The Debatable Land Part 8

"Didn't the nautilus have a very beautiful sh.e.l.l?" Mrs. Mavering spoke in a low voice. "If you ask me, I don't think human life is better than music. I think music is the better of the two." Gard seemed mutely to understand her, and was silent a moment as if to let the shadow pa.s.s, then said:

"Music is a little like the nautilus-sh.e.l.l, isn't it?--the venturous bark that flings its purple wings in gulfs enchanted, and all that. But isn't 'all that' rather a foolish thing to do forever? Purple wings in enchanted gulfs--it's a narrow experience when you come to think of it."

Gard rose to go, but stood a moment looking at the two, as if he wanted to fix the picture of them and carry it away; of the woman with heavy hair, in a black-and-red dress, who gave the impression of wearing jewelry and really wore none, and the girl in white with a blue band at her throat, slim hands that somehow looked so strong, and gray eyes that demanded candor and offered imaginations. The firelight played over them as if it were trying to ill.u.s.trate the subject, saying, "This is worth while to understand."

"Do you know there's a war coming?" said Gard. "Trumpets and drums are in the air."

After that he went away, and through the blowing storm along Philip's road to his rooms, which looked out on the law school square. The front room was full of the traces and tokens of the six years past, indicating what the mental life then had been, but not very clearly what result had come out of it all. There were books in number and confusion, as if he did not care for them in a bookish way, but only as mines, clefts, or fissures where metals are sometimes to be found--and if found and dug out, the source has no more personal value. There were some lounging-chairs, a desk with a litter of sheet-music and scored ma.n.u.script.

Gard's face was whiter and thinner than of old. It was noticeably white, with heavy eyelids, and the peculiar curve of hair-line that Moselle once noticed. One might fancy a trace of the cloister in it, not in anything that could be called clerical, but in something that could be called isolated. If there is manifestation in all faces of the spirit within, it would have seemed to manifest a certain separateness; as if, having learned in the cloister, at the age when one takes fundamental impressions, that a man is nothing else noticeable than a soul alone, with the eternities watching and the one issue of its salvation before it, he had never been rid of that sense of things, but had only altered his conception of the issue, and so the terms of description and the method of pursuit. This sense of things, of life as a kind of personal adventure, a kind of fortune-hunting after an ideal of self-culture, an ambition for a mental career rather than one apparent outwardly to men, may have sprung from far back in his nature and been of precloistral origin, come slowly of late years to a theory. The peculiarity of his coming, as one dropped out of a darker cloud than most men come from into the light of consciousness, may have added to this dim sense of isolation, of adventure, of destiny experimenting more definitely with him, of eternities more watchful. Not that he compared himself in that way with other men. The comparison, if it had occurred to him, would not have seemed interesting, or bearing on the issue. To each belonged his independent adventure; each was at the same time an end to himself and a means to other people.

Such progress and pilgrimage had its own perils, excitements, and new landscapes opening unexpectedly.

The picture that remained in Gard's mind of Mrs. Mavering and Helen seemed to him significant of something--Helen looking up with question and appeal to the older woman, the coloring, the firelight. She had brave eyes, that girl. One ought to see more of women. Mrs. Mavering looked like a kind of imperial exile. He sat down at the piano and touched a key thoughtfully. They signified something, surely, if one could put it into form. He wondered what had become of Mavering. Fritz Moselle was growing apoplectic, and people were talking about war. If old orders were changing, it was probably time they changed.

Chapter IX

Of Estates in Happiness

"In point of fact," said Thaddeus, "I am proposing a partners.h.i.+p, to be ent.i.tled 'The Helen Banking and Brokerage Company,' organized to do business for a commission."

"I don't know that I understand," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly.

"We make investments at interest, speculate in futures, examine securities." He paused, seeking precision of phrase. "It is in terms of happiness. One pursues it--happiness. One sees fortunes in it lost and fortunes won. I find I have spent my own capital. I have to be content with a commission."

But then it was not evident that Mrs. Mavering need be in the same case.

It would be poor taste to seem to a.s.sume it. "In point of fact," she suggested a h.o.a.rded wealth, an unknown, mysterious sum in reserve, rather than even poverty in respect to a future. But she might be allowed to express for herself the terms of her profit.

"I think I understand now," she said.

Her veil had little beads of moisture on it from the damp March wind that blew down Shannon Street in their faces. The gutters were slushy running streams, the elms shook their branches restlessly, as if full of the sweet pains of stirring sap and the coming birth of leaves.

"Acting," continued Thaddeus, "in behalf of the Helen estate, which I believe, I trust, will prove large, but is, I think, I fear--"

"You think uncertain?"

"Doubtless uncertain. There are elements of uncertainty. And in this matter I must confess myself only a man, a sad limitation. Mrs.

Mavering; somewhat elderly, too; and so, one who feels he must husband his slender resources. I fear I depend very much on that commission. I fear the bankruptcy of that estate would be disastrous for me."

Mrs. Mavering drew her veil closer, and they walked on a few moments in silence. Then she ventured:

"Uncertain, of course; but you spoke of elements."

"I might mention, in regard to the nature of it at present, a certain impetuosity, a determination, a loyalty perhaps a little too inflexible.

Flexibility is, so to speak, to have a good portion of one's capital near by for emergencies. I might mention, to speak technically, as a liability, a certain Morgan Map."

"But that," said she, hurriedly--"I mean. I know him only slightly, but Helen said--"

"You would wish me to convince you that he is liability rather than an a.s.set."

"Why not convince her?"

"Ah, but there! Might it not--I have tested, I fear it would, I ask your better intuition--might not the attempt, if made seriously, defeat its end by rousing that loyalty, giving perhaps direction and opportunity to that--that inflexibility?"

"It might."

Thaddeus lifted a neatly gloved hand, and cane swinging between the fingers.

"To be flexible, to adapt oneself. There are so many doors, it is well not to be too absolutely one kind of key. I have heard a phrase, which appears to be a recent discovery--this phrase, 'The survival of the fittest.' It was explained to me, who am not profound, I confess. Dear me, no; nor a reader of new books. But I understood it to mean the survival of that which fits, the introduction of order by the elimination of the disorderly, of the--a--antagonistic, and so the final result of a race and a world to fit each other like hand and glove. A happy consummation."

"But Helen--"

"Exactly. Helen's ancestors--my own, too; how singular! They cultivated a characteristic--a tendency to martyrdom. I believe a certain Bourn was put to death in the sixteenth century for obdurate persistence in a proscribed opinion. Probably later, in New England, some of them were by their neighbors said to be 'sot.' My brother was an obdurately unhappy person."

"But this Morgan Map?"

"An aboriginal, an anachronism. He belongs in the primeval wilderness with other--pardon me--brutes. His father had a singular opinion of him--a--that reminds me; he had a very singular opinion, very singular."

Thaddeus mused a moment.

"Mrs. Mavering, will you dine with us on Wednesday?"

They came to the corner of Charles Street, and parted at Mrs. Mavering's door.

To obtain a small measure of happiness as a commission for managing another person's estate in the same kind of property! She wondered if Thaddeus were not really a wise man, who made a pretext of frivolity. He seemed to have definite theories of things. It might be his rapid and light manner was part of his wisdom and his theory, as if he had found it the part of wisdom not to look gravely and long at any phase of human life. Who knows what might be disclosed, for all depths are black and threatening. One should touch surfaces and slip away before the depths boil up. If Thaddeus had really attained skill and success, it was something to admire. For herself, she seemed to have failed. She had stirred the depths and had not found them on the whole pleasant.

Thaddeus's house was four-square, of a yellowish stucco, with a raised entrance and a windowed cupola. They built so, and so decorated within, when they endeavored to build decoratively, a half century or more ago; they impressed a generation following with a hunted, persistent sense that in some manner a marble mantel, a plaster ornament on the ceiling, an ormolu clock, a flowered carpet, and china figurines with neat stockings, were the types and accepted symbols of earthly splendor.

Plush upholstery was a proper thing in Thaddeus's day, and Thaddeus had it. He desired the presence of that which was fit, accepted, not provocative of dispute.

And so his little dinner of five pa.s.sed fitly. He manipulated Gard to the piano, Helen near by, Morgan in position to observe her, and Mrs.

Mavering in position to observe all. He drew his chair near Mrs.

Mavering and smiled a wrinkled smile of content. He felt creative with respect to the situation, a strategist who had securely arranged how the enemy should act.

"He will growl," he said to Mrs. Mavering, softly; "the bristles will rise on his spine. My dear Mrs. Mavering, a primary egotist is an impossible person out of the jungle."

Mrs. Mavering thought she could see why Morgan suggested to Thaddeus such terms as "primitive," "aboriginal." There was something rugged and rough-hewn evident in the first place, a ma.s.siveness of antediluvian bone, such as they dig from the clay banks of rivers. "We are all egotists," was Thaddeus's theory, "but the primary won't do." He is savage and solitary, too direct, too elemental. He jumps to his aim. He does not care, so he gets it, what happens in between. He does not care for minor points. But civilization is a system of minor points. He has no sympathy, cannot move from his footing an inch to take another point of view. Doubtless he will lie and betray, for they are minor points of method, and faith and truth are social products. At least, he will not notice what he may happen incidentally to step on, or what becomes of an opposition after it is sufficiently smashed. "Why," he asked, primitively, "why should I?"

But Mrs. Mavering thought all this seemed an airy structure, built on a theory which was very likely a prejudice.

Gard was playing something martial, with the shrilling of fifes, the mutter of drums in it, and the measured tramp of feet. He was looking at Helen to see if she knew what he meant, because one liked to look at her, no doubt; it seemed to justify itself; but more particularly because he had fancied of late that her face was a kind of magic mirror, such as enchanters used to raise upon by incantation their pictured prophecies, and that he was become able to summon to it the shadows and counterparts of his moods, and watch the brightening and darkening of himself in reflection.

When he would come from the organ-loft, find her with Mrs. Mavering in the dark under the gallery by the stone pillar, and the three go out across the yard to Mrs. Mavering's house, he always found that Helen's interpretations, however wide they might be from his own in point of verbal symbols and form of allegory, followed the mood with accurate detail. Only the mirror tended to add moral judgments, or to subst.i.tute the terms, right and wrong, for beautiful and ugly, for harmony and discord, and in that respect appeared to be inaccurate. Still, it enabled him to realize himself with curious vividness.

Helen's face was flushed. Presently Gard became absorbed and looked at it no longer. He was trying to get not merely the sound of the marching, the ripple of the flags, and the elation of the crowds, but something about devotion and the spirit of the nation s.h.i.+ning like the sun on the faces of its soldiers. Mrs. Mavering, too, turned from Helen, and noticed how thickly Morgan's yellow eyebrows were knit above his eyes, which seemed to have a kind of green glare in them. They were fixed on Helen. A sudden memory shot through Mrs. Mavering's mind like a sharp pain--she s.h.i.+vered. Thaddeus noted it.