II
They helped him on, and pointed out the dim line of telephone poles which marked a road a mile beyond. He walked his horse onward, not daring to trot, struck the dusty highway, rode on over an imperceptible roll of the plains, and was alone on a vast bare earth, naked as when born from the womb of time.
Plover swung up before him with melancholy cries. A soft haze rose from the plains. They grew more vast, more endless. In the north, a white cloud-mass piled itself up and up until it seemed as if it might topple over upon the flat world beneath. He had never before looked at the country except as real estate, never seen the plains, and a curious new sense of the bigness of the earth oppressed him. He felt very small and very mean. The humiliation of his spirits was a novel feeling and an unpleasant one; he tried to hum it away:—
| 'Just wait till I strike Broadway |
| And watch me with the girls, |
| For I'm the man that invented it— |
| The hair that always curls.' |
His harsh voice in the stillness was ridiculous,—even to him,—but when he stopped singing, the silence flowed over him as a stream that had been held back. The sky was enormous; he was only a speck on the vast floor. As he plodded on and on and on through the dust, he began to grow dizzy from the glare and the heat. He could not collect his thoughts for business. A curious sense of weakened identity perplexed him, and his head was full of drifting pictures—Waldron's face among them. That face lingered. He saw him looking vaguely out of the car window—saying that he couldn't stand up under it—that it was 'impossible.' He wondered if it was a bluff, after all. The face faded away leaving a dull pity behind it, a struggling remorse. Cargan shifted uneasily in his saddle, and tried to think of business. But instead of business queer childish ideas began floating in and out of his mind, accompanied by words remembered from Sundays in his boyhood. He was alone with God. God saw into his heart. A little nervous shiver ran over him, and when he checked it with a laugh there followed a wave of superstitious emotion.
A low wave of the prairies had hidden from him a little house and barn standing crudely new against the sky in the distance. Tiny figures were moving behind the buildings, and a dust-cloud rose from the highway in front. Cargan suddenly became conscious of his appearance—his serge suit, his straw hat, his awkward seat in the saddle. The loneliness of the plains had shaken his usual self-assurance.
'Maybe they'll think I stole this horse. Guess I'll go round,' he said aloud. He jerked his steed from the road into the grass, and urged him into a trot. Instantly he found himself beaten and jolted like a ship in a tempest. He lost a stirrup, he slipped sidewise on the saddle; then in a panicky fright he began to shout and saw at the bit. Frightened by the voice and the thunder of hoofs, a chaparral cock darted from beneath the horse's nose. It was enough to make the beast swerve, then toss his head, and in a panic madder than his rider's, break into a run and dash unrestrainably onward. Cargan, numb with fright, leaned over his neck and wound his hands in the mane. The speed sickened him. The flat earth swung beneath, the sky swam dizzily. He dared not pull on the reins; he could only hold on grimly and shut his eyes. Once he slipped, and, screaming, saw for an instant a blur of grass before he could pull himself back to safety. And then the speed increased, the sweaty shoulders labored beneath him, and his senses whirled.
He did not note how far they ran; but at last came a slower motion, a gallop, and then a trot. Weak from exhaustion, he was bumped from the saddle, and found himself clutching and kicking with both arms around his horse's neck. Flinging himself outward, he rolled over on the soft ground, and lay groaning on the prairie. The well-trained horse stopped and began to graze; he too was quivering with fatigue, but his fright was over. The sun was burning near the zenith. The world again was empty, and this time there was no road.
When he recovered a little, he caught the horse, and, too shaken to mount him, limped on, leading him by the bridle, in what direction he did not know. Pangs of hunger and faintness assailed him. The awful loneliness chilled him through in spite of the blaze of heat and light. He remembered stories of men who had wandered on the prairie, round and round in an endless circle, until they had gone crazy and blown out their brains. A profound pity for himself stirred him. Never had he so felt the need of humanity, of human aid. He would have given a hundred dollars to be walking up Main Street, with the boys calling to him from Rooney's cigar store, and the world where it was yesterday.
Just in front a little calf stumbled to its feet and ran toward them, mooing piteously. It, too, was lost. Cargan stroked its nostrils, and a sympathy for all suffering things flowed through his heart. He thought with a shudder of Waldron, pacing somewhere like himself, alone, lost, helpless, his pride gone. In his awakened imagination, he saw him wandering nearer and nearer the fatal act. 'He'll shoot himself. I ought to done something,' he whispered, with a sudden rush of unfamiliar emotion; and all the sentiment in his nature heaved and struggled to the light.
A cow lowed somewhere beyond them; his horse pricked up his ears, and the calf ambled off in the direction of the sound. Cargan limped after hurriedly, leading his horse. A hundred yards brought them to the edge of a slight bowl in the plains, with a little moisture around which pewees were flying, and his heart leaped to see beside it a tiny house of unpainted boards. Wires stretched from one window, along the depression which led westward, until they disappeared in the endless horizon; and, as he paused to survey, a sharp bell rang.
'Hello, is that Annie?' came faintly across the silence.
He looked at his watch, and saw that it was only eleven. 'I'll talk to Casey about Waldron,' he said guiltily. Relief for his escape, and still more the hush of that enormous plain, the solemnity of the great and shining sky, filled him with high and noble thoughts.
'Say, is Hamden near here?' he asked of a slim woman in a gingham dress who appeared at the door.
She nodded.
'And say, can I use your telephone?'
She hesitated, looking him over, then motioned him incuriously to the stool behind the pine table. Solitude seemed to have made her unready of speech. He called Cargan & Casey, then waited, fidgeting. Silence invaded the little kitchen. The clock ticked in a hush; the chickens droned in whispers; the woman herself worked over the stove with slow fingers, moving the kettles gently. Cargan & Casey were 'busy.' He fumed for an instant, then gave his own home number.
'It's Jim,' he said, and heard his wife's carol of surprise. He could see her tiptoeing at their telephone. 'I'm all right,' he shouted in response to her eager words; and the thought of their little sitting-room, and the kids playing behind her, warmed his blood. 'I got run away with on the plains, but I'm all right—' Her frightened ejaculation thrilled him with loving pride—'honest I am.' And then suddenly a wave of generous emotion mounted to his head. 'Martha,' he called quickly,—'tell Casey not to sell out Waldron—tell him right away. I'll explain to-morrow.'
The connection roared and failed. He hung up the instrument. The quiet room, the gently moving woman, the immensity without, rushed back on his sight. Exhilarated, clear-hearted, looking heaven in the face, he asked the necessary questions, mounted his horse, and pushed onward.
Hamden was already a blotch upon the horizon. 'Say, it's great to get into a big country,' he murmured, lifted his bare head to the free air, and in a curious exaltation of mind rode on dreamily. He noticed the flowers in the coarse grass, watched the wild doves flying with their quick, strong wing-beats, and swung his eye joyfully around the blue horizons that receded until one felt the curve and pitch of the world.
The mood lasted until Cargan reached the first straggling houses of the village street, so that he entered upon the rutty highway between dirt sidewalks with regret, as one whose holiday was ending. He scarcely noticed the loiterers who stared at him, or thought of his streaked face, his trousers split at the knee, his hat lost on the wild ride.
But as he plodded onward the atmosphere of town had its effect. His eye began to take note of the size of the shops glittering under their false fronts, the new houses behind rows of stiff young trees, the number and make of automobiles. His subconsciousness grasped the financial level of Hamden, although his thoughts were still in the wide spaces of the plains. A boy ran out from the side-walk to sell him a paper. He stuck it in his side pocket, and suddenly began to feel like a man of this world again.
'Say, sonny,' he called; 'who sells land in this burg?—Dubell—John Dubell?—Thanks.'
He went more and more slowly.
A drug-store, blazing with marble and onyx in the afternoon sun, made Cargan's dry throat wrinkle with thirst. He pulled his horse toward that side of the street. There was a row of customers along the soda-water counter, and through the open windows came scraps of conversation: two boys were teasing each other about a girl; a group of men were talking auctions, options, prices, real estate. He drank their talk in greedily, with a pang of homesickness and a rush of returning common sense. Dismounting stiffly, he tied his horse, and stood for an instant on the cement pavement, feeling his dirt and tatters, wondering if they would throw him out for a bum. Then he slid inside the door, and ordered a chocolate soda.
The clerk was reading the paper while he juggled the milk-shakes. Cargan, carefully concealing his torn trousers, climbed a stool, and began to look back upon the vagaries of the day with sullen wonder. He brushed furtively at the caked dust on his legs, remembering, irritably, the elegance of Waldron, whom he had saved. In the mirror of the soda fountain he saw himself, torn, dirty, shrinking, and the sight filled him with disgust and anger. He felt as ridiculous as when he had come out with a glass too much from the Stoneham bar, and tripped over the steps of the main entrance. 'Gimme a cigar,' he called to the boy at the magazine counter; bit off the end, lit it, and began to think business.
The clerk, swirling a cataract of milk from glass to glass, revealed the inner sheet of the paper propped before him. Cargan read beneath his arm the full-page advertisement of a land sale—the land sale he had come through all this tomfoolery to reach. His eyes bulged as he saw that they were going to throw a thousand acres on the market. 'Good gosh,' he gulped inwardly, 'what a chance!' It was a sure thing for the man with the money.
The last of his fine sentiments evaporated. Except for Waldron he could have scooped it all in; but now four hundred was all he dared touch,—and perhaps not that. Raging against his softness back there on the plains, which seemed a hardly recognizable world, he ground his teeth, and coughed and choked over his soda. Soft-headed donkey! The reaction was complete.
Suddenly a little thought no bigger than a minute rose in one corner of his brain, and spread, and spread. He looked furtively at the clock over the clerk's head, and saw that it was only half-past two. With guilty deliberation he rose and walked slowly toward the door of the telephone booth, keeping back from full consciousness just what he was about to do. Then he slammed himself within, and shouted Casey's address to the operator. As he waited, his wrath mounted. 'What in heck was the matter with me anyway!' He smoked furiously in the stifling box.
'Go ahead,' said the operator,—and, at the word, 'Hey there, Casey,' he yelled at the dim voice on the wires, 'I've gotta have five thousand quick! Sell that Benningham Common—yes, Waldron's.' At the name his anger broke loose. 'The old high-brow tried to bluff me. What!!—' The connection failed and left him gasping.
'What! Sold it! He told you to!—No, I dunno anything about a court decision. Up 15 points on a merger! Well what do you think—' He gulped down the sudden reversal and felt for words. 'Say, tell him,—' he licked his lips,—'tell him I'm sure glad I saved him. I'm sure glad.'
The wires roared again,—and Cargan, putting down the receiver grinned shamefacedly into the dirty mirror. But gradually a sense of conscious virtue began to trickle pleasantly through his veins. 'I'm sure glad,' he repeated more vigorously; 'carryin' him to-day was what did it.' A vision of Mrs. Waldron's happy face rose to bless him; the exhilaration of the morning coursed back into his heart, with a comfortable feeling of good business about it. He felt better and better. From somewhere a saying floated into his head: 'Doing good unto others is the only happiness.' 'By heck, that's true,' he commented aloud, and sat smoking peacefully, his mind aglow with pleasant thoughts.
The bell whirred raucously. He saw that he had forgotten to replace the receiver, and putting it to his ear caught Casey's voice again:—
'Say, Carg, Jim Smith's in the office, and won't leave till he's heard from you. Montana Pacific's off two points more. Say, do you want to carry him? He says he's done for if you sell him out.'
A fire of indignation rushed through Cargan. 'What d' you think I am—a damned philanthropist?' he yelled. 'Sell out the old gambler! Sell him out!' And he hung up.
NOTHING
BY ZEPHINE HUMPHREY
THIS is not going to be an easy story to write. Its theme is precisely that which I have chosen for my title; and naturally its positive significance is not obvious. But I must somehow get the thing into words. The spiritual value which I found in the experience may come home to some reader. At any rate, it is good for us all to stop now and then and challenge the conventional standards of our lives.
To begin with, I presume that there are few sympathetic students of humanity who will not agree with me that the strain of mysticism which sometimes appears in the New England character is one of the most interesting and touching of all the manifestations of our human nature. It is so unexpected! The delicate pearl in the rough oyster is not more apparently incongruous, rarer, or more priceless. Nay, it is more than that. The development is so impossible as to be always a miracle, freshly wrought by the finger of God.
There are all sorts of elements in it which do not appear in other kinds of mysticism: humor (that unfailing New England salt!), reserve, and a paradoxical mixture of independence and deference. It knows how inexplicable it must seem to its environment, how it must fret its oyster; so it effaces itself as much as possible. But it yields not one jot of its integrity. It holds a hidden, solitary place apart—like a rare orchid in the woods, like a hermit thrush. Even to those who love it, it will not lightly or often reveal itself. But when it does—well, I would take a weary, barefoot pilgrimage for the sake of the experience which I had last summer. And here I may as well begin my narrative.