Before they reached the camp Brandon spoke again. “I can remember when I discovered that that was not the plan. I’d just had my knockout. I could not see any reason in it. For my wife to have to stay behind me, to support me until I was strong enough to get started, or could find a berth out here—it wasn’t the thing I wanted! I wasn’t pleasant to have around. I moaned a good deal to Bertha about failure. I was a failure, as a hero! I had to go to Boston to sell a piece of property. If I sold it, I thought I could take Bertha west with me. I did not sell it. I went in to a symphony concert after the deal fell through. I was full of rebellion; the apex had come too soon. I guess it always seems that way, whether we’re fifty, or twenty-nine. The music itself, the sounds did not soothe me. I was thinking of my paper, my ambition. Ambition in a desert? It had a mocking sound. I wanted to support my wife!
“I wasn’t listening to the music. I found I was watching the antics of the man with the violoncello. He’d sit for a while and never make a sound. It struck me as queer that a man could be willing to spend a lifetime learning to play a thing like that, spend an afternoon to come in, just once in a while! Just a few notes a day! I suppose you’ll laugh at me, for we get our lessons different ways. I got mine from that ’cello player. It came to me then, the apex philosophy. I got a view at the scheme of things. Men’s incompleteness, the brotherhood of man, our broken segments making up the whole; I remember when I left, I was trying to whistle a theme from that great Pathetique! I never shall forget that afternoon. I think of that ’cello player, think of my life that way. We are all playing in the symphony, some of us carry the tune a little further, some of us, like the ’cello player, content to fill out the harmonies.”
They had reached the encampment. “I believe I’ll turn in,” gruffed Hardin.
“Good night.” Brandon struck off to his tent.
Hardin found Innes asleep, huddled in his overcoat. He did not waken her. On his threshold he stumbled over a clumsy bundle. Paper, torn, paper wrappings, crackled under his fingers. He carried it into his tent and shut the door before striking a match, so as not to waken her. In the dark, he fumbled through the room for a match. Before lighting a candle, the flickering match in his hand, he pulled down the tent shades lest the light arouse Innes. He didn’t want any more woman talk! He was stumbling off to bed when his eyes fell on the fat parcel. The shape intrigued his curiosity.
It was soiled and racked from traveling. The labels read “Jalisco; Nogales; Guadalajara; Tepic.” He searched for the original address. At last he made out a blurred and muddied “Hardin.” Scrawled in by recent fingers was “The Crossing, Mexico.”
On the table he unwound its dirty wrappings. A covering of cheese-cloth lined the paper shells. Hardin’s weary eyes questioned the odd-looking cushion. His fingers ran over the rigid curves. It came to him then, what it was. Gerty’s form! And he sat it up on its waist-line.
Through Mexico, jostled from town to town; written about, speculated on, sorely needed every time one of those dainty gowns was made, “those pretty flimsy gowns of Gert’s!” At last it had come to the Heading!
He stared at it vacantly.
Something was happening within him; a childishness he could not control. The shuddering storm swept over him as a dry autumn wind that strips the trees gaunt.