“But surely you must have known——”
“How could I know? How much experience had I? How far had my education gone? I’ve met three women in all my life, I said. I’ve had two years of school. Well, that’s all. That’s my life. It isn’t much. I never knew much of—what you say.”
“Often?” asked Marcia Haddon—“How could it have been often that you met her?”
“Twice, Ma’am,” said David Joslin. “The last time to say good-by. That was up at Strattonville, not so very long ago. If it hadn’t been for that, I reckon I’d have gone on and finished my college course. I reckon maybe if I hadn’t met her then I could have been a preacher some time—I could have been president of this school—I could have had my life’s ambition and my hope. You say she ruined your life. Didn’t it come to the same thing with me? But I can’t call her bad—surely it wasn’t her fault in the least. I reckon it was the fault of life. But that was why I came back so soon. And that was why I met you when you came in. And you—you are a woman too.... But of another sort, I suppose. Better——”
“Did you know,” she said to him after a time, “that the Polly Pendleton Company was backed by my husband’s money all along? He was out on the road for weeks at a time—he practically abandoned me. Well, that was my husband!”
“And I’ve lost every honest dream of all my life because of that same woman,” he spoke after a time. “She herself tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t believe her. Well, you’ve made it easier.
“Not that it wasn’t over anyhow,” he added, with not the slightest trace of self-pride in his words. “Ma’am, let me tell you something—do you see that college house of ours up on the hill? Well, under the cornerstone of that building there are two things, and I put them both there myself. One is my copy of old John Calvin’s Institutes, and the other is a picture of Polly Pendleton. That’s a right odd combination, isn’t it, to go under the cornerstone of a college? Well, they’re both there.
“So now you know. As for me, I’ve got to finish my education before I’m big enough and good enough to teach or preach up there. It was you—not that woman—made me feel that. It was you that taught me how big and grand and sweet the world is, how much there is to learn, how much there is to do. It was you who have shown me how far I have to go. I reckon it’ll be over hot plowshares, Ma’am. I’ve got my ordeal yet ahead. May justice and not mercy be mine in my ordeal.
“You’ve made it easier,” he added after a time, “a heap easier. It’s only what the girl herself was trying to tell me—but I couldn’t believe it. Another man’s? No—I don’t share a woman with any other man on earth. What’s mine is mine. What’s his may be his. Let him rest up there on the hill. She’s dead, too, I reckon, now. But you see, I didn’t know. I’m glad you told me, Ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ‘Ma’am’!” exclaimed Marcia Haddon suddenly. “I hate that word!” Without any explanation, she rose and left him. She had seen the unveiling of a stark human life, and had begun to measure back her own life, her husband’s, with this whose story she now had heard. Hot plowshares? Why, yes, if need be. But that was his ordeal, and one that he had earned. Were men indeed all alike?