"Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from that she had given before--a place on the next avenue, within a block or two. "You"d better go home. You can walk, can"t you?"
"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she had given.
The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered them to the policeman.
"That"s all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.
"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French _table d"hote_ now."
"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be shut."
"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."
On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.
The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superst.i.tion of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarra.s.sment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compa.s.sion? Would her family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody"s Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment of that kind colored girl"s emotional fancy. She might be n.o.body"s Mother.
When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that old woman"s condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody"s Father?
VI
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
He had gone down at Christmas, where our host Had opened up his house on the Maine coast, For the week"s holidays, and we were all, On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall, About the corner fireplace, while we told Stories like those that people, young and old, Have told at Christmas firesides from the first, Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head, And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said, "This is so good, here--with your hickory logs Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs, And sending out their flicker on the wall And rafters of your mock-baronial hall, All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor, And the steel-studded panels of your door-- I think you owe the general make-believe Some sort of story that will somehow give A more ideal completeness to our case, And make each several listener in his place-- Or hers--sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping All over him--or her--in proper keeping With the locality and hour and mood.
Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!"
Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air, Looked around him on our hemicycle, where He sat midway of it. "Why," he began, But interrupted by the other man, He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote, But something with the actual Yankee note Of here and now in it!" "I"ll do my best,"
Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest.
What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good.
Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day Close to the water, and the sloop that lay, Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
Well, there she has lain just so, year after year; And she will never leave her pier again; But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain, For Bay Chaleur--or Bay Shaloor, as they Like better to p.r.o.nounce it down this way."
"I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
But go ahead," said the exacting guest.
And with a glance around at us that said, "Don"t let me bore you!" our host went ahead.
"Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he Still lives there with his aging family.
He built the sloop, and when he used to come Back from the Banks he made her more his home, With his two boys, than the big house. The two Counted with him a good half of her crew, Until it happened, on the Banks, one day The oldest boy got in a steamer"s way, And went down in his dory. In the fall The others came without him. That was all That showed in either one of them except That now the father and the brother slept Ash.o.r.e, and not on board. When the spring came They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother, If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother Good-by in going; and by general rumor, The father, so far yielding as to humor His daughters" weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek Against their lips. Neither of them would speak, But the dumb pa.s.sion of their love and grief In so much show at parting found relief.
"The weeks pa.s.sed and the months. Sometimes they heard At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by Along about the middle of July, A time in which they had no news began, And holding unbrokenly through August, ran Into September. Then, one afternoon, While the world hung between the sun and moon, And while the mother and her girls were sitting Together with their sewing and their knitting,-- Before the early-coming evening"s gloom Had gathered round them in the living-room, Helplessly wondering to each other when They should hear something from their absent men,-- They saw, all three, against the window-pane, A face that came and went, and came again, Three times, as though for each of them, about As high up from the porch"s floor without As a man"s head would be that stooped to stare Into the room on their own level there.
Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief They could not speak. The women did not start Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart, Knew she was looking on no living face, But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."
Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
But he who had required it of him spoke In what we others felt an ill-timed joke: "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don"t!"
As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won"t.
Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
At any rate, the women were not scared, But, as I said, they simply sat and stared Till the face vanished. Then the mother said, "It was your father, girls, and he is dead."
But both had known him; and now all went on Much as before till three weeks more were gone, When, one night sitting as they sat before, Together with their mother, at the door They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk Up from the pier, the tramp and m.u.f.fled talk Of different wind-blown voices that they knew For the hoa.r.s.e voices of their father"s crew.
Then the door opened, and their father stood Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving: "Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?"
"I am alive!" "But in this very place We saw your face look, like a spirit"s face, There through that window, just three weeks ago, And now you are alive!" "I did not know That I had come; all I know is that then I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you So that I could not think what else to do.
He"s there in Bay Shaloor!"
"Well, that"s the end."
And rising up to mend the fire our friend Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain: The exacting guest came at him once again; "You must be going to fall down, I thought, There at the climax, when your story brought The skipper home alive and well. But no, You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh,"
Who spoke before, "it"s wonderful! But you, How could you think of anything so true, So delicate, as the father"s wistful face Coming there at the window in the place Of the dead son"s! And then, that quaintest touch, Of half-apology--that he felt so much, He _had_ to come! How perfectly New England! Well, I hope n.o.body will undertake to tell A common or garden ghost-story to-night."
Our host had turned again, and at her light And playful sympathy he said, "My dear, I hope that no one will imagine here I have been inventing in the tale that"s done.
My little story"s charm if it has one Is from no skill of mine. One does not change The course of fable from its wonted range To such effect as I have seemed to do: Only the fact could make my story true."
VII
AN EXPERIENCE
For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason that I can a.s.sign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
There was something in the event which discharged him of all obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several of those relations--father, son, brother, husband--without identifying him very satisfyingly in either.
As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another"s curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary a.s.signment; I was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no ma.n.u.script, or plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one"s discomfort; to pull at one"s wilted collar and loosen the linen about one"s reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to suffer pa.s.sively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.
At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe, the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he could not.
My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really affect our characters. I remembered having once cla.s.sed certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I questioned whether the French language was so dest.i.tute of adjectives, after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.
With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about, crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one"s peace with G.o.d, as it used to be said, and after all there might be something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and possibly never waking again?
Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the half-open door with the k.n.o.b of it in his hand looking into the room blankly.
As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished as if he had sunk through the floor.
People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide s.p.a.ce which the street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.
The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those vast sighs.
They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a surpa.s.sing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret, speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from which there is no returning.
There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all dust forever.
That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another"s. They whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the fact.