IN THE FOLLY OF HIS YOUTH

At early twilight Bernal, sore at heart for the pain he had been obliged to cause the old man, went to the study-door for a last word with him.

“I believe there is no one above whose forgiveness I need, sir ­but I shall always be grieved if I can’t have yours.  I do need that.”

The old man had stood by the open door as if meaning to cut short the interview.

“You have it.  I forgive you any hurt you have done me; it was due quite as much to my limitations as to yours.  For that other forgiveness, which you will one day know is more than mine ­I ­I shall always pray for that.”

He stopped, and the other waited awkwardly, his heart rushing out in ineffectual flood against the old man’s barrier of stern restraint.  For a moment he made folds in his soft hat with a fastidious precision.  Finally he nerved himself to say calmly: 

“I thank you, sir, for all you have done ­all you have ever done for me and for Allan ­and, good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

Though there was no hint of unkindness in the old man’s voice, something formal in his manner had restrained the other from offering his hand.  Still loath to go without it, he said again more warmly: 

“Good-bye, sir!”

“Good-bye!”

This time he turned and went slowly down the dim hall, still making the careful folds in his hat, as if he might presently recall something that would take him back.  At the foot of the stairs he stopped quickly to listen, believing he had heard a call from above; but nothing came and he went out.  Still in the door upstairs was the old man ­stern of face, save that far back in his eyes a kind spirit seemed to strive ineffectually.

Across the lawn from her hammock Nancy called to Bernal.  He went slowly toward her, still suffering from the old man’s coldness ­and for the hurts he had unwittingly put upon him.

The girl, as he went forward, stood to greet him, her gown, sleeveless, neckless, taking the bluish tinge that early twilight gives to snow, a tinge that deepened to dusk about her eyes and in her hair.  She gave him her hand and at once he felt a balm poured into his tortured heart.  After all, men were born to hurt and be hurt.

He sat in the rustic chair opposite the hammock, looking into Nancy’s black-lashed eyes of the Irish gray, noting that from nineteen to twenty her neck had broadened at the base the least one might discern, that her face was less full yet richer in suggestion ­her face of the odds and ends when she did not smile.  At this moment she was not only unsmiling, but excited.

“Oh, Bernal, what is it?  Tell me quick.  Allan was so vague ­though he said he’d always stand by you, no matter what you did.  What have you done, Bernal?  Is it a college scrape?”

“Oh, that’s only Allan’s big-hearted way of talking!  He’s so generous and loyal I think he’s often been disappointed that I didn’t do something, so he could stand by me.  No ­no scrapes, Nance, honour bright!”

“But you’re leaving ­”

“Well, in a way I have done something.  I’ve found I couldn’t be a minister as Grandad had set his heart on my being ­”

“But if you haven’t done anything wicked, why not?”

“Oh, I’m not a believer.”

“In what?”

“In anything, I think ­except, well, in you and Grandad and ­and Allan and Clytie ­yes, and in myself, Nance.  That’s a big point.  I believe in myself.”

“And you’re going because you don’t believe in other things?”

“Yes, or because I believe too much ­just as you like to put it.  I demanded a better God of Grandad, Nance ­one that didn’t create hell and men like me to fill it just for the sake of scaring a few timid mortals into heaven.”

“You know Aunt Bell is an unbeliever.  She says no one with an open mind can live twenty years in Boston without being vastly broadened ­’broadening into the higher unbelief,’ she calls it.  She says she has passed through nearly every stage of unbelief there is, but that she feels the Lord is going to bring her back at last to rest in the shadow of the Cross.”

As Aunt Bell could be heard creaking heavily in a willow rocker on the piazza near-by, the young man suppressed a comment that arose within him.

“Only, unbelievers are apt to be fatiguing” the girl continued, in a lower tone.  “You know Aunt Bell’s husband, Uncle Chester ­the meekest, dearest little man in the world, he was ­well, once he disappeared and wasn’t heard of again for over four years ­except that they knew his bank account was drawn on from time to time.  Then, at last, his brother found him, living quietly under an assumed name in a little town outside of Boston ­pretending that he hadn’t a relative in the world.  He told his brother he was just beginning to feel rested.  Aunt Bell said he was demented.  While he was away she’d been all through psychometry, the planchette, clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology, and Unitarianism.  What are you, Bernal?”

“Nothing, Nance ­that’s the trouble.”

“But where are you going, and what for?”

“I don’t know either answer ­but I can’t stay here, because I’m blasphemous ­it seems ­and I don’t want to stay, even if I weren’t sent.  I want to be out ­away.  I feel as if I must be looking for something I haven’t found.  I suspect it’s a fourth dimension to religion.  They have three ­even breadth ­but they haven’t found faith yet ­a faith that doesn’t demand arbitrary signs, parlour-magic, and bloody, weird tales in a book that becomes their idol.”

The girl looked at him long in silence, swaying a little in the hammock, a bare elbow in one hand, her meditative chin in the other, the curtains of her eyes half-drawn, as if to let him in a little at a time before her wonder.  Then, at last: 

“Why, you’re another Adam ­being sent out of the garden for your sin.  Now tell me ­honest ­was the sin worth it?  I’ve often wondered.”  She gave an eager little laugh.

“Why, Nance, it’s worth so much that you want to go of your own accord.  Do you suppose Adam could have stayed in that fat, lazy, silly garden after he became alive ­with no work, no knowledge, no adventure, no chance to do wrong?  As for earning his bread ­the only plausible hell I’ve ever been able to picture is one where there was nothing to do ­no work, no puzzling, no chances to take, no necessity of thinking.  Now, isn’t that an ideal hell?  And is it my fault if it happens to be a description of what Christians look forward to as heaven?  I tell you, Adam would have gone out of that garden from sheer boredom after a few days.  The setting of the angel with the flaming sword to guard the gate shows that God still failed to understand the wonderful creature he had made.”

She smiled, meditative, wondering.

“I dare say, for my part, I’d have eaten that apple if the serpent had been at all persuasive.  Bernal, I wonder ­and wonder ­and wonder ­I’m never done.  And Aunt Bell says I’ll never be a sweet and wholesome and stimulating companion to my husband, if I don’t stop being so vague and fantastic.”

“What does she call being vague and fantastic?”

“Not wanting any husband.”

“Oh!”

“Bernal, it’s like the time that you ran off when you were a wee thing ­to be bad.”

“And you cried because I wouldn’t take you with me.”

“I can feel the woe of it yet.”

“You’re dry-eyed now, Nance.”

“Yes ­and the pink parasol and the buff shoes I meant to take with me are also things of the past.  Mercy!  The idea of going off with an unbeliever to be bad and ­everything!  ’The happy couple are said to look forward to a life of joyous wickedness, several interesting crimes having been planned for the coming season.  For their honeymoon infamy they will perpetrate a series of bank-robberies along the Maine coast.’  There ­how would that sound?”

“You’re right, Nance ­I wouldn’t take you this time either, even if you cried.  And your little speech is funny and all that ­but Nance, I believe, these last years, we’ve both thought of things now and then ­things, you know ­things to think of and not talk of ­and see here ­The man was driven out of the garden ­but not the woman.  She isn’t mentioned.  She could stay there ­”

“Until she got tired of it herself?”

“Until the man came back for her.”

He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.

“I wonder ­wonder about so many things,” she said softly.

“I believe you’re a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance.  If ever you do eat from that tree, there’ll be no holding you.  You won’t wait to be driven forth!”

“And you are, a wicked young man ­that kind never comes back in the stories.”

“That may be no jest, Nance.  I should surely be wicked, if I thought it brings the happiness it’s said to.  Under this big sky I am free from any moral law that doesn’t come from right here inside me.  Can you realize that?  Do I seem bad for saying it?  What they call the laws of God are nothing.  I suspect them all, and I’ll make every one of them find its authority in me before I obey it.”

“It sounds ­well ­unpromising, Bernal.”

“I told you it was serious, Nance.  I see but one law clearly ­I am bound to want happiness.  Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance.  No man can possibly want anything else.  That’s the only thing under heaven I’m sure of at this moment ­the one universal law under which we all make our mistakes ­good people and bad alike?”

“But, Bernal, you wouldn’t be bad ­not really bad?”

“Well, Nance, I’ve a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn’t really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth.  I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be.”

“You make me afraid, Bernal ­”

“But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?”

“ ­and you make me wonder.”

“I think that’s all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go.  I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet.  The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there’s a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her.  She says grandad evaded her questions about it.  She doesn’t dream there are depths below Unitarianism.  I must try to convince her that I’m not that bad ­that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that.  Nance ­girl!”

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her.  She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself ­as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose.  The girl patted from her skirts the hammock’s little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat.  Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young lust for living ­too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat ­the song Nature sings unendingly ­but heard only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.

“That elder young Linford,” began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, “has a future.  You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly advising him to enter it.  For all my broad views” ­Aunt Bell sighed here ­“I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian is ever thoroughly at ease in this world.”

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of smartness ­of coquetry, indeed ­as to her exquisitely small hands and feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

“Of course this young chap could see at once,” she went on, “what immensely better form it is than Calvinism. Dear me!  Imagine one being a Presbyterian in this day!” It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

“And he tells me that he has his grandfather’s consent.  Really, my dear, with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a future in the Episcopal Church.  I dare say he’ll be wearing the lawn sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he’s forty.”

“Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is ­well, just the least trifle ­I was going to say, vain of his appearance ­but I’ll make it ’self-conscious’?”

“Child, don’t you know that a young man, really beautiful without being effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it.  But vain he is not.  It mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it.”

“But why speak of it so often?  He was telling me to-day of an elderly Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth.”

“Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store ask the clerk who ‘that handsome stranger’ was.  But, my dear, he tells them as jokes on himself, and he’s so sheepish about it.  And he’s such a splendid orator.  I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college papers.  I don’t seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of the most beautiful expressions.  One, I remember, begins, ’Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of ­’ you know I’ve forgotten what it was ­Civilisation or Truth or something.  Anyway, whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, and so on.”

“That seems impressive and ­mixed, perhaps?”

“Of course I can’t remember things in their order, but it was about the essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world’s cold cheek to make it burn forever ­isn’t that striking?  And Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities?  And Rome, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour.  Of course I can’t recall his words.  There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South ­and a perfectly splendid passage about the world is and ever has been illiberal.  Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney ­Sidney who, I wonder?”

“Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?”

“And France, the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man ­”

“Spare me, Aunt Bell ­it’s like Coney Island, with all those carrousels going around and five bands playing at once!”

“But his peroration!  I can’t pretend to give you any idea of its beauties ­”

“Don’t!”

“Get him to declaim it for you.  It begins in the most impressive language about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far below.  So he watches the storm ­in his own language, of course ­while all around him is sunshine.  And such should be our aim in life, to plant our feet on the solid rock of ­how provoking!  I can’t remember what the rock was ­anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up to the rock ­I think it was Intellectual Greatness ­No! ­Unselfishness ­that’s it.  And the title of the paper was a sermon in itself ­’The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of Morality.’  Isn’t that a beautiful thought in itself?  Nancy, that chap will waste himself until he has a city parish.”

There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having returned to baser matters: 

“I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor.  I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came.”

And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered: 

“Oh, I wonder if he will come back!”