Chapter 14

"True that policemen take money in exchange for protection? True that they practise blackmail and extortion? Of course it's true. Whenever a big temptation appears loose in a city half the people who get a look at it trip and fall. Oh, I'd like to reform this city, Miss Barbara--and this country. I'd like to be dictator for six months."

"Who wouldn't?" said Barbara. "But what would you do? Where would you begin?"

"I should be drastic at first," said the legless man, "and kind later. I'd begin," he went on, his eyes smiling, "with a general massacre of incompetents--old men with too little money, young men with too much--old maids, aliens, incurables, the races that are too clever to work, the races that are too stupid, habitual drunkards, spreaders of disease, the women who abolished the canteen, the women who wear aigrettes. After that I should destroy all possibilities of graft."

"How?" asked Barbara.

"Why," said he, "the simplest way in the world--legalize the business that now pays for protection. There would be no more of them than there are now, and they could be regulated and kept to confined limits of cities. Don't blame the police for graft: blame all who believe that human nature can be abolished by law. But," and this time his whole face smiled, "I shall never be dictator. The thing to do is to start a new country, and make no mistakes."

And he proceeded, sometimes seriously but for the most part whimsically, to outline his model republic, while Barbara worked and listened, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with a sense of being uplifted and thrilled by the man's plausible originality. Since she had but the vaguest recollection of history, and none whatever of economics, it was easy for the man to play the constructive statesman. Nor were his schemes always foolish and illogical, since the book of human nature had been always in his library, and of all its volumes had been most often read.

"Ah!" said the legless man at last, "if I were younger, and whole!"

Whenever he referred to his maimed condition Barbara, to whom it was no longer physically shocking, was uncomfortable and distressed, changing the subject as swiftly as might be. But now, stopping her work short off, her hands hanging at her sides, she began to speak of the matter.

"I suppose," she said, "it's almost life and death to you--sometimes, that you'd give almost anything, take any chance to be--the way you were meant to be. My father believes that some day people can have anything that they've lost restored--a hand or an arm. He's made experiments along those lines ever since he made his mistake with you, and it all works out beautifully with monkeys and dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. Just now he is in Colorado to try it on a man. There's a man out there in jail for life, who has a brother that lost his right hand in some machinery. The well brother has offered to let father cut off his hand, and graft it on the maimed brother's wrist. I've just had a letter--it's been done. He thinks it's all right, but he can't be sure yet. Please don't say anything about it because--well, because people are still queer about these things. In the old days people burned the best doctors, and now they want to lynch vivisectors and almost anybody who's really trying to make health more or less contagious."

"Do you believe I could be made whole?" exclaimed Blizzard, his eyes glittering as with a sudden hope. "My God! Even if they weren't much use to me, I'd give my soul to look like a real man--my soul! Do you know what I'd rather do than anything in this whole world--just once? I'd rather draw myself to my full height--just once--than be Napoleon Bonaparte. If all the treasure in this city were mine to give, I'd give it to walk the length of a city block on my own feet, looking down at the people instead of always up--always up--until the leverage of your eyes twists the back of your brain in everlasting torment."

"When my father comes back," said Barbara quietly, "talk to him. And if only it can be done--why, you'll forgive us, won't you, for all the suffering you've had and everything?"

"Yes, yes," he said quickly. "But it isn't true--it isn't possible. It won't work. It's against experience."

"It is _possible_," said Barbara gently. "That's all I know. And even if--even if it can't be done yet awhile, I thought it would comfort you to think that some day--almost surely--"

"You are always thinking of my comfort," he cried. "In this pit that we call life, you are an angel serene, blessed and blessing. Oh," he cried, "what would you say if I stood before you on my own feet, and told you--told you--" He broke off short and hung his head.

Barbara bit her lips and lifted her hands with a weary gesture to resume work. But the bust of Blizzard was a live thing, and seeing anew the strength and hellish beauty of it, suddenly and as if with the eyes of a stranger, her heart seemed to leap into her throat, her whole body relaxed once more, and she said in a small, surprised voice:

"Why, it's finished!"

XXXII

Upon Blizzard, who had been looking forward to many mornings during which he should unobtrusively advance his cause, this quiet statement fell with disturbing force. It meant that his opportunities for intimate talks had come to a sudden and most unprepared-for end. He knew that Barbara was tired out with the steady grind of creation, and that she had been going through an equally steady grind of discouragement and uncertainty. He believed that she would make no delay in carrying her triumph and her trouble out of the heat-ridden city, to cool places, to her own people. He believed, not that she would forget him, but that, free from his influence, she would see with equal vision how wide the gulf between them really was.

He had made a slip in his calculation. He had been spreading his arts thinly, you may say, to cover what he supposed was to have been a much longer period of time. And he should have come sooner and with all his strength to the point. There had been moments of supreme discouragement, when, if there was to be a miracle in his life, he should have spoken. There were to be no more of those golden moments. She would close the studio, go away, and return by way of exercise and fresh air to a sane and normal state of mind--a state of mind in which such a physical and moral cripple as himself could have no place except among the curiosities.

She stood looking steadily at the head which had come to life under her hands. Her eyelids drooped heavily. She looked almost as if she was falling asleep.

Blizzard watched her as a cat watches a mouse, not knowing what was best for him to dare. Now he was for pleading his cause with all the passion that inspired it; now for boldly claiming her as the expiation for her father's fault; and now he was for passing over all preliminaries and felling her with a blow of his fist.

And then she suddenly turned to him, and smiled like a very happy and very tired child. "You've been very good to me," she said, "and so patient! I don't know quite how to thank you. I owe you such a lot."

"Do you?" he said, his hard eyes softening and seeking hers.

She nodded slowly. "Such a lot. And there's no way of paying, or making things up to you, is there?"

"Only one," he said.

There was quite a long silence; his eyes, flames in them, held hers, which were troubled and childlike, and imbued the two words that he had spoken with an unmistakable intelligence.

"Don't let me go utterly," he said, "and slip back into the pit. You have finished the bust. If you wished you could finish the man: put him back among the good angels.... If your father died owing money, you couldn't rest until you had paid his debts.... I could be anything you wished. And I could give you anything that you wanted in this world. There is nothing I couldn't put over--with you at my side, wishing the good deed done, the great deed--or--"

He began to tremble with the passion that was in his voice, slipped from his chair, and began to move slowly toward her with outstretched arms, upon his stumps of legs.

It was no mirth or any sense of the ridiculous that moved Barbara, but fear, disgust, and horror. She backed away from him, laughing hysterically. But he, whose self-consciousness in her sight bordered upon mania, mistook the cause of her laughter, so that a kind of hell-born fury shook him, and he rushed at her, his mouth giving out horrible and inarticulate sounds. And in those lightning moments she could move neither hand nor foot; nor could she cry for help. And yet she realized, as in some nightmare, that if once those horrible hairy hands closed upon her she was lost utterly. And in that same clear flash of reason she realized that for whatever might befall she had herself alone to blame. She had touched pitch, and played with fire--and all that men might some day call her great.

The speed for which the fury of the legless man called was more than the stumps of his legs could furnish. He was like a man, thigh-deep in water, who attempts to run at top speed. Yet his hands were within inches of her dress, when daring and nerve at last thrilled through Barbara, and returned her muscles into the keeping of her mind. She darted backward and to one side. In that instant the legless man overreached himself and fell heavily. Here seemed an inestimable advantage for Barbara, and yet the great body, shaken with curses and already rising to its stumps, was between her and the door.

XXXIII

For once the legless man had been deserted by the power of cool reasoning. And his fury was of a kind that could not wait for satisfaction. He was more like a mad dog than a man. And this, although it added to the horror of Barbara's situation, proved her salvation.

Occupying a point from which he could head off her escape by either of the studio doors, he abandoned this, and attempted to match the stumps of his legs against her swift young feet. And must have overcome the disparity, but that in the lightning instinct of self-preservation she overturned a table between them, and during the moments thus gained dashed into her dressing-room and locked the door behind her.

Blizzard vented his rage upon the locked door, splintering its panels with bleeding fists; but in the meanwhile his quarry had escaped him, and was already in the street walking swiftly toward Washington Square. He leaned at last from a window, and saw her going. And in his heart shame gradually took the place of fury. Why, when she laughed at him, had he not been able to dissemble his emotions for a few seconds? to mask his dreadfulness? For then, surely, he must have got her in his power. He should have hung his head when she laughed, begged her to forgive him for daring to lift his thoughts to her; and begged her as a token of forgiveness to shake hands with him. Her hand once clasped in his--

Well, he had made a fool of himself. Perhaps he had frightened her utterly beyond the reach even of his long arm. Fear would carry her out of the city, out of the State, out of the country, perhaps. To prevent the least of these contingencies he must act swiftly and with daring wisdom.

He passed into the studio, glanced upward at the bust of himself, stopped, and looked about for something heavy with which to destroy it. Later he would tell her that he had done so, and let that knowledge be the beginning of her torment.

But the thing that he planned to destroy looked him in the eye, smiling. The thing smiled in the full knowledge of good and evil, the fact that it had chosen evil, the fact that it was lost forever. It was no contagious smile, but a smile aloof and dreadful. So a man, impaled, may smile, when agony has passed beyond the usual human passions--and even so the legless man smiled upward at the smiling bust of himself. And he found that he could not destroy the bust: for the act would have about it too ominous a flavor of self-destruction.

He caught up his crutches, his little hand-organ, and hurried from the studio. By now Barbara must be well on her way uptown. He entered a public telephone station and gave the number of her house. He asked to speak with Miss Marion O'Brien, and when after an interval he heard the voice of Barbara's maid in his ear, he said: "She's been frightened. Let me know what she's going to do as soon as you know. Don't use the house 'phone. Slip out to a pay station. I must know when she's going and where, and if she says for how long." He hung up the receiver, and hurried off.

An hour later Barbara's maid telephoned him the required news, but all of it that mattered was that Barbara was not going out of town until the next day. There was a whole afternoon and night in which to act.

The legless man sank at once into deep and swift thought. And ten minutes later he had abandoned all idea of kidnapping Barbara for the present. Certain dangers of so doing seemed insurmountable. He must possess his soul in patience, and in the meanwhile discount, if possible, the fright that he had given her. To this end he wrote the following letter:

"It wasn't your fault that I lifted my eyes to you, and hoped that you would lower yours to me. But now I know what a fool I have been. I forgive you for laughing at me, though at the time it made me mad like a dog, and I only wanted to hurt the woman I love. I won't trouble you any more, ever. Indeed I am too ashamed and humbled ever to wish to see you again. Only please don't hate me. If I had any good sides, please remember them. Some time you will hear of me again; but never again from me. I have work to do, but I have given my time to dreaming.

"When your father comes back will you ask him to let me know if he will see me? You thought he could do something for me--or hold out some hope. I would risk my life itself to be whole, even if I could never be very active. And science is so wonderful; and I know your father would like to help me if he could.

"If you don't think I am being punished for threatening you, and going crazy, you don't know anything about the unhappiest beast in this world. But it is terrible for a cripple when the one person he looks up to laughs at him. I have a thick skin; but that burnt through it like acid."

The messenger who carried the letter to Barbara brought him her answer:

"I will give your message to my father. You are quite wrong about the laughing. I didn't laugh at you or anything about you. I laughed because I was nervous and frightened. But it can't matter much one way or the other. I am sorry that you have been hurt twice by my family. But the second hurt is not our fault. And I do not see that there is anything to be done about it. As for the first, my father would end his days in peace if he could make you whole. I shall hope to hear nothing but good of you in the future."

The shame and remorse to which Blizzard pretended, Barbara actually felt. All her friendships with men had been pursued by disasters of some sort or other. But her most disastrous experiment in friendship had been with Blizzard. She had been bluntly told by truth-speaking persons that he was not a fit acquaintance for her. His own face had warned her. But she had persisted in meeting him without precautions, in treating him like an equal, in overcoming her natural and just repugnance to him, and in calling him her friend. It was humiliating for her to realize and acknowledge that she had made a fool of herself. It was worse to remember the look in his face, during those last awful moments in the studio. Even if the bust she had made of him was a great work of art, she had paid too high for the privilege of making it.

XXXIV

Dr. Ferris was delighted to learn that Barbara had left town. Her meetings with Blizzard had been horribly on his mind and conscience. He had dreaded some vague calamity--some intangible darkening of his darling's soul.

A few days in the country had worked wonders for her. Her skin had browned a little, and her cheeks were crimson. But dearer to the paternal heart than these evidences of good health was the fact that she seemed unusually glad to see him. She seemed to him to have lost a world of independence and self-reliance, to be inclined to accept his judgments without dispute. She seemed more womanly and more daughterly, more normal and more beautiful.

For a man with a heavy weight always upon his conscience, the excellent surgeon found himself wonderfully at peace with the world and its institutions. There was no doubt that the hand which he had come from grafting was going to live and be of some use to its new owner. His mail was heavy with approbation. And it seemed to him that the path which he had discovered had no ending.

"In a hundred years, Barbara," he said, "it will be possible to replace anything that the body has lost, or that has become diseased and useless or a menace--not the heart, perhaps, nor the brain--but anything else. What I have done clumsily others will do to perfection."

"What are the chances for Blizzard?"

"Even," said the surgeon. "They would be more favorable if he had not lost his legs so long ago. At the worst the experiment wouldn't kill him. He would merely have undergone a useless operation. At the best he would be able to walk, run perhaps, and look like a whole man. If anything is to be done for him, the time has come. He has only to tell me to go ahead."

"I think he'll do that," said Barbara. "But there's one thing I don't understand," and she smiled; "who is to supply the spare legs?"

"That's the least of all the difficulties," said her father, "now that ways of keeping tissues alive have been discovered and proved. In time there will be storages from which any part of the human body may be obtained on short notice and in perfect condition for grafting. Just now the idea is horrible to ignorant people, but the faith will spread. Only wait till we have made a few old people young--for that will come, too, with the new surgery."

"You will be glad," said Barbara, "to hear that I have severed friendly relations with Mr. Blizzard. He behaved in the end pretty much as you all feared he would."

And she told her father, briefly, and somewhat shamefacedly, all that had happened in the studio.

"He thought I was laughing at him," she said. "Of course I wasn't. And he came at me. Do you remember when poor old Rose went mad, and tried to get at us through the bars of the kennel? Blizzard looked like that--like a mad dog." She shuddered.

The surgeon's high spirits were dashed as with cold water.

"He ought not to be helped," said Barbara; "he ought to be shot, as Rose was."

But Dr. Ferris shook his head gravely. "If he is that sort of a man," he said, "who made him so? Who took the joy of life from him? Barbara, my dear, there is nothing that man could do that I couldn't forgive."

"And I think that your conscience is sick," said Barbara. "I used to think as you think. But if you had seen his face that day!... The one great mistake you have made has ruined not his life, but yours. If he had had the right stuff in him, calamity would not have broken him! It would have _made_ him. Give him a new pair of legs, if you can; and forget about him, as I shall. When you first told me about him, I thought we owed him anything he chose to ask. At one time I thought that if he wished it, it would be right for me to marry him."

"Barbara!"

"Yes, I did--I thought it strongly. Shows what a fool a girl who's naturally foolish can make of herself! Why, father, what if he has suffered through your mistake? That mistake turned your thoughts to the new surgery--and for the one miserable man that you have hurt you will have given the wonder of hope to the whole of mankind."

She slid her hand under her father's arm.

"Let's potter 'round the gardens," she said, "and forget our troubles. It's bully to have you back. There's not much doing in the floral line. The summer sun in Westchester doesn't vary from year to year. But there are lots of green things that smell good, and the asters and dahlias are making the most extraordinary promises of what they are going to do by and by."

They passed out of the house and by marble steps into the first and most formal of their many gardens, and so down through the other gardens, terrace below terrace, to the lake.

The water was so still as to suggest a solid rather than a liquid; to the west shadowy mountains of cloud charged with thunder swelled toward the zenith. The long midsummer drought was coming to an end, and all birds and insects were silent, as if tired of complaining. Across the lake one maple, turned prematurely scarlet, brought out the soft greens of the woods with an astounding accent. Directly in front of this flaming tree, a snow-white heron stood motionless upon a gray rock.

To Barbara it seemed on that day that "Clovelly" was the loveliest place in all the world, and her father, who had fashioned it out of rough farm lands, one of the world's most charming artists. "Why paint with oils, when you can draw with trees and flowers and grass and water?" she asked herself.

"In the time it took me to do Blizzard's bust," she said, "I could have planted millions of flowers and seen them bloom."

"At least," said her father, "you can finish a bust, but a garden that is finished isn't a garden. What are you going to do with it?"

"The bust? Why, sometimes I think I'll just leave it in the studio, and let it survive or perish. Sometimes I want to take a hammer and smash it to pieces."

"It didn't come out as well as you hoped?"

"Of course not. Does anything ever? But it's the best that I can do. And I shall never do anything better."

"Nonsense."

"I shall never even try. I want to recover all the things I've thrown away, and put them back in my head and heart where they belong, and just live."

"Well," said her father, smiling, "if you feel that way, why that's a good way to feel. But I'm afraid art is stronger in you than you think. Just now you're tired and disillusionized. In a month you'll be making sketches for some monumental opus."

"If I do," said Barbara, "it will be executed here at Clovelly. I never want to leave Clovelly. I feel safe here, safe from myself and other people. I think," and she smiled whimsically, "that I should almost like to settle down and make you a good daughter."

"A good daughter," said the surgeon, "marries; and her father builds a beautiful house for her, just over the hill from his own--remember the little valley where we found all the fringed gentian one year?--and the shortest cut between the two houses is worn bare and packed hard by the feet of grandchildren. Good Lord, my dear, what's the good of art, what's the good of science? I would rather have watched you grow up than have made the Winged Victory, or discovered the circulation of the blood. Come now? Barbs, tell me, who's the young man?"

For the first time in her life she told him of the wild impulsiveness and the shocking brevity of her affections for various members of his sex; naming no names she explained to him with much self-abasement (and a little amusement) that she was no good, "A nice wife I'd make!" she concluded.

But her father only laughed. "The only abnormal thing about you," he said, "is that you tell the truth. The average girl shows men more attentions than men show her. I don't mean that she demonstrates her attentions; but that she feels them in her heart. To be absolutely the first in a woman's heart a man must catch her when she's about three months old."