“Yes, Bardek?” she asked, for he had not spoken more than her name. She looked magnificently strong and able as she stood blocked out in dark tints against his white door; and the weariness and the despondency had gone from her; wavering uncertainty had made place for the mind made up. She could not have her first wish; very well; she would accept the next best, and it would not be done half-heartedly; and once accepted, she would be loyal to the death. All this Bardek noted as he looked at her.
“But it is another story zat I happen to know,” he began softly. “Allen Blynn has not told me in words, for then I could not speak wit’out being tattle-tale, but I have listened wit’ my eyes and wit’ my heart—oh, a very good ear my heart has!—and so I know zat it is the good Allen who prays on his knees every night zat some day he will have courage to ask my Gorgas to try to like him—jus’ a leetle bit, mebbe!”
Slowly he drew her from the door. She protested. He argued subtly—it was the fight, he said, against the Evil One for the life of a woman, so it needs must be subtle. Slowly he drew her again to her place beside him on the floor. And then he poured forth the eloquence that only Bardek could summon. He made her cry and he made her laugh; and he filled her with hope. Who could doubt Bardek when he rose to his best? And when the theme is Love—ah! Bardek could have made great strides toward converting the Evil One himself!
“But how do you know, Bardek?” Gorgas demanded.
Ah, he knew! He, Bardek, had been born with both of his two eyes open! The ways of Allen Blynn were not hidden from him. And the little Gorgas must not let despair and fear in at the heart, for they are the father and mother of failure. Much he told her of Allen, evidence that piled up against the absent swain, until some of the despair and fear fled at his strong touch. The protestings of Gorgas grew weaker as Bardek plied his argument.
Among other matters he related one of the many debates which he and Allen had had together. Blynn had been standing for a reaction against the type of freedom—free will, free love, free anything—which had been pulsing from the “lunacy fringe” of the radicals for a generation or more. “They do not seem to understand,” Blynn had argued, “that there is something higher than individual will—or even the individual nation’s will, as Alexander and Napoleon have long ago found out—something which demands surrender, acquiescence.” Bardek had been defending life as the expression of the individual right to live; Blynn had taken the side of individual renunciation. “But there is a divine, far-off event to which the whole creation moves,” said Blynn; “and while our irresistible part is that of free spirits, yet we are most free when we bind the law upon ourselves.” That was the philosophy of Allen Blynn.
“He is not one to seize the daughter of the orange woman,” laughed Bardek, “and zen make a new service of marriage for himself! Ho! He would beat his breast wit’ ze big stone and wait four, five, six week! Now you! You are like me—it make you sick to wait. So! I say, do not wait. Go to him. Tell him to hurry. Tell him you cannot wait for God’s big universe to come to end, but it must come now! Go to him, Liebschen! Go to him!”
“I have always wanted to,” agreed Gorgas. “Many times I started to—but I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” asked the fearless man.
“Women do not do that, Bardek.”