Part 15

On a certain day I shall never forget—it was in the latter part of the same August—I stood looking out of the window of our office. From it I had a clear view of the harbor and of the vessels that came to and left it. Soon, a Cunarder glided into my vista, and, passing out, left a quickly lost picture of white wake, purple sea, and low hanging gray smoke. But the thought in my heart as I stood and watched remains:

"God bless his kindly old heart! and God grant he may return safe and sound to the 'little felly.'"

I speak of it as a thought. It must have been a prayer, so quickly was it answered. As I stood watching the slow blending of the smoke with the mellow light of the afternoon, I heard behind me a gentle, initiatory cough.

I turned. There stood O'Connor himself, hat in hand, in the centre of the office. I can tell you nothing of his entrance.

"What in the world!" I exclaimed and asked.

He hung his dear old head, and fingered the rim of the same tall hat I knew so well, while he slowly passed it round and round between his hands. At last he spoke. His voice was all appeal; without a tone of assertion:

"I decided not to go."

"Why?"

"The little felly."

"You went aboard?"

"Yis."

I ventured, from intuition, "But at the last moment you felt homesick? Is that it?"

He answered me over a half-turned, bashful, aged, and patient shoulder.

"Yis."

"So you left the boat before she sailed?"

"Jist that."

"And your baggage?"

"It's gone—wid the boat. But—but that's no differ."

Once more—never mind about the details. We had a long talk, our client and I. I learned that his wife and daughter, Tim Fennessey, too, had parted from him at his own request, a quarter of an hour before the sailing of the liner—"To have no scene," he said—and finally I learned what I could do in his behalf. It was to ease his return to his own people.

"Now, sor," he said, at the close of our interview, "will you be so kind as to go before me and warn me wife?"

"Tell her you changed your mind at the last moment? Is that it?" I asked.

"Yis, sor, 'tis jist that." Then, he added, with the first semblance of assertiveness, "And it was me right."

"Unquestionably," I answered. Then I suggested that we start on our journey, at the end of which I was to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Royal Consort.

During our walk through the almost deserted streets, where the heat of the passing day still hung in sluggish malignity, we had plenty of time for further consultation. Old O'Connor at my side, but never once in step, gave me minute instructions.

"You see, sor," he said, by way of additional explanation, "the windie from me place looks to the harbor, and we can see the steamboats as they comes and goes. 'Twas all arranged the little felly should be in wan o' the windies to see me as I wint away; well, when the orf'cer o' the boat sez that all thim that wasn't intendin' to go should go back to the dock, I sez to mesilf, "_Are_ you intendin' to go?" Thin I thinks to mesilf, 'Shure some odther day will do as well and 'tis as well to wait until the little felly is big enough to go with me and see for himself,' dye moind? Wid that I walks off av the boat and comes to your offus."

"Leaving your baggage on board," I added.

"Yis, sor—but that's no differ—shure the duds was all new, and I care little for thim." His eagerness increased as we neared his home, down on the wharf, and above his junk-store and saloon. So our conferences came in short sentences.

"I will get your baggage back," I began.

"Can you do that, sor?"

"Certainly. I will see the steamship company." He sighed comfortably.

"Thank you, sor. 'Twill be a favor to me. But, whishper! When we reaches my place, I will shtand outside forninst the corner. Thin, do you go inside and exshplain to me wife and prepare her for me return, do ye see?"

I quite understood, and said so. As we turned our last corner, we caught the soft caress of a gentle, belated sea-breeze, and I felt my heart uplift and my brain clear.

"Go on, now, you," was his parting instruction. "I will wait here till ye come back and tell me."

You may be sure I made my way to the royal mansion as quickly as the temperature would permit. In response to my knock at the inner door, it was opened by Mrs. O'Connor herself. She greeted me with quiet, simple courtesy and, as soon as I was seated and she had remarked upon the heat of the day (her remarks fitting exactly into my own opinion of the weather) she asked, before I had time to even set the wheels of my diplomacy in motion:

"Is Michael on the corner, sor?"

"Yes," I gasped, any further need for diplomacy gone.

"Tell him, sor, if you will kindly, that Tim and Mollie is here, and the baby, and we have supper most ready and is waiting for him."

"You knew, then?" I asked, weakly.

"Shure we all av us see him leave the boat, sor. We niver thought he'd go. And thank you, kindly, sor, for your trouble." Mrs. O'Connor crossed with me to the door, and a minute smile just beginning at the corners of her shrewd, old mouth let me out.

I soon came back to my principal in the affair. "Everything is all right," I said to him, and with the usual presumption of an ambassador, added, "I have fixed it. You needn't worry."

"God bless you, sor," he said as he grasped my hand. "I'll be in again soon to see you, sor. And now I—I think I will be gettin' home."

So we parted, he to his loved domain, I to my club.

I don't know the rest of the story.

IN THE SMALL HOURS

By Brander Matthews

Suddenly he found himself wide awake. He had been lost in sleep, dreamless and spaceless; and now, without warning, his slumber had left him abruptly and for no reason that he could guess. Although he strained his ear he caught the echo of no unusual sound. He listened in vague doubt whether there might not be someone moving about in the apartment; but he could hear nothing except the shrill creak of the brakes of a train on the elevated railroad nearly a block away. Wilson Carpenter was in the habit of observing his own feelings, and he was surprised to note that he did not really expect to detect any physical cause for his unexpected awakening. Sleep had left him as inexplicably as it had swiftly.

He lay there in bed with no restlessness; he heard the regular breathing of his wife, who was sleeping at his side; he saw the faint illumination from the door open into the next room where the baby was also asleep. He looked toward the window, but no ray of light was yet visible; and he guessed it to be about four o'clock in the morning, perhaps a little earlier. In that case he had not been in bed more than two or three hours at the most. He wondered why he had waked thus unexpectedly, since he had had a fatiguing day. Perhaps it was the excitement—there was no doubt that he had had his full share of excitement that evening—and he thrilled again as he recalled the delicious sensation of dull dread yielding at last to the certainty of success.

He had played for a heavy stake and he had won. That was just what he had been doing—gambling with fate, throwing dice with fortune itself. That was what every dramatic author had to do every time he brought out a new play. The production of a piece at an important New York theatre was a venture as aleatory almost as cutting a pack of cards, and the odds were always against the dramatist. And as the young man quietly recalled the events of the evening it seemed to him that the excitement of those who engineer corners in Wall Street must be like his own anxiety while the future of his drama hung in the balance, only theirs could not but be less keen than his, less poignant, for he was playing his game with men and women, while what they touched were but inanimate stocks. His winning depended upon the actors and actresses who had bodied forth his conception. A single lapse of memory or a single slip of the tongue, and the very sceptical audience of the first night might laugh in the wrong place, and so cut themselves off from sympathy; and all his labor would go for nothing, and all his hopes would shrivel before his eyes. Of a truth it is the ordeal by fire that the dramatist must undergo; and there had been moments that long swift evening when he had felt as though he were tied to the stake, and awaiting only the haggard squaw who was to apply the torch.

Now the trial was over and the cause was gained. There had been too many war-pieces of late, so the croakers urged, and the public would not stand another drama of the rebellion. But he had not been greatly discouraged, for in his play the military scenes were but the setting for a story of everyday heroism, of human conflict, of man's conquest of himself. It was the simple strength of this story that had caught the spectators, before the first act was half over, and held them breathless as situation followed situation. At the adroitly spaced comic scenes the audience had gladly relaxed, joyously relieving the emotional strain with welcome laughter. The future of the play was beyond all question; of that the author felt assured, judging not so much by the mere applause as by the tensity of the interest aroused, and by the long-drawn sigh of suspense he had heard so often in the course of the evening. He did not dread the acrid criticisms he knew he should find in some of the morning papers, the writers of which would be bitterer than usual, since the writer of the new play had been a newspaper man himself.

The author of "A Bold Stroke" knew what its success meant to him. It meant a fortune. The play would perhaps run the season out in New York, and this was only the middle of October. With matinées on Wednesday as well as on Saturday, two hundred performances in the city were not impossible. Then next season there would be at least two companies on the road. He ought to make $25,000 by the piece, and perhaps more. The long struggle just to keep his head above water, just to get his daily bread, just to make both ends meet—that was over forever. He could move out of the little Harlem flat to which he had brought his bride two years before; and he could soon get her the house she was longing for somewhere in the country, near New York, where the baby could grow up under the trees.

The success of the play meant more than mere money, so the ambitious young author was thinking as he lay there sleepless. It meant praise, too—and praise was pleasant. It meant recognition—and recognition was better than praise, for it would open other opportunities. The money he made by the play would give him a home, and also leisure for thought and for adequate preparation before he began his next piece. He had done his best in writing the war-drama; he had spared no pains and neglected no possibility of improvement; it was as good as he could make it. But there were other plays he had in mind, making a different appeal, quieter than his military piece, subtler; and these he could now risk writing, since the managers would believe in him after the triumph of "A Bold Stroke."

It would be possible for him hereafter to do what he wanted to do and what he believed himself best fitted to do. It had always seemed to him that New York opened an infinity of vistas to the dramatist. He intended to seize some of this opulent material and to set on the stage the life of the great city as he had seen it during his five years of journalism. He knew that it did a man good to be a reporter for a little while, if he had the courage to cut himself loose before it was too late, before journalism had corroded its stigma. His reporting had taken him into strange places now and again; but it had also taken him into the homes of the plain people who make New York what it is. Society, as Society was described in the Sunday papers, he knew little about, and he cared less; he was not a snob, if he knew himself. But humanity was unfailingly interesting and unendingly instructive; and it was more interesting, and more instructive in the factories and in the tenements than it was in the immense mansions on Lenox Hill.

His work as a reporter had not only sharpened his eyes and broadened his sympathies; it had led him to see things that made him think. He had not inherited his New England conscience for nothing; and his college studies in sociology, that seemed so bare to him as an undergraduate, had taken on a new aspect since he had seen for himself the actual working of the inexorable laws of life. To sneer at the reformers who were endeavoring to make the world better had not been easy for him, even he was straining to achieve the false brilliance of the star-reporter; and now that he was free to say what he thought, he was going to seize the first opportunity to help along the good cause, to show those rich enough to sit in the good seats in the theatre that the boy perched up in the gallery in his shirt-sleeves was also a man and a brother.

The young playwright held that a play ought to be amusing, of course, but he held also that it might give the spectators something to think about after they got home. He was going to utilize his opportunity to show how many failures there are, and how many there must be, if the fittest is to survive, and how hard it is to fail, how bitter, how pitiful! With an effort he refrained from saying out loud enough to waken his wife the quotation that floated back to his memory:

Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

His own success, now it had come, found him wondering at it. He was a modest young fellow at bottom, and he really did not know why he had attained the prize so many were striving to grasp. Probably it was due to the sturdiness of the stock he came from; and he was glad that his ancestors had lived cleanly and had left him a healthy body and a sober mind. His father and his mother had survived long enough to see him through college and started in newspaper work in New York. They had been old-fashioned in their ways, and he was aware that they might not have approved altogether of his choice of a profession, since it would have seemed very strange to them that a son of theirs should earn his living by writing plays. Yet he grieved that they had gone before he was able to repay any of the sacrifices they had made for him; it was the one blot on his good fortune that he could not share it with them in the future.

The future! Yes, the future was in his power at last. As he lay there in the darkness he said to himself that all his ambitions were now almost within his grasp. He was young and well educated; he had proved ability and true courage; he had friends; he had a wife whom he loved and who loved him; his first-born was a son, already almost able to walk. Never before had his prospects appeared so smiling, and never before had he foreseen how his hopes might be fulfilled. And yet, now as he thought of the future, for the first time his pulse did not beat faster. When it was plain to him that he might soon have the most of the things he cared for, he found himself asking whether, after all, he really did care for them so much. He was happy, but just then his happiness was passive. The future might be left to take care of itself all in good time. He was wide awake, yet he had almost the languor of slumber; it surprised him to find himself thus unenergetic and not wanting to be roused to battle, even if the enemy were in sight. He thought of the Nirvana that the oriental philosophers sought to gain as the final good; and he asked himself if perhaps the West had not still something to learn from the East.

Afar, in the silence of the night, he heard the faint clang of an ambulance-bell, and he began to think of the huge city now sunk in slumber all around him. He had nearly four million fellow-citizens; and in an hour or two or three they would awaken and go forth to labor. They would fill the day with struggle, vying one with another, each trying to make his footing secure; and now and again one of them would fall and be crushed to the ground. They would go to bed again at night, wearied out, and they would sleep again, and waken again, and begin the battle again. Most of them would take part in the combat all in vain, since only a few of them could hope to escape from the fight unvanquished. Most of them would fall by the wayside or be trampled under foot on the high road. Most of them would be beaten in the battle and would drop out of the fight, wounded unto death. And for the first time all this ceaseless turmoil and unending warfare seemed to him futile and purposeless.

What was victory but a chance to engage again in the combat? To win to-day was but to have a right to enter the fray again to-morrow. His triumph that evening in the theatre only opened the door for him; and if he was to hold his own he must make ready to wrestle again and again. Each time the effort would be harder than the last. And at the end, what? He would be richer in money, perhaps, but just then money seemed to have no absolute value. He would do good perhaps; but perhaps also he might do harm, for he knew himself not to be infallible. He would not be more contented, he feared, for he had discovered already that although success is less bitter than failure, it rarely brings complete satisfaction. If it were contentment that he really was seeking, why not be satisfied now with what he had won? Why not quit? Why not step out of the ranks and throw down his musket and get out of the way and leave the fighting to those who had a stomach for it?

As he asked himself these questions a gray shroud of melancholy was wrapped about him and all the brightness of youth was quenched in him. Probably this was the inevitable reaction after the strain of his long effort. But none the less it left him looking forward to the end of his life and he saw himself withered and racked with pain; he saw his young wife worn and ugly, perhaps dead—and the ghastly vision of the grave glimpsed before him; he saw his boy dead also, dead in youth; and he saw himself left alone and lonely in his old age, and still struggling, struggling, struggling in vain and forever.

Then he became more morbid even and he felt he was truly alone now, as every one of us must be always. He loved his wife and she loved him, and there was sympathy and understanding between them; but he doubted if he really knew her, for he felt sure she did not really know him. There were thoughts in his heart sometimes that he was glad she did not guess; and no doubt she had emotions and sentiments she did not reveal to him. After all, every human being must be a self-contained and repellent entity; and no two of them can ever feel alike or think alike. He and his wife came of different stocks, with a different training, with a different experience of life, with different ideals; and although they were united in love, they could not but be separate and distinct to all eternity. And as his wife was of another sex from his, so his boy was of another generation, certain to grow up with other tastes and other aspirations.

Wilson Carpenter's marriage had been happy and his boy was all he could wish,—and yet—and yet—Is this all that life can give a man? A little joy for the few who are fortunate, a little pleasure, and then—and then—For the first time he understood how it was that a happy man sometimes commits suicide. And he smiled as he thought that if he wished to choose death at the instant of life when the outsider would suppose his future to be brightest, now was the moment. He knew that there ought to be a revolver in the upper drawer of the table at the side of the bed. He turned gently; and then he lay back again, smiling bitterly at his own foolishness.

A heavy wagon rumbled along down the next street, and he heard also the whistle of a train on the river-front. These signs of returning day did not interest him at that moment when—so it seemed to him, although he was aware this was perfectly unreasonable—when he was at a crisis in his life.

Then there came to him another quatrain of Omar's, a quatrain he had often quoted with joy in its stern vigor and its lofty resolve:

So when the Angel of the darker Drink At last shall find you by the river-brink, And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul Forth to your Lips to quaff—you shall not shrink.

And youth came to his rescue again, and hope rose within him once more; and his interest in the eternal conflict of humanity sprang up as keen as ever.

The mood of craven surrender passed from him as abruptly as it had come, leaving him older, and with a vague impression as though he had had a strange and unnatural experience. He knew again that life is infinitely various, and that it is worth while for its own sake; and he wondered how it was that he had ever doubted it. Even if struggle is the rule of our existence in this world, the fight is its own reward; it brings its own guerdon; it gives a zest to life; and sometimes it even takes the sting from defeat. The ardor of the combat is bracing; and fate is a foeman worthy of every man's steel.

So long as a man does his best always, his pay is secure; and the ultimate success or failure matters little after all, for though he be the sport of circumstance, he is the master of himself. To be alone even—in youth or in age—is not the worst thing that can befall, if a man is not ashamed of the companionship of his own soul. If his spirit is unafraid and ready to brave the bludgeon of chance, then has man a stanch friend in himself, and he can boldly front whatever the future has in store for him. Only a thin-blooded weakling casts down his weapons for nothing and flees around the arena; the least that a man of even ordinary courage can do is to stand to his arms and to fight for his life to the end.

Wilson Carpenter had no idea how long it was that he had been lying awake motionless, staring at the ceiling. There were signs of dawn now, and he heard a cart rattle briskly up to the house next door.

Perhaps his wife heard this also, for she turned and put out one arm caressingly, smiling at him in her sleep. He took her hand in his, gently, and held it. Peace descended upon him and his brain ceased to torment itself with the future or with the present, or with the past.

He was conscious of no effort not to think, nor indeed of any unfulfilled desire on his part. It seemed to him that he was floating lazily on a summer sea, not becalmed but bound for no destination. And before he knew it, he was again asleep.

THE POINT OF VIEW

[Sidenote: A Vain Seeking]

The recent announcements by several men of science that they believe that they have sure proofs of the immortality of the soul may not be so important as they seem to the gentlemen who make them, but at least they are interesting. The proofs that are relied upon are chiefly communications received through mediums, which are said to be so remarkable in the knowledge which they imply, that those who receive them are driven to conclude that they come from the spirits of persons who lately lived on earth. To the average observer spiritualism seems a labyrinth of frauds and mysteries, some deep, some shallow, wherein those who wander grope from delusion to delusion, and arrive nowhere. The cry is not so much that all spiritualism is false, as that whether false or not it is all unprofitable. That is the usual attitude the intelligent public has toward it, and it is based on observation which is wide if not profound. For though we hear of reputations damaged and lives apparently misdirected as a result of spiritualistic experiments, we rarely hear of persons whom spiritualism has helped. The quest seems trivial and disconcerting; not useful.