.
I like my pretty clothes and my car, and how I do love my two
saddle-horses! And I like dancing, too--I turn into a bird in the
tree-tops when I dance, with not a care, not a responsibility. I don't
want to give all that up. Have I got to? Have I _got_ to "lay down my
life" to find it? For, somehow, cling as I will to all these things,
something is pushing, pushing back of them, stronger than them. You
started it. I want the big things now--I want to be worth while. But
yet clothes and gayety and horses and automobiles--I'm glued tight in
that round. I don't believe I can tear loose. I don't believe I want
to. Do you see--I'm in torment. And--silly idiot that I am--it's not
for me to decide anything. I'm turning into a ton of stone--I'll be a
horrible unhuman monster and have to give it all up and have nothing in
return. Soon I'll lay down my life and _not_ find it. I won't. I'll
pull the trigger. Will I? Do you see how I vacillate and shiver and
boil? This is my soul I'm pouring out to you. I hope you don't mind
hot liquids. What you wrote about the actor made me sit still a whole
half-hour without stirring a finger, with your letter in my hands. It
was glorious--there's no question. You meant it to inspire me. But he
had a job. I haven't. Back to me again, you see--unending me. Do you
know about the man who used to say "Now let's go into the garden and
talk about me"?
In any case, thank you for telling me that story. I'm glad to know
that there are people like that--several of them. I know you and Robin
anyhow, but the actor makes the world seem fuller of courage and
worth-whileness. I wish a little of it would leak into--oh, _me_
again. _Me_ is getting "irksome," as Robin said. Remember to tell me
the boy's name.
Yours gratefully if unsatisfactorily,
AUGUST FIRST.
P. S.--Robert Halarkenden isn't his real name. It's his grandmother's
father's name, and Welsh. I don't know the real one.
P. S. No. 2. If it isn't inconsistent, and if you think I'm worth
while, you might pray just a scrap too. That I may get to be like you
and Robin.
P. S. No. 3. But you know it's the truth that I'm balky at giving up
everything in sight. I'd hate myself in bad clothes. _Can't_ I have
good ones and yet be worth while? Oh, I see. It doesn't matter if
they're good or bad so long as I don't care too much. But I do care.
Then they hamper me--eh? Is that the idea? This is the last
postscript to this letter. Write a quick one--I'm needing it.
WARCHESTER,
St. Andrew's Parish House,
Sept. 23d.
I don't think it matters what his real name is. I'd been thinking all
along, that he was just a convenient fiction, useful for an address,
and now he turns out about the realest person going. Sometimes I
imagine perhaps it will be like that when we get through with this
world and wake up into what's after--that the things we've passed over
pretty much here and been vague about will blaze out as the eternal
verities. A miracle happened that day in your September garden.
You've surely read "_Sur la Branche_"--that book written around a
woman's belief in the Providence of God? Well, that's what I mean.
Why did Halarkenden come down out of the woods into your uncle's
garden? Why did you tell him, of all people? Why was it you who got
through to the truth about him? Why did it all happen just the minute
you most needed it? Of course I believe it--every word, exactly as you
wrote it. It's impossible things like that which do happen and help us
to bear the flatly ordinary. It's the incredible things that shout
with reality. Miracles ought to be ordinary affairs--we don't believe
in them because we're always straining every nerve to keep them from
happening. We get so confused in the continual muddle of our own
mistakes that when something does come straight through, as it was
intended to do, we're like those men who heard the voice of God that
day and told one another anxiously that it thundered.
Just think what went to make up those five minutes which gave you the
lift you had to have--that young Scotchman, beating back his devils up
in the lonely mountains all those years ago--that's when it started.
And then fetch it down to now; his leaving home forever--and his exile
in the woods--considerably different from a camping trip--the silent
days, worse--the nights. And all the time his mind going back and back
to what he'd left behind--his home, seeing every little corner of
it--you know the tortures of imagination--his friends--the girl--always
the girl--wondering why, and why, and why. Think of the days and
months without seeing one of your own kind. He had to have books; his
wild garden had to blossom. That man wasn't "coddling" his soul--he
was ripping and tearing it into shreds and then pounding it together
again with a hammer and with nails. All alone. That's the hardest, I
suppose. And then, when it was all done and the worst of the pain and
the torment passed, away up there in the forests, Robert
Halarkenden--it _is_ true, isn't it?--he rose from the dead, and being
risen, he took a hand in the big business of the world. And his latest
job is you. Has that occurred to you? I don't mean to say that he
went through all that just to be a help to you. But I do say that if
he hadn't gone through it he wouldn't have been a help to anybody. He
did it. You needed to find out about it. He told you. It got
through. Things sometimes do.
Suppose he hadn't come down from the mountains that day--that they'd
found him there--that he hadn't had the nerve to face it? Who would
have cured the tuberculosis lad--who would have sent the children
south--who would have brushed through your uncle's garden hedge in
Forest Gate, Illinois, and told you what you needed to be told? If
_you_ should turn out not to have the nerve--if, some day you--? Then
what about _your_ job? Nobody can ever do another person's real work,
and, if it isn't done, I think it's likely we'll have to keep company
with our undone, unattempted jobs forever. Mostly rather little jobs
they are, too--so much the more shame for having dodged them. You say
that you haven't got one. Maybe not, just now. But how do you know it
isn't right around the corner? Did Halarkenden have you in mind those
years he fought with beasts? No--not you--it was the girl back in
Scotland. But here you are, getting the benefit of it. It's a small
place, the world, and we're tied and tangled together--it won't do to
cut loose. That spoils things, and it's all to come right at the last,
if we'll only let it.
Possibly you'll think it's silly or childish, but I believe maybe this
life with its queer tasks and happenings is just the great, typical
Fairy Story, with Heaven at the last. They're true--that's why
unspoiled children love fairy stories. They begin, they march with
incident, best of all, one finds always at the end that "'They' lived
happily ever afterward." "They," is you, and I hope it's me. The
trouble with people mainly is that they're too grown up. Who knows
what children see and hear in the summer twilights, on the way home
from play? There's the big, round moon, tangled in the tree-tops--one
remembers that--and there's the night wind, idling down the dusty
street. Surely, though, more than that, but we've forgotten. Isn't
growing up largely a process of forgetting, rather than of getting,
knowledge? Of course there's cube-root and partial payments and fear
and pain and love--one does acquire that sort of thing--but doesn't it
maybe cost the losing of the right point of view? And that's too
expensive. Naturally, or, perhaps, unnaturally, we can't afford to be
caught sailing wash-tub boats across the troubled seas of orchard
grass, or watching for fairies in the moonlight, but can't we somehow
continue to want to give ourselves to similar adventure? There's a
good deal of difference, first and last, between childishness and
childlikeness--enough to make the one plain foolishness, and the other
the qualification for entrance into the Kingdom of God. I'd rather
have let cube-root go and have kept more of my imagination. The other
day, in the middle of a catechism I was holding in the parish school, a
small youngster rose to his feet and solemnly assured the company
present that "the pickshers of God in the church" were "all wrong."
Naturally we argued, which was a mistake. He got me. "God," said he,
"is a Spirit, and spirits don't look like those colored pickshers in
the windows." You see, he knew. He still remembers. But the higher
mathematics and a few brisk sins will assist him to forget. Too bad.
Still, when we get back home again surely it will all "come back" like
a forgotten language.
Meantime there are two hundred dollar frocks to consider, as well as
miracles in gardens. And that's all right, so long as the frocks are
worthy the background, which I venture to suppose, of course, they are.
The subject of clothes interests me a good deal just now, as I'm
engaged in living on my salary. It's all a question of what one can
afford, financially and spiritually. I gather you're not a bankrupt
either way. I don't recall anything in Holy Writ that seems to require
dowdiness as necessary to salvation. If one's got money it's
fortunate--if money's got one--that's different. Which is my
platitudinous way of agreeing with the last postscript of your letter.
I know you're getting to look at things properly again. To lose one's
life certainly does not mean to kill it, and to give it away one
needn't fling it to the dogs. And when you do connect with your job
you'll recognize it and you'll know how to do it. I'd like to watch
you. Once get your imagination going properly again and the days are
rose and gold. Oh, not all of them--but a good many--enough.
I nearly forgot about Theodore. There's humor for you--Theodore, "The
Gift of God"--that's the name they gave him sixteen good years ago
somewhere over in Scotland as you'd have guessed from the rest of it,
which is Alan McGregor. He is an orphan, is Theodore, but he doesn't
wear the uniform of the Orphans' Home--far from it! He wears soft
raiment and lives in kings' houses, or what amounts to the same thing.
I am engaged in exorcising the devil out of him and in teaching him
enough Latin to get into a decent school at the earliest instant. The
Latin goes well--three nights a week from eight to half-past nine. But
the devil takes advantage of every one of those nine points of law
which possession is said to give, and doesn't go at all. I am the only
living person who knows how to define "charm." Charm is the most
conspicuous attribute of the devil, and young McGregor has got it.
Likewise other qualities, the ones, for instance, which make his name
so rather awfully funny. You'd have to know Theodore to appreciate
just how funny.
It was the rector who "wished" him on to me. The rector is one of his
guardians, and being Theodore's guardian is a business which requires
at least one undersecretary, and I'm that. Theodore and hot water have
the strongest affinity known to psychological chemistry. So I'm kept
busy. But it's all the keenest sport you can imagine, and it's going
to be tremendously worth while if I can make a success of it. He's the
right kind of bad, and he's getting ready to grow into a great, big,
straight out-and-outer, with a mind like lightning and a heart like one
of the sons of God. But that kind is always the worst risk. He has
the weapons to get him through the fight with splendor, only they're
every one two-edged, and you have to be careful with swords that cut
both ways. His father was an inventor genius and there are bales of
money and already it has begun to press down on him a little. Still,
that may be the exact right thing. He has talked about it once or
twice as a nice boy would. There's a place on the other side which
comes to him, with factories and such things. He wanted to know
wouldn't it be his business to see that the working people were
properly looked after; I gathered he's been reading books, trying to
find out. And then he got suddenly shy and very bright red as to the
face, and cleared out. So far, so good, but it isn't far enough. Not
yet.
That's my present job. You'll get yours.
Wasn't it wonderful--I mean Halarkenden! When I think of him and then
of myself it gives me a good deal of a jounce. It surprises me that I
ever had the conceit to think I could handle this parson proposition.
Lately I've not been over-cheerful about it. That's one reason why
your letter did me good.
I hear the Gift of God coming up the stairs, and I've neglected to look
up the Future Periphrastic Conjugation and that ticklish difference
between the Gerund and the Gerundive, which is vital.
One thing more--your second postscript. You didn't suppose that I
don't, did you? Only, not like me!
GEOFFREY McBIRNEY.
The man took the letter down the three flights to the post-box at the
entrance of the Parish House and dropped it, with a certain
deliberation, as if he were speaking to someone whom he cared for, with
a certain hesitation, as if he were not sure that he had spoken well,
into the box. As he mounted the stairs again his springing gait was
slower than usual. It was very late, but he drew a long chair close
and poked the hard-coal fire till it glowed to him like a bed of
jewels, all alive and stirred to their hot hearts; opals and topazes
and rubies and cairngorms and the souls of blue sapphires and purple
amethysts playing ghostly over the rest. He dropped into the chair and
the tall, black-clothed figure fell into lax lines; his long fingers,
the fingers of an artist, a musician, lay on the arms of the chair
limply as if disconnected from any central power; there was surely
despair, hopelessness, in the man's attitude. His gray eyes glowed
from under the straight black brows with much of the hidden flame, the
smouldering intensity of the coals at which he gazed. He sat so
perhaps half an hour, staring moodily at the orange heart of the fire.
Then suddenly, with a smothered half-syllable, with a hand thrown out
impatiently, he was on his feet with a bound, and with that his arms
were against the tall mantel and his head dropped in them, and he was
gazing down so and talking aloud, rapidly, disjointedly, out of his
loneliness, to his friend, the red fire. "How can I--how dare I? A
square peg in a round hole--and the extra corners all weakness and
wickedness. Selfishness--incompetence--I to set up to do the Lord's
special work! I to preach to others--If it were not blasphemy it would
be a joke--a ghastly joke. I can't go on--I have to pull out.
Yet--how can I? They'll think--people will think--oh what _does_ it
matter what people will think? Only--if it hurt the rector--if it hurt
the work? And Theodore--but--someone else would do him--more good than
I can. There ought to be--an older man--to belong. Surely God will
look after His gift--His gift!" The quick lightning of the brilliant
eyes, which in this man often took the place of a smile, flashed; then
the changing face was suddenly grim with a wrenching feeling, yet
bright with a wind of tenderness not to be held back. The soul came
out of hiding and wrote itself on the muscles of the face.
"She--that's it--that's the gist of it--fool that I am. To think--to
dream--to dare to hope. But I _don't_ hope," he brought out savagely,
and flung his shoulders straight and caught the wooden shelf with a
grip. "I don't hope--I just"--the voice dropped, and his head fell on
his arms again. "I won't say it. I'm not utterly mad yet." He picked
up the poker and stirred the fire, and put on coal from a scuttle, and
went and sat down again in the chair. "Something has got to be
decided," he spoke again to the coals in the grate. "I've got to know
if I ought to stay at this job, or if it's an impertinence." For
minutes then he was silent, intent, it seemed, on the fire. Then again
he spoke in the low, clear voice whose simplicity, whose purity
reached, though he did not know it, the inmost hearts of the people to
whom he preached. "I will make a test of her," he said, telling the
fire his decision. "If she is safe and wins through to the real
things, I'll believe that I've been let do that, and that I'm fit for
work. If she doesn't--if I can't pull off that one job which is so
distinctly put up to me--I'll leave." With a swing he had put out the
lights in the big, bare living-room and gone into the bedroom beyond.
He tried to sleep, but the tortured nerves, the nerves of a high-bred
race-horse, eager, ever ready for action, would not be quiet. The
great, rich city, the great poverty-stricken masses seething through
it, the rushing, grinding work of the huge parish, had eaten into his
youth and strength enormously already in six months. He had given
himself right and left, suffered with the suffering, as no human being
can and keep balance, till now he was, unknowingly, at the edge of a
breakdown. And the distrust of his own fitness, the forgetfulness
that, under one's own limitations, is an unlimited reserve which is the
only hope of any of us in any real work; this was the form of the
retort of his overwrought nerves. Yet at last he slept.
Meantime as he slept the hours crept away and it was morning and an
early postman came and opened the box with a rattling key and took out
three letters which the deaconess had sent to her scattered family, and
one, oddly written, which the janitor had executed for his mother in
Italy, and the letter to the girl. From hand to hand it sped, and
away, and was hidden in a sack in a long mail-train, and at last,
Robert Halarkenden, on the 25th of September, came down the garden
path, and the girl, reading in the wild garden, laid aside her book and
watched him as he came, and thought how familiar and pleasant a sight
was the gaunt, tall figure, pausing on the gravelled walk to touch a
blossom, to lift a fallen branch, as lovingly as a father would care
for his children. "A letter, lassie," Robert Halarkenden said, and
held out the thick envelope; and then did an extraordinary thing for
Robert Halarkenden. He looked at the address in the unmistakable, big,
black writing and looked at the girl and stood a moment, with a
question in his eyes. The girl flushed. "Checkmate in six moves" was
quite enough to say to this girl; one did not have to play the game
brutally to a finish.
She laughed then. "I knew you must have wondered," she said, and with
that she told the story of the letters.
"It's no wrong," Robert Halarkenden considered.
The girl jumped to her answer. "Wrong!" she cried, "I should say not.
It's salvation--hope--life. Maybe all that; at the least it's the
powers of good, fighting for me. Something of the sort--I don't know,"
she finished lamely. With that she was deep in her letter and Robert
Halarkenden had moved a few yards and was tending a shrub that seemed
to need nursing.
October the Sixth.