The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Thus, at least, she held her hand, paying tribute to fate; thus when the birthday came, and Rollo and Lady Burdon across the sea, and empty her vengeance made to seem if she then took it, she turned to fate and asked of fate "What now?"

"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Again to her ear that strong companion stooped—not threatening now; encouraging, supporting....

"Why, Aunt Maggie," Percival cried, "you do look well—fit, this morning. Fifty times as bright as you've been looking these past days. Younger, I swear!"

"Well, it is your birthday, dearest," she told him.

"All very well! But every time we've mentioned my birthday, my twenty-first—even last night—you've been—I've thought it has made you sad, as if you didn't want me to have it!—growing too old, or something!"

For answer she only shook her head and smiled at him. But her reason for the stronger air he noticed in her, for her rescue from her depression of the days that led to his birthday, was that to her question of "What now?" she was somehow assured that she had but to wait, but to have a little more patience, and her opportunity would come. Fate was shaping it for her; fate in due time would present it....

II

Percival for his own part was also in some dealing with fate in these days. As one that is forever feasting his eyes on a prized and newly won possession, the more fully to realise it and enjoy it, so frequently in these days he was telling himself "I'm the happiest and luckiest beggar in the world!" and was marvelling at the train of tricks and chances by which fate—luck as he called it—had brought him to this happy, lucky period.

Every human life falls into periods reckoned and divided not by years but by events. Sometimes these events are recognised as milestones immediately they fall; a death, a birth, a marriage, a new employment, a journey, a sickness—we know at once that a new phase is begun, we take a new lease of interest in life; not necessarily a better or a brighter lease, a worse, maybe—but new and recognised as different. More frequently the milestone is not perceived as such until we look back along the road, see the event clearly upstanding and realise that we were one man as we approached it and have become another since we left it behind; again not necessarily a better or a happier man—a worse, maybe; and maybe one that often cries with outstretched arms to resume again that former figure. It cannot be. Life goes forward, and we, once started, like draughtsmen on a board, may not move back. Beside each event that marks a milestone we leave a self as the serpent sheds a skin—all dead; some better dead; some we would give all, all to bring again to life. It may not be.

Percival in these happy, happy months as right-hand man to the Rough 'Uns on the famously prospering little horse farm often told himself that his life had been—as he expressed it—in three absolutely different periods. He found a wonderful pleasure in dividing them off and reviewing them. Daily, and often more than once in a day, when he had a pony out at exercise, he would pull up on the summit of rising ground and release his thoughts to wander over those periods as his eyes reviewed from point to point the landscape stretched beneath him; his mind aglow with what it tasted just as his body glowed from his exercise of schooling the pony in the saddle. Three periods, as he would tell himself. The first had ended with that night when he came to Dora in the drive. Everything was different after that. Then all his life with Japhra and with Ima in the van—the tough, hard, good life that ended with the fight. The third—he now was in the third! Two had been lived and left, and in review had for their chief burthen the picture of how, as he had said during his convalescence, every one had been so jolly, jolly good to him. Two had been lived and had shaped him—"a sort of thing for other people's plans"; and what kind plans! and what dear planners! and he, of their fondness, how happy a thing!—to this third period that sung to him in every hour and that went mistily into the future whose mists were rosy, rosy, rose-red and snow-white, Snow-White-and-Rose-Red....