Mary Wollaston

by Henry Kitchell Webster

"I remember your father said to him, 'Man, the will of God this morning is waiting to express itself in the skill of my hands,' and it didn't sound like blasphemy either. He carried father off in his apron, just as he was, to the hospital and I went along. I scraped an acquaintance afterward with one of the students who had been there in the theatre watching him operate and got him to tell me about it. They felt it was a historic occasion even at the time; cheered him at the end of it. And that sort of virtuosity does seem worthier of cheers than any scraping of horsehair over cat-gut could ever come to. I wonder how many lives there are to-day that owe themselves altogether to him just as my sister does.—How many children who never could have been born at all except for his skill and courage. Because, of course, courage is half of it."

Upon Mary the effect of this new portrait of her father was electrifying; eventually was more than that—revolutionary. These few words of March's served, I think, in the troubled, turbid emotional relation she had got into with her father, as a clarifying precipitant.

But that process was slower; the immediate effect attached to March himself. The present wonder was that it should have been he, a stranger, equipped with only the meagerest chances for observation, who, turning his straying search-light beam upon the dearest person to her in the world, should thus have illuminated him anew. Even after he had gone it was the man rather than the things he had said that she thought about.

Amazingly, he had guessed—she was sure she had given him no hint—at the part Paula was playing in their domestic drama. It had come pat upon what he had told her of the lives her father had plucked from the hand of death, the ironic, "he saved others, himself he can not save," hanging unspoken in their thoughts.

"Paula will be fighting for his life," he said. "Magnificently. That must be one of your hopes."

She had confirmed this with details. She got the notion, perhaps from nothing more than his rather thoughtful smile, that he comprehended the whole thing, even down to Aunt Lucile. Though wasn't there a phrase of his,—"these uninhibited people, when it comes to getting things done …" that slanted that way? Did that mean that he was one of the other sort? Wasn't your ability to recognize the absence of a quality or a disability in any one else, proof enough that you had it yourself? It would never, certainly, occur to Paula to think of any one as "uninhibited."

But the opposed adjective didn't fit him. She couldn't see him at all as a person tangled, helpless, in webs of his own spinning;—neither the man who had written that love song nor the man who had sat down in his chair again after Rush had slammed the door.

He wasn't even shy but he was, except for that moment when a vivid concern over John Wollaston's illness brought him back, oddly remote, detached. He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career. "She has abandoned all that now, I suppose," he said. "Everything that goes with it. She would wish, if she ever gave us a thought, that LaChaise and I had never been born."

Mary would have tried to deny this but that the quality and tone of his voice told her that he really knew it and that, miraculously, he didn't care. She had exclaimed with a sincerity struck out of her by amazement, "I don't see how you know that."

"Paula's a conqueror," he had answered simply, "a—compeller. It's her instinct to compel. That's what makes her the artist she is. Without her voice she might have been a tamer of wild beasts. And, of course, a great audience that has paid extravagantly for its pleasure is a wild beast, that will purr if she compels it, snarl at her if she doesn't manage to. She's been hissed, howled at. And that's the possibility that makes cheers intoxicating. Left too long without something to conquer, she feels in a vacuum, smothered. Well, she's got something now; the greatest thing in the world to her,—her husband's life. She's flung off the other thing like a cloak."