Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

He discovered, too, something to interest and admire in nearly every one upon whom he called. He was surprised to find how nice people were generally. He had before known people mainly in the mass, as publics, as audiences, or congregations. Now he began to know them as individuals, and to like them, to conceive a sort of social passion for them, and to desire fervently to do all men good. With this went the knowledge that he was becoming socially very skillful, and a sense of still increasing personal power peppered his veins with the sparkle of new hopes. Ambition flamed once more. The king in his soul was alive again. He could not only meet people, but handle them. He felt that as a politician he could win votes, as a lawyer he could sway juries.

He might even turn again to the stage, with the prospect of swifter and surer success; but he had begun to discover that one cannot go back, that no life ever flows up-stream.

Yet the thing which really made the stage career no longer possible was this sense of new powers grown up within him that were not mimetic, but creative and constructive, and which would insistently demand some other form of expression.

Besides, the perspective of his life was now long enough for him to look back and see how all his experiences had enriched him. His very awkwardness, his temporary blindness, his dramatic ambition, the calamity which shattered that career and made him a seller of books, each had been a step into power. His passion for Marien even, while it was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which taught him self-control and made his love for Bessie a tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher devotion than it could otherwise have been.

This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and half-religious, that his existence was being ordered for him by a power above his own. The effect of this was to increase his eager zest for life itself. He lived excitedly, hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him from behind the next corner.

Meantime, he was making money. Within six months all the bills were paid and he had more than a thousand dollars in the bank. Rose was out of the sanitarium and, with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on the slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting sun flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide ocean rolled always in the distance.

John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come when he could go back to Bessie and tell her of his love. The past seemed very far past indeed. The memory of those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to Marien Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced slumber into which he had sunk but once, and from which he had awakened forever.

Letters had passed frequently between himself and Bessie. On his part, these were carefully studied and almost devoutly restrained in expression; but none the less freighted in every line with the fervor of his growing devotion to her.

On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively rich with the essence of her own happy, effervescent self as they had always been. She had expressed a loyal sympathy with him in the shattering of his stage career, but had commended him for his renunciation, while through the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to discover for the first time that Bessie's concurrence in his dramatic ambitions was never without misgivings. True, she had told him this once, but it was when he had been too deaf to hear. What pleased John most in this correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost from letter to letter, which the big man felt revealed her perception of his growing love for her.

Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that made it seem as though his love for Bessie had always been a part of his life, and the impulse to declare it a legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown slowly towards perfection.