All the next day she kept testing herself to see if that decision was
final. By evening she was satisfied that she had found the deeper
necessity. And now what could she do for the girl she had lost, and the
man she had given up? There must be active and disinterested sympathy for
both.
As for Elsie, she must find her before she could stand by her. And when
she had found her, she must show an interest in Westermarck on marriage,
and no fear of Marie Sukloff. A personal in the newspapers would be the
simplest method, but this had not occurred to her while she had been
bewailing scorpions and crickets. That evening she wrote out a personal:
Elsie.—Simply must resume Westermarck. Not afraid of Marie or
anybody like her.—Edith.
As for Trench, Elsie’s words about the socialists came to her aid.
Socialists were trying to make earth a reasonable sort of heaven. Their
disbelief in a future life helped them to work at this task not less
cheerfully, but more cheerfully. Doubtless many a scientific man was
working in exactly that way. She must grasp this point of view at its
best, and present it to Trench on the twenty-eighth of June, instead
of quarrelling about a hopelessly technical problem. Incidentally she
must read some current history, and try to dispel his absurd fear of an
impending war. The days of great wars were over.
Easter morning dawned glorious, and she thanked God for it. The Easter
after her mother had died had been so raw and rainy that it was no fit
symbol of the resurrection, and good dry bones would have preferred to
stay underground. But this morning, this twelfth of April, 1914, was
everything that it should be. She could reflect calmly that she was not
anxious about her new clothes, though she had some, and no longer worried
to death about her soul.
At breakfast she found by her place a glorious lily with a blurred
card—“From Clara to her best friend, and I got one for Elsie, too.”
Bless her heart—that good red little heart, to which no theory of
physiology could ever do justice! An idea! Edith would add that message
to the personal. She did so, after breakfast, and when later in the day
her druggist telephoned the personal to four papers, it read:
Elsie.—Simply must resume Westermarck. Not afraid of Marie or
anybody like her. And Clara has a lily for you.—Edith.
At half-past ten the whole family descended from the car and entered the
church. It was an old building, rich with autumnal glass. It was a church
of gentlemen for gentlemen, as Cardinal Newman would ironically have
said, but social problems were not bothering Edith Bridgman this morning.
At the opening of the service, Guilmant’s “Marche Funebre et Chant
Seraphique” was played, and she yielded gladly to its spell. “The rest
may reason and welcome; ’tis we musicians know,” she quoted to herself,
and wondered if Trench ever heard any music. She laid a plot to get him
to the concerts of the Symphony Society.
She had come intending to get a good deal out of the sermon, but she
heard nothing after the first words of the exegesis. “We shall be
changed, in a moment”—and the Greek for moment was the Greek for atom.
Instantly she recalled Trench’s contemptuous designation of himself. She
would take him at his word for a few atomic moments and note the result.
Flowers and preacher vanished. Light-years rolled back. Out of nothing
but unguessed energy arose innumerable centres of it—ethereal but
ponderable. They combined, but not by impersonal passion or personal
command. They melted into two great drifts of stars and nebulæ. One of
the whirling spirals spun till its core shone independent, and the rings
condensed into eight planets. She watched the third from the centre as
it whirled and grew. Planetesimals fell into it with flash and shock,
and at last it held the atoms which would some day be Trench and his
students, and Elsie and Clara and Edith. Then it gave off gases which
formed an atmosphere, a great delicate bubble rippling with storms. This
in turn distilled water, which spread like dew on a grape. The ever
revolving flash of sun against the earth had power at last to gather from
lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere the elements of a third sphere,
the film of life. It pulsed faintly opalescent. It was green, with flecks
of red, and tiny white scars. Every millimetre of that tissue bore some
wound from which it had recovered. If now she shut out the green and
heightened the aurora-red to carmine, she could see all the blood. To
her it seemed a ruby, and for her it obliterated the scars triumphantly,
as the blood of the Lamb obliterates sin. But Trench was bound not to
object if that rich, meaningless, unvalued stuff was bought and sold. He
was bound not to flinch as he saw the currents pass from body to body
by agonised birth or pitiless crunching of teeth. And the teeth and
bones were calcium, caught up from the rock to support the flesh tints
of the bubble. But the hot life pulsed and shock, and the calcium fell
like snow. Life clung to the rock, depositing death at every pore. It
damascened smooth surfaces with fossils, it floored the sea with chalk
and limestone and marble. It fell on fields of battle from pole to pole.
Had these bones cost no more to the breeding than to impearl a rifle ball?
Trench would answer no. But how could he live by such a view? No
man could hold the impersonal focus steady—she herself had felt her
eye-muscles shorten and lengthen as her human interest inevitably drew
some spot of the picture nearer. And if Trench really insisted that the
only reality was atomic energy, he would face a blank field in which
there were only equations, mass having vanished like Shelley’s skylark,
lost in the light of heaven. Of such a universe he could say nothing, and
yet he was doomed to express himself in the system of faded mythology
which goes by the name of the English language.
What was more, he was in that web of life to stay. If he thought he could
lessen the pain of it by leaving no child, he was just plain stupid. The
minute his calcium fell, the sunlight would laugh at him, pick up his
atoms, and put him back into the web. He would begin as plant food, but
presently he would be back in human bodies.
She couldn’t tell him so, but she could tell him that he was fated to
stand as he stood, touching the web with steel or medicine, to make it
rosier. If—when he banished pallor with oxygen, or with tincture of fern
flicked out canker from the roseleaf tissue, or with a moonlight trace
of silver brushed a foul film from a baby’s eye—he could not see that it
was worth while, he must at least see that it was fated. He was himself a
part of the web, and every red cell that emerged from the marrowy caverns
of his bones was literally breathing, and almost as literally breathing
hope.
She could not leave the vision till she had drawn him closer and
analysed him. She did so, dissolving him into a dozen impersonal
Trenches—muscular, arterial, lymphatic, boney. But she could not find
his very self, even in his nerves—that shadowy seaweed ghost, swept by
ethereal tides. She could not find him in his brain—starred with all
children but hers—where between the centres flashed a lacy midnight
of orderly pale lightning. And when at last she reduced him to atoms
and peered among his shining electrons, he faded and was lost in the
light of heaven. She loved him still, but she understood no atom of
what she loved. Never mind! The sciences which yesterday had frightened
her, to-day cheered her. He was apparently linked with everybody and
everything in the universe, and she would have to show courtesy to all
his brethren. Why! that was the theory of God, wasn’t it? In spite of
all the bloodshed of life, God loved the world with a love more than
personal, more than impersonal.
Oh, she would open his eyes on the twenty-eighth of June. She would
operate on them as he had operated on her throat. That was a mere
metaphor, but she had a right to all the metaphors she wanted. To express
her new faith she would even say that God’s personal love pulses to the
very star-tips of the universe. To crown all, Trench would some day be
the most surprised man that ever waked up in heaven. For herself she
asked no better heaven than to see him kneel and kiss little Mildred.
When the Hallelujah Chorus burst forth, she was ready to join in. When
the benediction had been said, and all stood for a minute in silent
prayer, she prayed that Elsie might be found and Trench might be changed.
And when she turned round, she saw Trench.
It was impossible. Yet there he stood in the rear of the room, no vision,
but real as hope or heaven. He was waiting, and the crowd began to pass
him on its way out. He spoke to nobody, though many directed well-bred
glances at him as they passed.
John made his way forward to shake hands with the minister. And now
through the thinning stream she saw Trench advancing.
“Good morning, Miss Bridgman. Good morning, Mrs. Drummond. Hello, scout!”
“We’re terribly glad to see you, doctor,” said Helena. “You have given us
the most blessed Easter we have ever known. Where do you usually worship?”
“Nowhere, Mrs. Drummond. I am a wandering sheep. This is the first time
I’ve been to church since I used to go with my mother.”
“You poor man! You poor overworked faithful doctor. You must come home to
dinner with us.”
Up to this time Edith had said nothing. She had been standing there with
strange new sensations—a shyness she had never felt before. Helena’s
invitation made her panicky. She simply couldn’t have him accept.
“Were you in at the first, Dr. Trench?”
“I followed you in. I heard it all.”
“Did the music please you?”
Trench lifted his eyes, and a curious tenderness seemed to stream from
their grey depths. “Yes. Somehow it made me think of this rascal here.
You put up a good fight, scout.”
Bobbie swung the hand he was holding—“It’s only two more years before
I’ll be a really and truly.”
“Good business! Here comes your father.”
John was indeed coming, and he struck Trench like a planet.
“Hello, Director! Did you think I had forgotten?”
“Am I to be honest?”—Trench’s hand was being squeezed too hard.
“Always be honest with your banker.”—John only tightened his grip.
“Then I did think so. I came here with the base design of finding
out.”—Trench managed to free his hand.
“You are a wise youth, doctor. You deliberately picked out the one day
when you thought I might possibly loosen up.”
“I’m not denying it. It was a shabby trick.”
“Nothing of the sort. Perfectly justifiable. But you don’t know what a
time I’ve had getting the land.”
“You have bought? You have it already? I offer the most abject apologies.”
“I’ve got it—the whole block south—quit claim—all straight, and back to
the Indians. But the owner held out for impossible figures.”
“Mr. Drummond, you are what I call a normal man, so far as a man can be
who is entangled in our present financial system. I offer you a health
certificate from our faculty.”
“What on earth are you two men talking about?”
“Sh! not so loud, Helena. There’s just a little matter that I haven’t
mentioned to you and Edith. But while nobody’s looking this way, let me
present Dr. Isham Trench, Director of the Drummond Children’s Pavilion of
Lister Hospital.”
Helena looked at him—looked at him hard, and thought at first that she
saw him, but everything disappeared as the April rose to her eyes.
But Edith stepped up to her brother and kissed him before everybody.
“John, I’m a cypripedium, and Dr. Trench is an atom—he told me so
himself—but you are a dear. Doctor, you must accept my sister’s
invitation.”
“That’s right, Director, and we’ll talk business. I feel an inch taller
already.”
And this time Drummond had him by one arm, and Bobbie by the other.