“Oh, if I only had my little baby—to take away!”
15
Fallows stood forward on the ferry that night and considered the whole New York episode. He had done his work. He had told the Ploughman story five times. It was just the sowing. He might possibly come back for the harvest.... He had another story to tell now. Could he ever tell it without breaking?... He had tortured his brain to make things clear for Morning and for men. He realized that a man who implants a complete concept in another intelligence and prevents it from withering until roots are formed and fruitage is assured, performs a miracle, no less; because, if the soil were ready, the concept would come of itself. He had driven his brain by every torment to make words perform this miracle on a large scale.
And this little listening creature he had just left—she had taken his idea, finished it for him, and involved it in action. To her it was the Cross. She had carried it to Golgotha, and sunk upon it with outstretched palms.... There was an excellence about Betty Berry that amazed him, in that it was in the world.... He had not called such women to him, because such women were not the answer to his desires. He realized with shame that a man only knows the women who answer in part the desires of his life. Those who had come to him were fitted to the plane of sensation upon which he had lived so many years. He had condemned all women because, in the weariness of the flesh, he had suddenly risen to perceive the falsity of his affinities of the flesh. “What boys we are!” he whispered, “in war and women and work—what boys!”
Betty Berry had taught him a lesson, quite as enormous to his nature as the Ploughman’s. A man who thinks of women only in sensuousness encounters but half-women. He had learned it late, but well, that a man in this world may rise to heights far above his fellows in understanding, but that groups of women are waiting on all the higher slopes of consciousness for their sons and brothers and lovers to come up. They pass their time weaving laurel-leaves for the brows of delayed valiants....
Duke thought of the men he had seen afield, the gravity with which these men did their great fighting business, the world talking about them. Then he thought of the little visionary in her room accepting her tragedy....
Even now, in the hush and back-swing of the pendulum, it seemed very true what he had said. She had seen it. It is dangerous business to venture to change the current of other lives; no one knew it better than Fallows. But he considered Morning. Morning, as it were, had been left on his door-step. Morning would be alone now—alone to listen and receive his powers.... Fallows looked up from the black water to the far-apart pickets of the wintry night. He was going home.
The cabin was lit. Fallows climbed the hill wearily. There was a certain sharpness as of treachery from his night’s work, but to that larger region of mind, open to selfishness and the passion to serve men, peace had come. He was going home, first to San Francisco—then to the Bosks and the little boy.
Morning arose quickly at the sound of the step on the hard ground, and opened the door wide. He had been reading her letter, which Fallows had left upon the table. The letter had been like an added hour with her. It was full of shy joy, full of their perfect accord, remote from the world—its road and stone-piles and evasions.... Fallows saw that he looked white and wasted. The red of the firelight did not mislead his eye. Its glow was not Morning’s and did not blend with the pallor.