WITHERLE’S FREEDOM
His little world was blankly astonished when Witherle dropped out of it. His disappearance was as his life had been, neat, methodical, well-arranged; but why did he go at all?
He had lived through thirty-seven years of a discreetly conducted existence with apparent satisfaction; he had been in the ministry for fifteen years; he had been married nearly as long; he was in no sort of difficulty, theological, financial, or marital; he possessed the favor of his superiors in the church, the confidence of his wife, and he had recently come into a small fortune bequeathed him by a great-aunt. Every one regarded him as very “comfortably fixed”—for a minister.
Of all the above-enumerated blessings he had divested himself methodically, as a man folds up and lays aside worn garments. He resigned his charge, he transferred his property to his wife, and wrote her a farewell note in which he said, in a light-hearted way which she mistook for incoherence, that she would never see him again. These things done, he dropped out of the sight of men as completely as a stone fallen into a pond.
His friends speculated and investigated, curiously, eagerly, fearfully, but to no purpose. What was the motive? Where had he gone? Had he committed suicide? Was he insane? The elders of the church employed a detective, and the friends of his wife took up the search, but Witherle was not found. He had left as little trace whereby he could be followed as a meteor leaves when it rushes across the sky.
Presently, of course, interest in the event subsided; the church got a new minister; Witherle’s wife went back to her own people; the world appeared to forget. But there was a man of Witherle’s congregation named Lowndes who still meditated the unsolved problem at odd moments. He was a practical man of affairs, with the psychological instinct, and he found the question of why people do the things that they do perennially interesting. Humanity from any point of view is a touching spectacle; from a business standpoint it is infinitely droll. Personally Lowndes was one of the wholesome natures for whom there are more certainties than uncertainties in life, and he felt for Witherle the protecting friendliness that a strong man sometimes has for one less strong. He advised him as to his investments on week-days, and listened patiently Sunday after Sunday, as the lesser man expounded the mysteries of creation and the ways of the Creator, sustained by the reflection that Witherle was better than his sermons. He did not consider him an interesting man, but he believed him to be a good one. When Witherle was no longer at hand, Lowndes counselled and planned for his wife, and otherwise made himself as useful as the circumstances would permit. He felt sorry for Witherle’s wife, a nervous woman to whom had come as sharp an upheaval of life as death itself could have brought about, without the comfort of the reflection that the Lord had taken away.
Fate, who sometimes delivers the ball to those who are ready to play, decreed that, in May, about a year after Witherle’s disappearance, Lowndes should be summoned from the Pennsylvania village where he lived to one of the cities of an adjoining State. His business took him along the dingy river-front of the town. Crossing a bridge one evening toward sunset, he stopped idly to note the shifting iridescent tints that converted the river for the hour into a heavenly water-way between the two purgatorial banks lined with warehouses and elevators black with the inexpressibly mussy and depressing blackness of the soot of soft coal. His glance fell upon a coal-barge being loaded at the nearest wharf. He leaned over the rail, wondering why the lines of the figure of one of the workmen looked familiar to him. The man seemed to be shovelling coal with a peculiar zest. As this is a species of toil not usually performed for the love of it, his manner naturally attracted attention. While Lowndes still stood there pondering the problematical familiarity of his back, the man turned. Lowndes clutched the rail. “By Jove!” he said, excitedly, for he saw that the features were the features of Witherle. Their expression was exultant and illuminated beyond anything ever vouch-safed to that plodding gospeller. Moving along the bridge to a point just above the barge, he took out his watch and looked at it. It was nearly six o’clock.
The next fifteen minutes were exciting ones for Lowndes. His mind was in a tumult. It is no light matter to make one’s self the arbiter of another man’s destiny; and he knew enough of Witherle to feel sure that the man’s future was in his hands. He looked down at him dubiously, his strong hands still clutching the rail tensely. For a minute he felt that he must move on without making his presence known, but even as he resolved, the clocks and whistles clamorously announced the hour.
When the men quitted their work, the man whom Lowndes’s eyes were following came up the stairs that led to the bridge. As he passed, Lowndes laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.
“How are you, Witherle?” he said.
The man stared at him blankly a second, recoiled, and his face turned livid as he shook off the friendly hand. The other men had passed on, and they were alone on the bridge.
“I’m a free man,” said Witherle, loudly, throwing back his shoulders. “Before God, I’m a free man for the first time in my life. What do you want with me?”
“Don’t rave,” said Lowndes, sharply. “I sha’n’t hurt you. You couldn’t expect me to pass you without speaking, could you?”
“Then you weren’t looking for me?” asked Witherle, abjectly.
“I have business on hand.” Lowndes spoke impatiently, for he did not enjoy seeing his old friend cower. “I am here for the Diamond Oil Co. I was crossing the bridge just now, when I saw a man down there shovelling coal as if he liked it; and I delayed to look, and saw it was you. So I waited for you. That is all there is of it. You needn’t stop if you don’t wish.”
Witherle drew a deep breath. “My nerves aren’t what they were,” he said, apologetically. “It played the mischief with them to—” He left the sentence hanging in the air.
“If you weren’t going to like the results, you needn’t have gone,” observed Lowndes, in an impartial tone. “Nobody has been exactly able to see the reasons for your departure. You left the folks at home a good deal stirred up.”
“What do they say about me there?”
Lowndes hesitated. “Most of them say you were crazy. Your wife has gone back to her people.”
“Ah!”
Lowndes looked at the man with a sudden impulse of pity. He was leaning against the rail, breathing heavily. His face was white beneath the soot, but in his eyes still flamed that incomprehensible ecstasy. He was inebriate with the subtle stimulus of some transcendent thought. But what thought? And what had brought him here? This creature, with his sensitive mouth, his idealist’s eyes, his scholar’s hands, black and hardened now but still clearly recognizable, was at least more out of place among the coal-heavers than he had been in the pulpit. Lowndes felt mightily upon him the desire to shepherd this man back to some more sheltered fold. The highways of existence were not for his feet; not for his lips the “Song of the Open Road.” He did not resist the desire to say, meditatively:
“You have no children——”
“God in His mercy be praised for that one blessing!” Witherle muttered. But Lowndes went on as if he did not hear:
“But you might think of your wife.”
“I have thought of her—too much. I thought about everything too much. I am tired of thinking,” said Witherle. “I wonder if you understand?”
“Not in the least.”
Witherle looked about him restlessly. “Come where we can talk—down there on that pile of boards. I think I’d like to talk. It is very simple when once you understand it.”
He led the way to the opposite end of the bridge, and down an embankment to a lumber-pile at the water’s edge. Up the river the May sun had gone down in splendor, leaving the water crimson-stained. Witherle sat down where he could look along the river-reaches.
“Hold on a minute, Witherle. Don’t talk to me unless you are sure you want to.”
“That’s all right. There’s nothing much to tell. I don’t seem to mind your understanding.”
Witherle was silent a minute.
“It is very simple,” he said again. “This is the way I think about it. Either you do the things you want to do in this world or else you don’t. I had never done what I wanted until I left home. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody by coming away in that style, and I don’t think that I did. I’d rather not be selfish, but life got so dull. I couldn’t stand it. I had to have a change. I had to come. The things you have to do you do. There was a Frenchman once who committed suicide and left a note that said: ‘Tired of this eternal buttoning and unbuttoning.’ I know how he felt. I don’t know how other men manage to live. Perhaps their work means more to them than mine had come to mean to me. It was just dull, that was all, and I had to come.”
Lowndes stared. Truly it was delightfully simple. “Why, man, you can’t chuck your responsibilities overboard like that. Your wife——”
“When I was twenty-one,” interrupted Witherle, “I was in love. The girl married somebody else. Before I met my wife she had cared for a man who married another woman. You see how it was. We were going to save the pieces together. As a business arrangement that sort of thing is all right. I haven’t a word to say against it. She is a good woman, and we got on as well as most people, only life was not ecstasy to either of us. Can’t you see us tied together, snaking our way along through existence as if it were some gray desert, and we crawling on and on over the sand, always with our faces bent to it, and nothing showing itself in our way but the white bones of the men and women who had travelled along there before us—grinning skulls mostly? Can’t you see it?”
Looking up, he caught an expression in Lowndes’s eyes the meaning of which he suspected. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid,” he added, hastily, “that this is insanity. It’s only imagination. That’s the way I felt. And my work was only another long desert to be toiled through—with the Sphinx at the end. I wasn’t a successful preacher, and you know it. I hadn’t any grip on men. I hadn’t any grip on myself—or God. I couldn’t see any use or any meaning or any joy in it. The whole thing choked me. I wanted a simpler, more elemental life. I wanted to go up and down the earth and try new forms of living, new ways of doing things, new people. Life—that was what I wanted; to feel the pulse of the world throb under my touch, to be in the stir, to be doing something. I was always haunted by the conviction that life was tremendous if only you once got at it. I couldn’t get at it where I was. I was rotting away. So when that money was left me it came like a godsend. I knew my wife could live on that, and I didn’t think she’d miss me much, so I just came off.”
“And you like it?”
The man’s eyes flamed. “Like it? It’s great! It’s the only thing there is. I’ve been from Maine to California this year. I wintered in a Michigan lumber-camp—that was hell. I was a boat-hand on the Columbia last summer—that was heaven. I worked in a coal-mine two months—a scab workman, you understand. And now I’m at this. I tell you, it is fine to get rid of cudgelling your brains for ideas that aren’t there, and of pretending to teach people something you don’t know, and take to working with your hands nine hours a day and sleeping like a log all night. I hadn’t slept for months, you know. These people tell me about themselves. I’m seeing what life is like. I’m getting down to the foundations. I’ve learned more about humanity in the last six months than I ever knew in all my life. I believe I’ve learned more about religion. I’m getting hold of things. It’s like getting out on the open sea after that desert I was talking about—don’t you see? And it all tastes so good to me!” He dropped his head into his hands, exhausted by the flood of words he had poured rapidly out.
Lowndes hesitated long before he spoke. He was reflecting that Witherle’s exaltation was pathological—he was drunk with the air of the open road.
“Poor little devil!” he thought. “One might let alone a man who finds ecstasy in being a coal-heaver; but it won’t do.”
“Life is big,” he admitted, slowly; “it’s tremendous, if you like; it’s all you say—but it isn’t for you. Don’t you see it is too late? We’re all of us under bonds to keep the world’s peace and finish the contracts we undertake. You’re out of bounds now. You have got to come back.”
Witherle stared at him blankly. “You say that? After what I’ve told you? Why, there’s nothing to go back for. And here—there is everything! What harm am I doing, I’d like to know? Who is hurt? What claims has that life on me? Confound you!” his wrath rising fiercely, “how dare you talk like that to me? Why isn’t life for me as well as for you?”
This Witherle was a man he did not know. Lowndes felt a little heart-sick, but only the more convinced that he must make his point.
“If you didn’t feel that you were out of bounds, why were you afraid of me when I came along?”
The thrust told. Witherle was silent. Lowndes went on: “Bread isn’t as interesting as champagne, I know, but there is more in it, in the long run. However, that’s neither here nor there—if a man has a right to his champagne. But you haven’t. You are mistaken about your wife. She was all broken up. I don’t pretend to say she was desperately fond of you. I don’t know anything about that. But, anyhow, she had made for herself a kind of life of which you were the centre, and it was all the life she had. You had no right to break it to pieces getting what you wanted. That’s a brutal thing for a man to do. She looked very miserable, when I saw her. You’ve got to go back.”
Witherle turned his head from side to side restlessly, as a sick man turns on the pillow.
“How can I go back?” he cried, keenly protesting. “Don’t you see it’s impossible? I’ve burned my ships.”
“That’s easy enough. You went off in a fit of double consciousness, or temporary insanity, or something like that, and I found you down here. It will be easy enough to reinstate you. I’ll see to that.”
“That would be a lie,” said Witherle, resolutely.
Lowndes stared at him curiously, reflecting upon the fastidiousness with which men pick and choose their offenses against righteousness, embracing one joyously and rejecting another with scorn.
“Yes; so it would. But I have offered to do the lying for you, and you are off your head, you know.”
“How?” demanded Witherle, sharply.
“Any man is off his head who can’t take life as it comes, the bad and the good, and bear up under it. Suicide is insanity. You tried to commit suicide in the cowardliest way, by getting rid of your responsibilities and saving your worthless breath. Old man, it won’t do. You say you’ve learned something about religion and humanity—come back and tell us about it.”
Witherle listened to his sentence in silence. His long lower lip trembled.
“Anything more?” he demanded.
“That’s all. It won’t do.”
The man dropped his head into his hands and sat absolutely still. Lowndes watched the river growing grayer and grayer, and listened to the lapping of the water against the lumber, remembering that one of the poets had said it was a risky business tampering with souls, and matter enough to save one’s own. The reflection made him feel a little faint. What if Witherle had a right to that life in spite of everything—that life for which he had given all?
Witherle lifted his head at last. “You are sure my wife was broken up over it?” he demanded, despairingly.
“Sure.”
Witherle cast one longing glance across the darkening river to the black outlines of the barge. There, ah, even there, the breath of life was sweet upon his lips, and toil was good, and existence was worth while.
“I thought no soul in the world had a claim on me. Curse duty! The life of a rat in a cage!” he cried. “Oh, Lord, I haven’t the head nor the heart for it!”
The words were bitter, but his voice broke with compliance. He rose to his feet and stretched out his arms with a fierce gesture, then dropped them heavily by his side.
“Come on,” he said.
Lowndes, watching him with that curious, heart-sickening sympathy growing upon him, was aware that he had seen the end of a soul’s revolt. Rightly or wrongly, Witherle’s freedom was over.