Part 10

The large, bony person called Jake, slouch-hatted and rough-bearded, brought the child in time, and departed, muttering embarrassment. She stood among the Annuals and old magazines with a silver dollar from Jake clasped in each hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in her tiny pocket, probably representing young Barria's estate and the end of Jake's duties as executor. She might have been two or three years old. That was not a matter of interest to Mr. Barria, in whose conception the soul of every creature was, in a way, more ancient than the hills.

She seemed to believe in his good intentions and came to him gravely. She did not remember any mother, and for her own name it had apparently been “chicken” when her father had wanted her, and “scat” when he did not. Mr. Barria envied a mind so untrammelled with memories, and named her Jhana, which means a state of mystical meditation, of fruitful tranquillity, out of which are said to come six kinds of supernatural wisdom and ten powers. The name sometimes appeared to him written Dhyana, when his meditations ran in Sanskrit instead of Pali. Cripple Street called her Janey, and avoided the question with a wisdom of its own. It had grown used to Mr. Barria. Scholars came from near-by universities to consult him, and letters from distant countries to Herr, Monsieur, or Signor Doctor Julian Barria, but Cripple Street, if it knew of the matter, had no stated theory to explain it and was little curious. His hair and beard grew white and prophetic, his skin more transparent. A second decade and half a third glided by, and Janey and Tommy Durdo sat hand in hand among the Annuals.

“You must ask him, Tommy,” Janey insisted, “because lovers always ask parents.”

“An' the parents is horty and they runs away hossback. Say, Janey, if his whiskers gets horty, I 'll faint. Say, Janey, you got to go 'n ask my ma if you can have me.”

“Would she be haughty?”

Janey always bubbled with pleasure, like a meadow spring, when Tommy “got on a string,” as he called it, fell to jesting circumstantially. “You bet. She'd trun you down. An' yet she's married second time, she has,” he went on, thoughtfully, “an' she didn't ask my consent, not either time. I would n't a given it the first, if she had, 'cause dad was no good. I'd a been horty. I'd a told her he wa'n't worthy to come into any family where I was comin', which he wa'n't.”

“Oh, Tommy!”

“Yep. Dad was more nuisance'n mosquitoes.”

Mr. Barria came out of the distant retreat of his meditation slowly, and looked up. It did not need all the subtle instinct of a pundit to read the meaning of the two standing hand in hand before him.

Tommy looked and felt as one asking favors of a spectre, and Mr. Barria had fallen into a silent habit of understanding people.

“Little Jhana iss a woman so soon?” he said softly. “She asks of her birthright.”

He rose and looked quietly, steadily at Tommy, who felt himself growing smaller inside, till his shoes seemed enormous, even his scalp loose and his skull empty.

“Mr.--”

“It's Tommy Durdo,” said Janey.

“You will always remember to be a little kinder than seems necessary, Mr. Durdo? It iss a good rule and very old.”

“He didn't ask whether I was a burglar or a lunatic by profesh,” grumbled Tommy, later. “Ain't a reasonable interest. He might a asked which.”

“Never mind,” said Janey. “I'll tell that.”

There were four rooms over the shop, where the three lived in great peace. Tommy never made out whether Mr. Barria thought him a burglar or a lunatic. As regards Janey he felt more like a burglar, as regards Mr. Barria more like a lunatic. He dodged him reverentially. Only at the station, where his duties kept him for the most part, did he feel like a natural person and a fireman. He confided in Hamp Sharkey, and brought him to the shop and the little up-stairs sitting-room for the purpose of illustration. Hamp's feelings resembled Tommy's. They fell into naïve sympathy. Hamp admired Tommy for his cleverness, his limber tongue, the reckless daring of his daily contact with Mr. Barria and Janey, two mysteries, differing but both remote. She was not like the shop-girls on Main Street. Hamp would carry away the memory of her shining eyes lifted to Tommy's irregular, somewhat impish face, and growl secretly over his mental bewilderment. Tommy admired Hamp for his height and breadth and dull good-nature.

On an afternoon in the early summer the fire-bells rang call after call. Engine No. 4 went second. The freight houses by the harbor were burning, and the tall furniture factory that backed them. About dusk the north wall of the factory fell into the street with a roar and rattle of flying bricks.

The book-shop was dark in the centre. The two lamps in the front windows were lit, and Mr. Barria's lamp in his hidden corner.

It came upon Mr. Barria in his absorption that there had been a moment before the sound of the trampling of heavy feet in the front of the shop, and a sudden cry. The trampling continued and increased. He came forward with his lamp. Men were crowding up the narrow stairs that began in the opposite corner. One of them swung a lantern overhead.

“'Twere a brick,” said some one in the dark centre of the shop. “Took him over the ear. Dented him in like a plug hat.”

“Where's some water?”

“Knocked her over quicker 'n the brick.”

“Sh! What's that?”

“It's the old man.”

The light of the lamp, lifted in Mr. Barria's hand, fell over his head with its flowing white hair, rabbinical beard, and spectral face. Three-men, one of them a policeman, drew back to one side of the shop, looking startled and feebly embarrassed. On the other side the window lamp shone on Janey, where she lay fallen among the old Annuals.

He lifted her head and muttered:

“Jhana, Jhana.”

The three men slipped through the door; those above came down; a doctor bustled in, satchel in hand, and after him several women; Janey was carried up; the shop was empty, except for Mr. Barria sitting by his lamp and muttering softly.

“She could not find it, the peace that is about, and her little happiness it would not stay beside her.”

Presently the doctor spoke over him.

“I think Mrs. Durdo should be taken to the hospital. St. James, you know. It's not far.”

“You think--”

“She is approaching confinement, and the shock, you know.”

“Whatever iss desirable, Herr Doctor. There iss no need, sir, of the economy in respect to--to whatever iss desirable.”

“Quite right, Mr. Barria. Quite right.”

This was in June. Late in the fall Janey came back from St. James's Hospital, pale, drooping, and alone.

She sat in a black dress by the front window and kept the accounts as before, gazed through the dim panes at Cripple Street, which was made by nature to be dull, but read the Annuals no more, which was perhaps a pity.

Mr. Barria from the rear of the shop watched Janey, sitting among the Annuals and looking out on Cripple Street. He had not entered on the Path himself as a cure for sorrow and suffering; he had come to it from another direction. Yet the first purpose of its system had been the solution of these. It was written:

“Sorrow and suffering will be overcome when this thirst for life is quenched, which makes for continuance, and that desire of separateness and hunger after selfhood are put aside. They will fall away as drops from a lotus leaf.”

And Janey was a type of them as they walk abroad. The measure of her trouble was the measure of the yearning and attainment that had been hers.

“Desire not more then of yearning or attainment, of sight or touch, of life in variety or abundance, but desire none at all, and turning within, the dwelling you build there dwell in it, until both desire and separateness shall in turn disappear.”

He went forward and drew a chair beside her.

“Little Jhana,” he said, “there wass once a woman and young who brought her dead child to the wisest of men, and asked so of him, 'Do you know one medicine that will be good for this child?' It was the custom then for the patients or their friends to provide the herbs which the doctors require, so that when she asked what herbs he would wish, and he answered, 'Mustard-seed,' she promised with haste to bring it, for it wass a common herb. 'And it must come,' he said, 'only from some house where no child, no hussband, no wife, no parent, no friend hass died.' Then she went in great hope, carrying the dead child; but everywhere they said, 'I have lost,' and again, 'We have lost,' and one said, 'What iss this you say; the living are few but the dead are many.' She found so no house in that place from which she might take the mustard-seed. Therefore she buried the child, and came, and she said, 'I have not found it; they tell me the living are few and the dead many.' And he showed her how that nothing endured at all, but changed and passed into something else, and each wass but a changing part of a changing whole, and how, if one thought more of the whole, one so ceased to be troubled much of the parts, and sorrow would fade away quietly.” Janey stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. There was a certain comfort always in Mr. Barria himself, however oddly he might talk. She dropped her head on his knee and whispered:

“I don't know about all that. I want Tommy and the baby.”

He touched her hair with thin fingers gently. “Then I wonder, little Jhana,” he said, looking to the magazines and Annuals, “if you have found among these one, a poet of the English, who calls it to be better to love and lose than not to love.”

“I don't know. I don't remember.”

He smoothed her hair again and went away. The winter passed and the spring came with a scatter of sunshine and little showers. Janey still sat by the window. If she had been able to generalize, to see that Tommy and the baby represented hunger after life, and that this was the root of sorrow, it would perhaps have still seemed to her that love and loss were the better choice. Perhaps not. But she could not generalize. Her thoughts were instincts, fancies, and little shining points of belief. She could not see herself in any figure of speech; that she was one of a multitude of discordant notes in the universe, whose business it was to tune themselves to the key of a certain large music and disappear in its harmony, where alone was constant happiness. It did not seem to mention Tommy or the baby, and if not there was no point in it.

Spring slipped away. Cripple Street was filled to the brim with bland summer. Janey went every day to the cemetery with flowers. In September she began to come back with flowers in her belt.

It was a rainy, dismal day in October. Mr. Barria had a remote sense of hearing Janey's laugh. It seemed to him there was a strange presence in the shop. He peered out, and saw Hamp Sharkey outlined against the window, large, slow-moving, and calm, a man who seemed to avoid all troubles of the flesh by virtue of having enough flesh, and solid bone beneath. Janey looked up at him and laughed. Around her were the old Annuals, containing the loves of Edwards and Eleanors.

Mr. Barria leaned back in his chair. Some untraced suggestion led him to counting his years idly. He made them out to be nearly eighty. They seemed suddenly to rest on his shoulders like a weight. If one considered them at all, they were heavy, the years. And for this human life, it was only intelligible in the abstract. Of its details there were too many.

The shop grew duskier, and the rain beat on the windows with an incessant pattering, a multitude of tiny details, sounding accordingly as one might listen. For either it would seem a cheerful, busy sound of the kindly water, humble and precious and clean, needful in households, pleasant in the fulness of rivers, comfortable, common, familiar; or it was the low sigh of the driven rain, the melancholy iteration and murmur of water circling like everything else its wheel of change, earth and ocean and sky, earth and ocean and sky, and weary to go back to its vague, elemental vapor, as before the worlds were shaped.

Mr. Barria turned back to his volume, bound in gray paper with a German imprint. To his ears the sound of the two voices talking became as abstract as the rain. Hamp Sharkey's laugh was like the lowing of a contented ox, and Janey's, as of old, like the ripple of a brook in a meadow.

TOBIN'S MONUMENT

|I was a student then and lived on the second floor of a brick dormitory with foot-worn stones and sagging casements. The windows looked across one end of the campus on ivy-covered walls of other buildings, on a bronze statue whose head was bent to indicate that the person represented had taken life seriously in his day. Near at hand was a street of unacademic noises, horse-cars, shops, German bands, newsboys, people who bought and sold without higher mathematics and seldom mentioned Horatius Flaccus.

But there were drifts and eddies of the street that would turn aside and enter the dormitories commercially. Tobin was one of these. He came to my door by preference, because of the large crack in the panel. For, if one entered the dormitory commercially and knocked at the doors, one never knew--it might be Horatius Flaccus, a volume of size and weight. But with a crack in the panel one could stand outside at ease and dignity, looking through it, and crying, “_M'las ca-andy!_ Peanuts!” Then, if anything arrived, without doubt it arrived. A man might throw what he chose at his own door.

He was thin in the legs and shoulders, but round of face and marked there with strange designs that were partly a native complexion; but, if one is a candy boy, in constant company with newsboys, shiners, persons who carry no such merchandise but are apt to wish for it violently, one's complexion of course varies from day to day.

“Say, but I hit _him!_ He bled on his clo's.” Tobin sometimes made this comment, “him” meaning different persons. There was a vein of fresh romance in him. Did not Sir Balin, or his like, smite Sir Lanceor, so that the blood flowed over his hauberk, and afterward speak of it with enthusiasm?

It was a cold December day in the year 188-, when the snow whirled without rest from morning chapel till the end of the day was signified by the first splutter of gas-jets. Among the hills where I was born that office was left to the sunsets and twilights, who had a manner of doing it, a certain broad nobility, a courtesy and grace. “One of God's days is over. This is our sister, the night.” The gas-jets were fretful, coquettish, affected. “It is an outrage! One is simply turned on and turned off!” Horatius Flaccus was social and intimate with me that day. “_Exegi monumentum_,” he remarked. “You will find it not easy to forget me.”

Monuments! At the University we lived among commemorative buildings; many a silent dusty room was dim with accumulation of thought; and there men labored for what but to make a name?

The statue outside represented one who took life seriously in his day, now with the whirling snow about it, the gas-jet in front snapping petulantly. “One is simply turned on and turned off!”

“_Exegi monumentum_,” continued Horatius Flac-cus. “This is my work, and it is good. I shall not all die, _non omnis moriar_.” It seemed natural to feel so. But how honorably the sunsets and twilights used to go their ways among the hills, contented and leaving not a wrack behind.

It was a better attitude and conduct, that serene security of clouds in their absolute death. “_Non omnis moriar_” was not only a boast, but a complaint and a protest.

Still, as to monuments, one would rather be memorialized by one's own work than by the words of other men, or the indifferent labor of their chisels.

“_M'las ca-andy!_”

“Come in, Tobin!”

He opened the door and said, tentatively, “Peanuts.”

He always spoke in a more confident tone of the candy than of the peanuts. There was no good reason for his confidence in either.

“Tobin,” I said, “you don't want a monument?”

He kicked his feet together and murmured again, “Peanuts.”

His shoes were cracked at the sides. The cracks were full of snow.

The remark seemed to imply that he did not expect a monument, having no confidence in his peanuts. As a rule they were soggy and half-baked.

Tobin's life, I thought, was too full of the flux of things; candy melted, peanuts decayed, complexion changed from day to day, his private wars were but momentary matters. I understood him to have no artificial desires. Death would be too simple an affair for comment. He would think of no comment to make. Sunsets and twilights went out in silence; Tobin's half of humanity nearly as dumb. It was the other half that was fussy on the subject.

“Your feet are wet, Tobin. Warm them. Your shoes are no good.”

Tobin picked the easiest chair with good judgment, and balanced his feet over the coals of the open stove, making no comment.

“I won't buy your peanuts. They're sloppy. I might buy you another pair of shoes. What do you think?”

He looked at me, at the shoes, at the wet basket on his knees, but nothing elaborate seemed to occur to him. He said:

“A'right.” He had great mental directness. I had reached that point in the progress of young philosophy where the avoidance of fussiness takes the character of a broad doctrine: a certain Doric attitude was desired. Tobin seemed to me to have that attitude.

“If I give you the money, will you buy shoes or cigarettes?”

“Shoes.”

“Here, then. Got anything to say?”

He put the bill into his pocket, and said:

“Yep, I'll buy 'em.”

His attitude was better than mine. The common wish to be thanked was pure fussiness.

“Well, look here. You bring me back the old ones.”

Even that did not disturb him. The Doric attitude never questions other men's indifferent whims.

“A'right.”

I heard him presently on the lower floor, crying, “_M'las ca-andy!_ Peanuts.”

“I shall be spoken of,” continued Horatius Flaccus, calmly, “by that wild southern river, the Aufidus, and in many other places. I shall be called a pioneer in my own line, _princeps Æolium carmen deduxisse_.”

The night was closing down. The gas-light flickered on the half-hidden face of the statue, so that its grave dignity seemed changed to a shifty, mocking smile.

I heard no more of Tobin for a month, and probably did not think of him. There were Christmas holidays about, and that week which is called of the Promenade, when one opens Horatius Flaccus only to wonder what might have been the color of Lydia's hair, and to introduce comparisons that are unfair to Lydia.

It was late in January. Some one came and thumped on the cracked panel. It was not Tobin, but a stout woman carrying Tobin's basket, who said in an expressionless voice:

“Oi! Them shoes.”

“What?”

“You give 'im some shoes.”

“Tobin. That's so.”

“I'm Missus Tobin.”

She was dull-looking, round-eyed, gray-haired. She fumbled in the basket, dropped something in wet paper on a chair, and seemed placidly preparing to say more. It seemed to me that she had much of Tobin's mental directness, the Doric attitude, the neglect of comment. I asked: “How's Tobin?”

“Oi! He's dead.”

“I am very sorry, Mrs. Tobin. May I--”

“Oi! Funeral's this afternoon. He could'n' be round. He was sick. Five weeks three days.”

She went out and down the stair, bumping back and forth between the wall and the banister.

On the misty afternoon of that day I stood on that corner where more than elsewhere the city and the University meet; where hackmen and newsboys congregate; where a gray brick hotel looks askance at the pillared and vaulted entry of a recitation hall. The front of that hall is a vainglorious thing. Those who understand, looking dimly with halfshut eyes, may see it change to a mist, and in the mist appear a worn fence, a grassless, trodden space, and four tall trees.

The steps of the hall were deserted, except for newsboys playing tag among the pillars. I asked one if he knew where Tobin lived.

“He's havin' a funeral,” he said.

“Where?”

“10 Clark Street.”

“Did you know him?”

The others had gathered around. One of them said:

“Tobin licked him.”

The first seemed to think more than ordinary justice should be done a person with a funeral, and admitted that Tobin had licked him.

No. 10 Clark Street was a door between a clothing shop and a livery stable. The stairway led up into darkness. On the third landing a door stood open, showing a low room. A painted coffin rested on two chairs. Three or four women sat about with their hands on their knees. One of them was Mrs. Tobin.

“Funeral's over,” she said, placidly.

The clergyman from the mission had come and gone. They were waiting for the city undertaker. But they seemed glad of an interruption and looked at me with silent interest.

“I want to ask you to tell me something about him, Mrs. Tobin.”

Mrs. Tobin reflected. “There ain't nothin'.”

“He never ate no candy,” said one of the women, after a pause.

Mrs. Tobin sat stolidly. Two large tears appeared at length and rolled slowly down.

“It made him dreadful sick when he was little. That's why.”

The third woman nodded thoughtfully.

“He said folks was fools to eat candy. It was his stomach.”

“Oi!” said Mrs. Tobin.

I went no nearer the coffin than to see the common grayish pallor of the face, and went home in the misty dusk.

The forgotten wet bundle had fallen to the floor and become undone.

By the cracks in the sides, the down-trodden heels, the marks of keen experience, they were Tobin's old shoes, round-toed, leather-thonged, stoical, severe.

Mrs. Tobin had not commented. She had brought them merely, Tobin having stated that they were mine.

They remained with me six months, and were known to most men, who came to idle or labor, as “Tobin's Monument.” They stood on a book-shelf, with other monuments thought to be _aere perennius_, more enduring than brass, and disappeared at the end of the year, when the janitor reigned supreme. There seemed to be some far-off and final idea in the title, some thesis which never got itself rightly stated. Horatius Flaccus was kept on the shelf beside them in the notion that the statement should somehow be worked out between them. And there was no definite result; but I thought he grew more diffident with that companionship.

“_Exegi monumentum_. I suppose there is no doubt about that,” he would remark. “_Ære perennius_. It seems a trifle pushing, so to trespass on the attention of posterity. I would rather talk of my Sabine farm.”

THE CONCLUSION BY THE WAYFARERS

All honest things in the world we greet

With welcome fair and free;

A little love by the way is sweet,

A friend, or two, or three;

Of the sun and moon and stars are glad,

Of the waters of river and sea;

We thank thee, Lord, for the years we've had,

For the years that yet shall be.

These are our brothers, the winds of the airs;

These are our sisters, the flowers.

Be near us at evening and hear our.prayers.,

O God, in the late gray hours.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Delectable Mountains, by Arthur Colton