Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial, she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing upon the hallowed soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since George's death, when he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful. Scarcely a day had passed since then that he had not brightened by some reminder of his friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had gone to dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play. That he had been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but she had tried her best to repay him—she had, when one came to the point, done as much as she could to remedy the defects of his education. At first she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of making him over; then, as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of discouragement, of approaching failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and at last she had realized that her work, except in the merest details, had been ineffectual and futile. The differences, which she had regarded as superficial, were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make him over because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely for certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was perfectly simple—he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the things she wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter of finish, or even of education—for it was, after all, not one of manner, but of material. Day by day she had realized more clearly that the problem confronting them was one which involved their different standards of living and their individual philosophies. The things which she regarded as essential were to him only the accidental variations of life. He had lived so long in touch with the basic realities—with vast spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms—he had lived so long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature, that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he must remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out of her power.

And of course he had his virtues—she would have been the last to deny him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she realized how little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature. He was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour. Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts. They were experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums. For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed compatible with human designs—certainly not with human achievement. According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex—according to the inflexible code of her mother and Jane—he was not a gentleman. He lacked breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of schools; but in other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was beginning dimly to realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably larger than any superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation, restraint—in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur was endowed in her memory, in all the attributes she had particularly esteemed in the past—she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly fall below her inherited standards. But, failing in these things, he had been able to command her respect by the sheer force of his character. Though he had, as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to him for an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural chivalry of mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared as exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as in his practical efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he embodied, she felt, the triumphs and the failures of American democracy—this democracy of ugly fact and of fine ideals, of crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of little codes and of large adventures, of puny lives and of heroic deaths—this democracy of the smoky present and the clear future. "If this is our raw material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the finished and signed product of to-morrow be?"

"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"

Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a rustic basket of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know if he may speak to you for a minute before you go out?"

"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly disappeared and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway was filled exuberantly by O'Hara.

"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he began, a little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was flushing with pleasure.

"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered him, he seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the world outside—of that magic world where the elm tree and the grass and the sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He diffused a glowing consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in the inherent goodness of experience. For, as she had discovered long ago, O'Hara was one of those who stood not for the elimination of struggle, but for the complete acceptance of life. He had sprung out of ugliness, he had lived intimately with evil; and yet more than any one she had ever known, he seemed to her to radiate the simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was the strongest person she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never evaded facts, never feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked the hardy, adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had never "found him a quitter."

He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and blues of the background. The sunshine, falling through the open window, warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear light in which the jubilant spirit of the spring was reflected. "After all, it isn't what one does, it is what one is, that matters," she thought while she looked at him. "At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is character, not circumstances, that counts."

"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that basket," he said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity which prompted him to impress her with the value of small attentions; and this she was swift to recognize as the opposite of Arthur's delicacy. It was the only littleness she had observed in O'Hara so far—this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a bushel—and in its place, it was amusing. Here was an obvious instance where nature unassisted by training appeared to fall short.

"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world," she responded sincerely.