Chapter 16

THE QUESTION ANSWERED.

During the days that followed Claire's attitude grew into one of motherhood. She watched over Lawrence for the least thing she might do, the least promise of returning health. There were times when he raved in delirium, and she listened with a swelling heart.

One morning he began suddenly talking of himself. In broken sentences, shapeless phrases, half finished thoughts, he unfolded a strange tale. Claire was glad that Philip was away at work with his traps. She sat beside Lawrence, her hands clasped, and did not miss a word.

"You see," he began one day without preliminaries, "you see, I wasn't just given the best of chances. That was the beginning of it all. I wasn't fairly treated." She tried to comfort him into sleep, but he did not know she was talking to him and went on earnestly with his unconscious revelation.

"The whole business was a squalid sort of thing banked by mountains so grand in their rugged strength that I never got used to the dirty, dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and its surroundings. Men ought to be better up there, but they aren't. They just magnify faults with the bigness of the hills around. Lots of it was romantic, lots of it ought never to be lost, the frank freedom, the vital living, the joy of uncertain victory over the dirt of the mines. It made men wild, wild to the last degree, that ever possible stumbling into gold, pure, glittering gold. Why, I saw it as a kid, shining like stars all over the side of the tunnel. It made even the children mad, I think. When I modeled rude little figures out of the red clay, I was always on the outlook for a possible gold-mine."

He laughed, then went on seriously. "I didn't have the chance to grow up learning things gradually. There was no dividing-line between vice and virtue, all of it spread out there, street behind street, in a glow of abandoned riot. Even virtue flashed with a loose frankness that deceived a growing boy. It was a grand drama. Fifty thousand mad men and women!"

She looked at him in amazement. This was something beyond her knowledge. What was it all that he was talking about?

"There was Josey; she didn't know. I didn't. We saw love played with in hilarious open passion. We thought it was the thing to do. Children oughtn't to see it quite that way."

Claire felt guilty, but he stopped and when he began again he was on a different line of old memories.

"Why, when I sold papers down on the main street I could see the girls of the district standing around, one block below, in their business regalia. I thought at first they were angels."

Claire sat in wonder and listened.

"The first time I ever went down there I was eight. Eight years old, and one of them called me from the open door of her house. When I stepped to the door, she was coming down a stairway, her white dress open and spread like wings at either side of her naked body. I was sure she was an angel out of my Sunday-school book. I could scarcely take the dime she gave me. I never forgot her kissing me and patting my head when I stared so at her."

Claire felt a strangely tender pity for the little chap she was seeing now in her imagination.

"And the fighting, dirty, freckled sons of those women--they kept me hard at it, keeping the money I got. After that day, I went down there often. Traded a paper with a golden-haired angel for a box of cigarettes, the first I ever owned. It was great, wonderful, to have her cigarettes. I smoked them with a sense of reverence.

"Wright and I played hooky, and the girls hid us all day in their shacks, played with us, teased us about sex, and taught us things we oughtn't to have known. Poor old Wright! They sent him to the pen for burglary after I had been gone years and was blind. I wonder if I'd have followed him. Most likely would.

"And, oh, the hills! There was old Pisga, pined to its cone point, and a race-track, with a saloon, at its foot. I ran away out there once at a big Fourth of July barbecue. It rained like the devil and I lounged in the bar with jockeys and sporting girls, listening to their ribald talk.

"I don't know--a street urchin in a camp, that was all I was. If I got licked, and I did, I was a coward for years and had to give up my pennies. I used strategy, cunning, because I was afraid to fight till I whipped Red. That made a difference. If the old fellow I liked so hadn't given Red a quarter to lick me, I'd have been a coward yet. It made me so mad I licked Red."

Lawrence laughed again merrily.

"That started me fighting, and I fought daily without provocation. Dirty, scaly fisted little rat, whose stockings sagged around his shoes, fighting for money in the saloons! The men liked me, too. All of them called me their kid. I used to stand big-eyed and watch the faro-table stacked with gold. There were days, too, when I went out alone over the hills. I was ashamed of my little figures and afraid lest the boys find my mud-pies, as Red had called a tiny dog that fell out of my pocket in a fight.

"One day in an electric storm I saw a man and his horse killed by lightning. I was awed, and electricity became my god. I worshiped it like a little heathen. I even bought penny suckers and stuck them up in the ground where the lightning played in stormy weather.

"It always seemed that the only things about the whole camp that fitted with the hills were that girl in white and an old mountaineer who fought with his fists alone against a gang of drunks. I don't know why. They just belonged."

He stopped and lay a long time in silence. Claire thought over what he had said, and her heart went out to this man as if he were still the little gamin of the hills.

"Poor little chap," she murmured aloud.

Lawrence half raised himself in bed, talking again, and she was obliged to push him back.

"It was all paradise, though, compared to that school where the Women's Club sent me. I didn't want an education. Freedom was taken from me. I was chained with discipline. I had seen too much and I told the other marveling boys. They talked, and I was punished as a degenerate little villain. I couldn't see why. That first winter was hell. They all misunderstood me, and I them. I ached for my mountains again, and when they sent me to the camp for the summer I whooped for joy.

"I must have been thirteen at that time. The men in camp paid the Widow Morgan to keep me through the summer. She had a daughter seventeen or thereabouts. Georgia had curly hair and blue eyes. She didn't pay much attention to me at first. I didn't care.

"Then one night the widow went off to a lodge-meeting and left us alone. Pearly and the gang came around and began throwing rocks at the house and demanding that Georgia let them in. I was furious, and she was nearly scared to death. She got her mother's pistol and asked me to shoot it. I took it and, opening the door, fired into the night. The gang slunk off, but Georgia was still frightened.

"We slipped out of our clothes in trembling silence and huddled together in her mother's bed. She was crying, and I felt very brave. I put my arms around her and comforted her. She became quiet by and by and slipped her arms around me. After that we found ourselves.

"She said we were in love, and I guess we were. That night was the beginning of my rebellious manhood. Her mother abused us roundly for immoral little whiffits. I was put out, and after that the county kept me. Georgia hated me, for she said I was to blame.

"I suppose that was all right, too, but it made me bitter against what seemed to me an unjust world. I went back to school, hating. I never stopped hating as long as I was there. It was misunderstanding from first to last. I never ceased rebelling against punishment for rebellion.

"It was a hopeless snarl, but it made me what I was when I entered college, distant, sullen, and ferocious. My only joy was in my work, and I spent all my spare time in the studio. Then the second summer I shot off the gunpowder, and blindness came."

Lawrence lay back silent, then began again.

"After the accident it was a thousand times worse. I thought people didn't like me because I was blind. They only pitied and misunderstood. Misunderstood--that word might be my epitaph. It could certainly be placed over my childhood's grave.

"It was in college that I started thinking. Thought out my plan of militant egoism. It seemed to succeed, but all the time I was afraid it was only pity that sold my work. You know, Claire, as you said, I've got to do it all over again. All of it, building a new platform, a new work-bench. I've got to allow for things. I've got to understand."

In her tension, Claire walked the floor. Would he never stop? That glimpse into his life at the widow's--who was Pearly?--and what a tough little gang he must have grown up with! Poor boy!

He did not talk much for a long time, then he kept repeating: "I must build a new work-bench, Claire. That's the thing to do."

She felt at times that she must scream at him, then she would be all motherly tenderness. "Lawrence," she would whisper, "do it, my man. You can, my laddie."

He tossed, and chided an unseen man or woman for having helped him through charity under the garb of admiration. He was misunderstanding again. He thought everything was charity, pity for his blindness, and he raved. She began to see that this sudden bitterness which poured from his lips was the outcome of years of sorrow, the product of a deep-burning fire to see the beauty his soul craved.

"Lawrence," she cried, "God knows if I could I would give you my eyes!"

She knew that he was consumed with the pain of his struggle to comprehend more beauty. Even exaggerating his hunger for sight, she wept beside him. Her whole soul yearned to help him, to give him more of the beauty which seemed the prime need of his nature.

Sometimes he prayed for it, addressing Fate, Nature, Chance, anything, everything but God.

After a silence that was beginning to frighten Claire, he began again. At first his words were indistinct, but as she leaned closer, they cleared of guttural sounds. She listened spellbound.

"You see, I hadn't done my thinking with allowance for the whole of human character, Claire. That was what was wrong with me. I'm doing that now. I'm finding myself again. It is back with the beginning of things I must start. Back with the first squirm of life in the primordial mud. It's no use trying further back than that. No use at all. Back of that lies only conjecture.

"There was existence, perhaps, inert unconscious existence waiting to become suddenly aware of itself, aware of its parts and its difference from other things. Well, existence struggling, dreaming of self-knowledge, found in a wriggling, oozing spot of protoplasm--that's the start of it all. Feeding without hunger, moving without knowledge to food, reproducing mechanically by division, living without instinct, without emotion, without death. For me, that must be the beginning.

"Whether death came, or what it was--a long period without food, perhaps--that started this stuff to changing, I do not know. Maybe it was existence following the way of greatest pressure toward selfhood. Anyway, it started and began its journey. Up and up, out of the mud and ooze, into light and dry dirt.

"The glory of light must have been a great thing then. Think of it, coming into light, out of wet, dark mud. I know what it would be better than you. Light, the first great discovery of life! It must have hastened growth--warmth, sunrays, heat, cold at night and dark again. The glory of it breaking at dawn over the squirming, groping blind existence of things!

"God said let there be light, and there was light.

"Existence demanding the thing it craved. Was that it, or existence finding light and learning to crave it? No matter--light, a thousand miracles of warmth and wonder! Growth was inevitable, Claire.

"Then the craving learned by experience broke into new form. I don't know what it was; a two-celled bug, perhaps--only that it was craving that did it. Hunger and thirst after light.

"Pain came at the very start of things. Wants unsatisfied drove with the scourge of hell, forcing eyes, ears, stomach, sex into being, and out of the squalor of it all, still goaded by incessant want, there heaved the gigantic scaly carcass of the dinosaur. Still unaware of things, but driven to move, to grow, to expand. Existence demanding more expression of its awareness of self.

"The beast didn't know what it was. He only grew and grew and grew, till he spread his ugly, yearning life over hundreds of feet of ground. Eye and ear and touch and a peace of filled belly lay basking in the light, glorying in what they found. Life was good, riotously good, finding things, finding itself out. They fought, fed, killed, bred, all in the effort of existence to know.

"What a blood-drenched chaotic struggle for self it was, Claire!

"And so, on and on and on. Touch didn't satisfy the incessant taste for more knowledge, more life. Bodies rising like hills out of the marshes couldn't give the keen joy that existence craved for itself.

"New things again: changed, altered products of the old, bearing in their frames the history, the memory of the old--it all came, and out of it at last, hunger-driven for more keen life, sprang a biped, hairy, tusked, savage, bloody, lustful, eager to live, live, live!

"He was a glorious beast. In his flattened head that held the little bloodshot eyes were memory, products of the past, things that harked back for confirmation of present things. He had instincts--that's what they are, instincts, memories of past sufferings--that whipped the organism to go on into keener living. He was sexed, he was hungry, he was vicious, he slept and ate, he bred consciously, carrying on the eager shout within his being for more, more of life. More of existence aware of itself!

"If he killed, he gloried in the hot blood that drenched his hairless nose, and he learned to laugh through the pleasure of a filled belly. He learned to cry when he went hungry. Tears came, and emotions, a more specialized instinct.

"He was learning something else, too. But pain still whipped him on, filled him with fear of non-life, and he grew cowardly. Nature had created a new thing, a brain, a specialized mass of cells that can comment, realize, criticise, warn, appreciate, choose better food, get it easier, help to conquer and promote life; the biped used this new thing to understand why he ran from the fingers that clutched at him in the dark and he became afraid. If it brought him new pain, it also brought him new pleasure. It was a great toy that could be used to enjoy oneself with.

"It can have the joy of bodily sensations and then recall them, study them, comment on them, on its own instincts, its own memories. It can dream of ways for procuring fuller life, and put the dreams into any desired shape. Man struts from his jungle, laughing aloud, with lust for life and joy at his fulness thereof. But all the while, pain, the darkness, the still inert unconsciousness in existence that oppresses and drags back into its own dead inertness, is laughing still more heartily.

"Everywhere it checks, but man in his egotism forgets that he is a slave, bound and hampered, and boasts himself master. Death sweeps in, lightning kills, thunder crashes over him, and filled with fear, with something bigger than he can grasp, he falls upon his knees, and cries, 'God!'

"Then begins the mess, the tangled, detestable, bloody, dirty, riotously glorious, sublime mystery that is me. Me and you, Claire. Here we are."

Claire leaned over him, her breath suspended in her eagerness.

"Me, the man, specialized, sex-specialized, made to record, to enjoy, to remember, to create, and to die at last from sheer wearing out myself seeking life.

"And you, you the woman, deeper, more vitally sexed, more complete in your memory of the past, more true in your record of it, less a sport, more a true seeker and knower of life--you, the embodiment of it all, memory, instinct, fear, passion, tenderness, hate--cunning, strong, wise, far-seeing, and altogether mistress of the whole brute world, mistress of everything in life and destiny save death. You, too, worn out by struggling to live more fully, but not until your lust for life has sent children out to carry on the struggle.

"Oh, Claire, it is you the woman, demanding at any cost that your child live, who gives us our great knowledge, our beauty, our selfishness, and our strident sex, our pain."

Claire caught her breath and sobbed: "Lawrence, Lawrence!"

"Yes," he went on, "that is the end of it all. I see it now. You, unknown to yourself, demanding your child, stung to fear of death without it here in the wilderness, you love me--I know it, you love me. And I--I love you. It was that which drove you to speak as you did. I see. I love you!"

She sank down on the pillow beside him. In her heart was a great relief which carried her away in a flood of tears. Lawrence talked on unheeded by her. He had made everything clear, and she was utterly happy.

When Philip came in he found her sitting quietly, in her eyes a deep, calm peace that filled him with wonder.

He smiled at her, thoughtfully, and remarked: "Well, Claire, you look happier than you have for months."

"I am," she said simply.

They did not carry on the conversation. He was satisfied that it was love for him which made her so distant, and he was content to wait until she should be his wife. He sat by the fire, watching her earnestly, and she was too deep in her new-found joy even to think of him or of her promise to him.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK. Don't forget this magazine is issued weekly, and that you will get the continuation of this story without waiting a month.

Claire

by Leslie Burton Blades

THE BLIND LOVE OF A BLIND HERO

_BY A BLIND AUTHOR_

This story began in the All-Story Weekly for October 5.