Gargoyle

== GARGOYLE ==
=== By Edwina Babcock ===
From Harper's Magazine 1920
Gargoyle
stole up the piazza steps. His arms were full of field flowers. He stood there
staring over his burden.
A hush fell upon tea- and card-tables. The
younger women on the Strang veranda glanced at one another. The girl at the
piano hesitated in her light stringing of musical sentences.
John Strang rose. "Not now, Gargoyle,
old man." Taking the flowers from the thin hands, he laid them on the rug
at his wife's feet, then gently motioned the intruder away. Gargoyle flitted
contentedly down the broad steps to the smooth drive, and was soon hidden by
masses of rhododendron on the quadrangle.
Only one guest raised questioning eyebrows
as Strang resumed his seat. This girl glanced over his shoulder at the aimless
child straying off into the trees.
"I should think an uncanny little
person like that would get on Mrs. Strang's nerves; he gives me the
creeps!"
"Yes? Mrs. Strang is hardly as
sensitive as you might suppose. What do you say of a lady who enjoys putting
the worms on her shrinking husband's hook? Not only that, but who banters the
worms, telling them it's all for their own good?"
The mistress of Heartholm, looking over at
the two, shook a deprecating head. But Strang seemed to derive amusement from
the guest's disapproval.
Mockwood, where the Strangs lived, had its
impressiveness partly accounted for by the practical American name of
"residential park." This habitat, covering many thousands of acres,
gave evidence of the usual compromise
between fantastic wealth and over-reached restraint. Polished automobiles
gliding noiselessly through massed purple and silver shrubberies, receded into
bland glooms of well-thought-out boscage. The architecture, a judicious mixture
of haughty roofs and opulent chimneys, preened itself behind exclusive screens
of wall and vine, and the entire frontage of Mockwood presented a polished
elegance which did not entirely conceal a silent plausibility of expense.
At Heartholm, the Strangs' place, alone, had
the purely conventional been smitten in its smooth face. The banker's country
home was built on the lines of his own physical height and mental breadth.
Strang had flung open his living-rooms to vistas of tree branches splashing
against the morning blue. His back stairs were as aspiring as the Apostles' Creed,
and his front stairs as soaring as the Canticle to the Sun. As he had laid out
his seven-mile drive on a deer track leading to a forest spring, so had he
spoken for his flowers the word, which, though it freed them from the prunes
and prisms of a landscape gardener, held them, glorified vassals, to their
original masters, sun and rain.
Strang and his love for untrammeled nature
were hard pills for Mockwooders to swallow. Here was a man who, while he kept
one on the alert, was to be deplored; who homesteaded squirrels, gave rabbits
their own licentious ways, was whimsically tolerant of lichens, mushrooms, and vagabond
vines. This was also the man who, when his gardener's wife gave birth to a deaf
and dumb baby, encouraged his own wife to make a pet of the unfortunate
youngster, and when he could walk gave him his freedom of the Heartholm acres.
It was this sort of thing, Mockwooders
agreed, that "explained" the Strangs. It was the desultory gossip of
fashionable breakfast tables how Evelyn Strang was frequently seen at the
gardener's cottage, talking to the poor mother about her youngest. The
gardener's wife had other children, all strong and hearty. These went to
school, survived the rigors of "regents" examinations, and were
beginning to talk of "accepting" positions. There would never be any
position for little Gargoyle, as John Strang called him, to "accept."
"Let the child run about," the
village doctors had advised. "Let him run about in the sun and make
himself useful."
But people who "run about in the
sun" are seldom inclined to make themselves useful, and no one could make
Gargoyle so. It would have been as well to try to train woodbine to draw water
or to educate cattails to write Greek. The little boy spent all of the day
idling; it was a curious, Oriental sort of idling. Callers at Heartholm grew disapprovingly
accustomed to the sight of the grotesque face and figure peering through the
shrubberies; they shrugged their shoulders impatiently, coming upon the
recumbent child dreamily gazing at his own reflection in the lily-pond, looking
necromantically out from the molten purple of a wind-blown beech, or standing
at gaze in a clump of iris.
Strang with his amused laugh fended off all
protest and neighborly advice.
"That's Gargoyle's special variety of
hashish. He lives in a flower-harem--in a five-year-old Solomon's Song. I've
often seen the irises kowtowing to him, and his attitude toward them is
distinctly personal and lover-like. If that little chap could only talk there
would be some fun, but what Gargoyle thinks would hardly fit itself to words--besides,
then"--Strang twinkled at the idea--"none of us would fancy having
him around with those natural eyes--that undressed little mind."
It was in good-humored explanations like
this that the Strangs managed to conceal their real interest in Gargoyle. They
did not remind people of their only child, the brave boy of seven, who died
before they came to Mockwood. Under the common sense that set the two instantly
to work building a new home, creating new associations, lay the everlasting
pain of an old life, when, as parents of a son, they had seemed to tread springier
soil, to breathe keener, more vital air. And, though the Strangs adhered
patiently to the recognized technicalities of Mockwood existence, they never
lost sight of a hope, of which, against the increasing evidence of worldly
logic, their human hearts still made ceaseless frantic attestation.
Very slowly, but very constructively, it
had become a fierce though governed passion with both--to learn something of
the spiritual life coursing back of the material universe. Equally slowly and
inevitably had the two come to believe that the little changeling at the lodge
held some wordless clue, some unconscious knowledge as to that outer sphere, that
surrounding, peopled ether, in which, under their apparent rationality, the two
had come to believe. Yet the banker and his wife stood to Mockwooders for no
special cult or fad; it was only between themselves that their quest had become
a slowly developing motive.
"Gargoyle was under the rose-arbor
this morning." It was according to custom that Evelyn Strang would relate
the child's latest phase. "He sat there without stirring such a long time
that I was fascinated. I noticed that he never picked a rose, never smelled
one. The early sun fell slanting through their petals till they glowed like
thin little wheels of fire. John dear, it was that scalloped fire which
Gargoyle was staring at. The flowers seemed to lean toward him, vibrating color
and perfumes too delicate for me to hear. _I_ only saw and smelled the flowers;
Gargoyle looked as if he _felt_ them! Don't laugh; you know we look at flowers
because when we were little, people always said, 'See the pretty flower, smell
the pretty flower,' but no one said, 'Listen and see if you can hear the flower
grow; be still and see if you can catch the flower speaking.'"
Strang never did laugh, never brushed away
these fantastic ideas. Settling back in his piazza chair, his big hands locked
together, he would listen, amusing himself with his pet theory of Gargoyle's "undressed
mind."
"By the way," he said once,
"that reminds me, have you ever seen our young Solomon of the flower-harem
smile?"
"Of course I haven't; neither have
you." Young Mrs. Strang averred it confidently. "He never has smiled,
poor baby, nor cried--his mother told me that long ago."
The banker kept his eyes on the treetops;
he had his finger-tips nicely balanced before he remarked, with seeming irrelevance:
"You know that nest in the tree we
call the Siegfried tree?"
She nodded.
"The other day a bird fell out of it,
one of the young ones, pushed out by a housecleaning mother, I suppose. It
killed the poor little feathered gawk. I saw Gargoyle run, quick as a flash,
and pick it up. He pushed open the closing eyes, tried to place the bird on a
hollyhock stalk, to spread its wings, in every way to give it motion. When,
after each attempt, he saw it fall to the ground, he stood still, looking at it
very hard. Suddenly, to my surprise, he seemed to understand something, to
_comprehend_ it fully and delightedly. He laughed." Strang stopped,
looking intently at his wife.
"I can imagine that laugh," she
mused.
Strang shook his head. "I don't think
you can. It--it wasn't pleasant. It was as uncanny as the rest of the little
chap--a long, rattling, eerie sound, as if a tree should groan or a butterfly
curse; but wait--there's more." In his earnestness Strang sat up, adding,
"Then Gargoyle got up and stretched out his hands, not to the sky, but to
the air all around him. It was as if--" Here Strang, the normal, healthy
man of the world, hesitated; it was only the father of the little boy who had
died who admitted in low tones: "You would have said--At least even _I_
could imagine that Gargoyle--well--that he _saw_ something like a released
principle of life fly happily back to its main source--as if a little mote like
a sunbeam should detach itself from a clod and, disembodied, dart back to its
law of motion."
For a long time they were silent, listening
to the call of an oven-bird far back in the spring trees. At last Strang got
up, filled his pipe, and puffed at it savagely before he said, "Of course
the whole thing's damned nonsense." He repeated that a little brutally to
his wife's silence before in softened voice he added, "Only, perhaps
you're right, Evelyn; perhaps we, too, should be seeing that kind of thing, understanding
what, God knows, we long to understand, if we had 'undressed minds,' if we
hadn't from earliest infancy been smeared all over with the plaster-of-Paris of
'normal thinking.'"
Time flew swiftly by. The years at
Heartholm were tranquil and happy until Strang, taken by one of the swift
maladies which often come to men of his type, was mortally stricken. His wife
at first seemed to feel only the strange ecstasy that sometimes comes to those
who have beheld death lay its hand on a beloved body. She went coldly, rigidly,
through every detail of the final laying away of the man who had loved her to the
utmost power of his man's heart. Friends waited helplessly, dreading the
furious after-crash of this unnatural mental and bodily endurance. Doctor
Milton, Strang's life-long friend, who had fought for the banker's life,
watched her carefully, but there was no catalepsy, no tranced woman held in a
vise of endurance. Nothing Evelyn Strang did was odd or unnatural, only she
seemed, particularly before the burial, to be waiting intently for some
revelation, toward which her desire burned consumingly, like a powerful flame.
Just before the funeral Strang's sister
came to Doctor Milton.
"Evelyn!" in whispered response
to his concerned look. "Oh, doctor, I cannot think that this calmness is
_right_ for her----" The poor, red-eyed woman, fighting hard for her own composure,
motioned to the room where, with the cool lattices drawn, and a wave of flowers
breaking on his everlasting sleep, the master of Heartholm lay. "She has
gone in there with that little deaf-and-dumb child. I saw her standing with
him, staring all about her. Somehow it seemed to me that Gargoyle was smiling--that
he _saw_ something----!"
For long weeks Doctor Milton stayed on at
Heartholm, caring for Mrs. Strang. From time to time the physician also studied
and questioned Gargoyle. Questioned in verity, for the practiced hand could
feel rigid muscles and undeveloped glands that answered more truthfully than words.
Whatever conclusions 
arrived at, he divulged to no one but Mrs. Strang. What he had to say roused
the desolate woman as nothing else could have done. To the rest of the world
little or nothing was explained. But, after the consent of the mother at the
gardener's cottage had been gained, Doctor Milton left Heartholm, taking
Gargoyle with him.
In the office of Dr. Pauli Mach, the professional
tongue was freed. ,
with the half-quizzical earnestness habitual to him, told his story, which was
followed by the exchange of much interesting data.
The two fell back on the discussion of
various schools where Gargoyle might be put under observation. At last, feeling
in the gravely polite attention of the more eminent man a waning lack of
interest, 
reluctantly concluded the interview.
"I'll write to Mrs. Strang and tell
her your conclusions; she won't accept them--her own husband humored her in the
thing. What John Strang himself believed I never really knew, but I think he
had wisdom in his generation."
stood there, hesitating; he looked abstractedly at the apathetic little
figure of Gargoyle sitting in the chair.
"We talk of inherent human
nature," said the doctor, slowly, "as if we had all knowledge
concerning the _possibilities_ of that nature's best and worst. Yet I have
sometimes wondered if what we call mentally askew people are not those that
possess attributes which society is not wise enough to help them use
wisely--mightn't such people be like fine-blooded animals who sniff land and
water where no one else suspects any? Given a certain kink in a human brain,
and there might result capacity we ought to consider, even if we can't, in our
admittably systematized civilization, utilize it."
The Swiss doctor nodded, magnetic eyes and
mouth smiling.
"Meanwhile"--in his slow, careful
speech--"meanwhile we do what we can to preserve the type which from long
experience we know _wears_ best."
nodded. He moved to go, one hand on Gargoyle's unresponsive shoulder,
when the office door swung open.
"Now this is real trouble,"
laughed a woman's fresh, deep-chested voice. "Doctor Mach, it means using
one of your tall measuring-glasses or permitting these lovely things to wilt;
some one has inundated us with flowers. I've already filled one bath-tub; I've
even used the buckets in the operating-room."
The head nurse stood there, white-frocked,
smiling, her stout arms full of rosy gladioli and the lavender and white of
Japanese iris. The two doctors started to help her with the fragrant burden,
but not before Gargoyle sprang out of his chair. With a start, as if shocked
into galvanic motion, the boy sat upright. With a throttled cry he leaped at the
surprised woman. He bore down upon her flowers as if they had been a life-preserver,
snatching at them as if to prevent himself from being sucked under by some
strange mental undertow. The softly-colored bloom might have had some vital
magnetizing force for the child's blood, to which his whole feeble nature
responded. Tearing the colored mass from the surprised nurse's arms, Gargoyle
sank to the floor. He sat there caressing the flowers, smiling, making uncouth
efforts to speak. The arms that raised him were gentle enough. They made no
attempt to take from him his treasures. They sat him on the table, watching the
little thin hands move ardently, yet with a curious deftness and delicacy, amid
the sheaf of color. As the visionary eyes peered first into one golden-hearted
lily, then into another, Milton felt stir, in spite of himself, Strang's old
conviction of the "undressed mind." He said nothing, but stole a
glance at the face of his superior. Doctor Mach was absorbed. He stood the boy
on the table before him. The nurse stripped Gargoyle, then swiftly
authoritative fingers traveled up and down the small, thin frame.
*     *    
*     *     *
Life at Heartholm went on very much the
same. The tender-hearted observer might have noted that the gardens held the
same flowers year after year, all the perennials and hardy blooms John Strang
had loved. No matter what had been his widow's courageous acceptance of modern stoicism,
the prevailing idea that incurable grief is merely "morbid," yet, in
their own apartments where their own love had been lived, was every mute image
and eloquent trifle belonging to its broken arc. Here, with Strang's books on
occult science, with other books of her own choosing, the wife lived secretly,
unknown of any other human being, the long vigil of waiting for some sign or
word from the spirit of one who by every token of religion and faith she could
not believe dead--only to her wistful earthly gaze, hidden. She also hid in her
heart one strangely persistent hope--namely, Gargoyle! Letters from Doctor
Milton had been full of significance. The last letter triumphantly concluded:
Your young John Strang Berber, alias Gargoyle, can talk now, with      only one drawback: as yet he doesn't know
any words!
The rapidly aging mother at the gardener's
cottage took worldly pride in what was happening to her youngest.
"I allus knowed he was smart,"
the woman insisted. "My Johnny! To think of him speaking his mind out like
any one else! I allus took his part--I could ha' told 'em he had his own
notions!"
There was no doubt as to Gargoyle's having
the "notions." As the slow process of speech was taught and the
miracle of fitting words to things was given unto John Berber, alias Gargoyle,
it was hard for those watching over him to keep the riotous perceptions from
retarding the growing mechanistics. Close-mouthed the boy was, and, they said,
always would be; but watchful eyes and keen intuitions penetrated to the silent
orgies going on within him. So plainly did the fever of his education begin to
wear on his physical frame that wary Doctor Mach shook his head. "Here I
find too many streams of thought coursing through one field," said the
careful Swiss. "The field thus grows stony and bears nothing. Give this
field only one stream that shall be nourishing."
For other supernormal developments that
"one stream" might have been music or sports. For Gargoyle it
happened to be flowers. The botanist with whom he was sent afield not only knew
his science, but guessed at more than his science. His were the beatitudes of
the blue sky; water, rocks, and trees his only living testament. Under his
tutelage, with the eyes of Doctor Mach ever on his growing body, and with his
own special gifts of concentration and perception, at last came to Gargoyle the
sudden whisper of academic sanction--namely, "genius."
He himself seemed never to hear this
whisper. What things--superimposed on the new teeming world of material
actualities--he _did_ hear, he never told. Few could reach Berber; among fellow-students
he was gay, amiable, up to a certain point even frivolous; then, as each
companion in turn complained, a curtain seemed to drop, a colorless wrap of unintelligibility
enveloped him like a chameleon's changing skin; the youth, as if he lived another
life on another plane, walked apart.
Doctor Milton, dropping into the
smoking-room of a popular confrÃƒÂ¨re, got a whiff of the prevailing gossip
about his protÃƒÂ©gÃƒÂ©.
"I'll be hanged if I can associate
psychics with a biceps like Berber's; somehow those things seem the special
prerogative of anemic women in white cheese-cloth fooling with 'planchette' and
'currents.'"
"You've got another guess," a
growling neurologist volunteered. "Why shouldn't psychic freaks have
biceps? We keep forgetting that we've dragged our fifty-year-old carcasses into
an entirely new age--a wireless, horseless, man-flying, star-chasing age. Why,
after shock upon shock of scientific discovery, shouldn't the human brain, like
a sensitive plate, be thinned down to keener, more sensitive, perceptions?"
Some one remarked that in the case of
Berber, born of a simple country woman and her uneducated husband, this was
impossible.
Another man laughed. "Berber may be a
Martian, or perhaps he was originally destined to be the first man on Jupiter.
He took the wrong car and landed on this globe. Why not? How do we know what
agency carries pollen of human life from planet to planet?"
, smiling at it all, withdrew. He sat down and wrote a long-deferred
letter to Mrs. Strang.
I have asked John Berber if he would care to revisit his old home.      It seemed never to have occurred to him
that he _had_ a home! When      I
suggested the thing he followed it up eagerly, as he does every      new idea, asking me many keen questions as
to his relatives, who      had paid for
his education, etc. Of the actual facts of his cure he      knows little except that there was special
functioning out of gear,      and that
now the wheels have been greased. Doctor Mach is      desperately proud of him, especially of
the way in which he      responds to
_normal diversion-environments_ and _friendships_. You      must instruct his mother very carefully as
to references to his      former
condition. It is best that he should not dwell upon the      former condition. Your young friend,
Gargoyle, sees no more spooks.      He is
rapidly developing into a very remarkable and unconceited      horticulturist!
The first few days at Mockwood were spent
at the little gardener's cottage, from which the other youngsters had flown.
Berber, quietly moving about the tiny rooms, sitting buried in a scientific
book or taking long trips afield, was the recipient of much maternal flattery. He
accepted it all very gently; the young culturist had an air of quiet consideration
for every one and absolutely no consciousness of himself. He presumed upon no
special prerogatives, but set immediately to work to make himself useful. It
was while he was weeding the box borders leading to the herb-gardens of
Heartholm that Mrs. Strang first came upon him. Her eyes, suddenly confronted
with his as he got to his feet, dropped almost guiltily, but when they sought
his face a second time, Evelyn Strang experienced a disappointment that was
half relief. The sunburnt youth, in khaki trousers and brown-flannel shirt, who
knelt by the border before her was John Strang Berber, Doctor Mach's human masterpiece;
this was not "Gargoyle."
"That is hardly suitable work for a
distinguished horticulturist," the mistress of Heartholm smiled at the
wilting piles of pusley and sorrel.
White teeth flashed, deep eyes kindled.
Berber rose and, going to a garden seat, took up some bits of glass and a
folded paper. He showed her fragments of weed pressed upon glass plates,
envelopes of seeds preserved for special analyzation. "There's still a
great undiscovered country in weed chemistry," he eagerly explained,
"perhaps an anodyne for every pain and disease."
"Yes, and deadly poisons, too, for
every failure and grief." The mistress of Heartholm said it lightly as she
took the garden seat, thinking how pleasant it was to watch the resolute
movements and splendid physical development of the once weazened Gargoyle. She
began sorting out her embroidery silks as Berber, the bits of glass still in his
hand, stood before her. He was smiling.
"Yes, deadly poisons, too,"
agreeing with a sort of exultation, so blithely, indeed, that the calmly moving
fingers of the mistress of Heartholm were suddenly arrested. A feeling as
powerful and associative as the scent of a strong perfume stole over Evelyn
Strang.
Before she could speak Berber had resumed
his weeding. "It's good to get dictatorship over all this fight of
growing," looking up for her sympathy with hesitance, which, seen in the
light of his acknowledged genius, was the more significant. "You don't
mind my taking Michael's place? He was very busy this morning. I have no
credentials, but my mother seems to think I am a born gardener."
This lack of conceit, this unassuming
practicality, the sort of thing with which Gargoyle's mind had been carefully
inoculated for a long time, baffled, while it reassured Mrs. Strang. Also the
sense of sacred trust placed in her hands made her refrain from any psychic
probing.
For a long while she found it easy to exert
this self-control. The lonely woman, impressed by the marvelous
"cure" of John Berber, magnetized by his youth and sunny enthusiasms
back to the old dreaming pleasure in the Heartholm gardens, might in the
absorbed days to come have forgotten--only there was a man's photograph in her
bedroom, placed where her eyes always rested on it, her hand could bring it to
her lips; the face looking out at her seemed to say but one thing:
"_You knew me--I knew you. What we
knew and were to each other had not only to do with our bodies. Men call me
'dead' but you know that I am not. Why do you not study and work and pray to
learn what I am become, that you may turn to me, that I may reach to
you?_"
Mockwooders, dropping in at Heartholm for
afternoon tea, began to accustom themselves to finding Mrs. Strang sitting near
some flower-bed where John Berber worked, or going with him over his great
books of specimens. The smirk the fashionable world reserves for anything not usual
in its experience was less marked in this case than it might have been in
others. Even those who live in "residential parks" are sometimes forced
(albeit with a curious sense of personal injury) to accept the idea that they
who have greatly suffered find relief in "queer" ways. Mockwooders,
assisting at the Heartholm tea-hour, and noting Berber among other casual
guests, merely felt aggrieved and connoted "queerness."
For almost a year, with the talking over of
plans for John Strang's long-cherished idea of a forest garden at Heartholm,
there had been no allusion between mistress and gardener to that far-off
fantasy, the life of little Gargoyle. During the autumn the two drew plans
together for those spots which next spring were to blossom in the beech glade.
They sent to far-off countries for bulbs, experimented in the Heartholm greenhouses
with special soils and fertilizers, and differences of heat and light; they
transplanted, grafted, and redeveloped this and that woodland native.
Unconsciously all formal strangeness wore away, unconsciously the old bond
between Gargoyle and his mistress was renewed.
Thus it was, without the slightest
realization as to what it might lead, that Evelyn Strang one afternoon made
some trifling allusion to Berber's association with the famous Doctor Mach. As
soon as she had done so, fearing from habit for some possible disastrous
result, she tried immediately to draw away from the subject. But the forbidden
spring had been touched--a door that had long been closed between them swung
open. Young Berber, sorting dahlia bulbs into numbered boxes, looked up; he met
her eyes unsuspiciously.
"I suppose," thoughtfully,
"that that is the man to whom I should feel more grateful than to any
other human being."
The mistress of Heartholm did not reply. In
spite of her tranquil air, Evelyn Strang was gripped with a sudden
apprehension. How much, how little, did Berber know? She glanced swiftly at
him, then bent her head over her embroidery. The colored stream of Indian
summer flowed around them. A late bird poured out his little cup of song.
"My mother will not answer my
questions." Young Berber, examining two curiously formed bulbs, shook the
earth from them; he stuffed them into his trousers pocket. "But Michael
got talking yesterday and told me--Did you know, Mrs. Strang? I was thought to
be an idiot until I was twelve years old--born deaf and dumb?"
It was asked so naturally, with a
scientific interest as impersonal as if he were speaking of one of the
malformed bulbs in his pocket, that at first his mistress felt no confusion.
Her eyes and hands busying themselves with the vivid silks, she answered.
"I remember you as a little pale boy
who loved flowers and did such odd, interesting things with them. Mr. Strang
and I were attracted to your mysterious plays.... No, you never spoke, but we
were not sure you could not hear--and"--drawing a swift little
breath--"we were always interested in what--in what--you seemed--to
_see_!"
There was a pause. He knelt there, busily
sorting the bulbs. Suddenly to the woman sitting on the garden bench the
sun-bathed October gardens seemed alive with the myriad questioning faces of
the fall flowers; wheels and disks like aureoled heads leaned toward her,
mystical fire in their eyes, the colored flames of their being blown by
passionate desire of revelation. "This is your moment," the flowers
seemed to say to her. "Ask him _now_."
But that she might not yet speak out her
heart to John Berber his mistress was sure. She was reminded of what Strang had
so often said, referring to their lonely quest--that actual existence was like
a forlorn shipwreck of some other life, a mere raft upon which, like grave buffoons,
the ragged survivors went on handing one another watersoaked bread of faith,
glassless binoculars of belief, oblivious of what radiant coasts or awful
headlands might lie beyond the enveloping mists. Soon, the wistful woman knew,
she would be making some casual observations about the garden, the condition of
the soil. Yet, if ever the moment had come to question him who had once been
"Gargoyle," that moment was come now!
Berber lifted on high a mass of thickly
welded bulbs clinging to a single dahlia stalk. He met her gaze triumphantly.
"Michael says he planted only a few of
this variety, the soft, gold-hearted lavender. See what increase." The
youth plunged supple fingers into the balmy-scented loam, among the swelling
tuber forms. "A beautiful kind of ugliness," he mused. "I
remember I used to think----" The young gardener, as if he felt that the
eyes fixed upon him were grown suddenly too eager, broke abruptly off.
"Go on, John Berber. What you have to
say is always interesting."
It was said calmly, with almost maternal
encouragement, but the fingers absorbed in the bright silks fumbled and erred.
"Used to think"--words such as these filtered like sunlight to the
hope lying deep in Evelyn Strang's heart.
But young Berber leaned upon his garden
fork, looking past her. Over the youth's face crept a curious expression of
wrapt contemplation, of super-occupation, whether induced by her words or not
she could not tell. Furtively Mrs. Strang studied him.... How soon would he
drop that mystical look and turn to her with the casual "educated"
expression she had come to know so well?
Suddenly, nervousness impelling her, she
broke in upon his revery:
"How wonderful, with such dreams as
you must have had, to be educated! How very grateful you must be to Doctor
Mach."
She heard her own words helplessly, as if
in a dream, and, if the unwisdom of this kind of conversation had impressed the
mistress of Heartholm before, now she could have bitten off her tongue with
that needless speech on it. Young Berber, however, seemed hardly to have heard
her; he stood there, the "Gargoyle" look still in his eyes, gazing past
his mistress into some surrounding mystery of air element. It was to her,
watching him, as if those brooding, dilated pupils might behold, besides
infinitesimal mystery of chemical atoms, other mysteries--colorless pools of
air where swam, like sea anemones, radiant forms of released spirit; invisible
life-trees trembling with luminous fruit of occult being!
When Berber turned this look, naked as a
sword, back to Evelyn Strang, she involuntarily shivered. But the boy's face
was unconscious. His expression changed only to the old casual regard as he
said, very simply:
"You see, I wish they had not educated
me!"
The confession came with inevitable shock.
If she received it with apparent lightness, it was that she might, with all the
powers a woman understands, rise to meet what she felt was coming. The barrier
down, it was comparatively easy to stand in the breach, making her soft note of
deprecation, acknowledging playfully that the stress of so-called "normal"
life must indeed seem a burden to one who had hitherto talked with flowers,
played with shadows. Berber, however, seemed hardly to hear her; there was no
tenseness in the youth's bearing; he merely gazed thoughtfully past her
efforts, repeating:
"No--I wish they had not taught me. I
have not really gained _knowledge_ by being taught."
Mrs. Strang was genuinely puzzled. Yet she
understood; it was merely _theories about life_ that he had gained. Again she
called to mind a sentence in Doctor Milton's letter: "I know that you have
followed the case in such a way as to understand what would be your
responsibility toward this _newly made_ human soul." Was it right to
question Berber? Could it be actually harmful to him to go on? And yet was it
not her only chance, after years of faithful waiting?
Trying to keep her voice steady, she
reproached him:
"No? With all that being educated
means, all the gift for humanity?"
The young fellow seemed not to get her
meaning. He picked up the garden fork. Thoughtfully scraping the damp earth
from its prongs, he repeated, "All that it means for humanity?"
"Why not"--urging the thing a
little glibly--"why not? You can do your part now; you will help toward
the solving of age-long mysteries. You must be steward of--of"--Mrs.
Strang hesitated, then continued, lamely--"of your special insight.
Why--already you have begun--Think of the weed chemistry." Had he noticed it?
There was in her voice a curious note, almost of pleading, though she tried to
speak with authority.
John Berber, once called
"Gargoyle," listened. The youth stood there, his foot resting upon
the fork but not driving it into the ground. He caught her note of anxiety,
laughing in light, spontaneous reassurance, taking her point with ease.
"Oh--I know," shrugging his
shoulders in true collegian's style. "I understand my lesson." Berber
met her look. "I had the gift of mental _unrestraint_, if you choose to
call it that," he summed up, "and was of no use in the world. Now I
have the curse of _mental restraint_ and can participate with others in their
curse." Suddenly aware of her helpless dismay and pain, the boy laughed
again, but this time with a slight nervousness she had never before seen in
him. "Why, we are not in earnest, dear Mrs. Strang." It was with
coaxing, manly respect that he reminded her of that. "We are only joking,
playing with an idea.... I think you can trust me," added John Berber,
quietly.
The surprised woman felt that she could
indeed "trust" him; that Berber was absolutely captain of the self
which education had given him; but that from time to time he had been conscious
of another self he had been unwise enough to let her see. She silently
struggled with her own nature, knowing that were she judicious she would take
that moment to rise and leave him. Such action, however, seemed impossible now.
Here was, perhaps, revelation, discovery! All the convictions of her lonely, brooding
life were on her. Temptation again seized her. With her longing to have some
clue to that spirit world she and her husband had believed in, it seemed
forewritten, imperative, inevitable, that she remain. Trying to control
herself, she fumbled desperately on:
"When you were little, Mr. Strang and
I used to notice--we grew to think--that because you had been shut away from
contact with other minds, because you had never been told _what_ to see, as
children are told, 'Look at the fire,' 'See the water,' and so forever regard
those things in just that way, not seeing--other things--Oh, we thought that perhaps--perhaps----"
It was futile, incoherent; her tongue
seemed to dry in her mouth. Besides, the abashed woman needs must pause before
a silence that to her strained sense seemed rebuking. She glanced furtively up
at the youth standing there. It troubled the mistress of Heartholm to realize
that her protÃƒÂ©gÃƒÂ© was staring gravely at her, as if she had proposed some guilty
and shameful thing.
At last Berber, with a boyish sigh, seemed
to shake the whole matter off. He turned to his bulbs; half at random he caught
up a pruning-knife, cutting vindictively into one of them. For the moment there
was silence, then the young gardener called his mistress's attention to the severed
root in his hand.
"A winy-looking thing, isn't it? See
those red fibers? Why shouldn't such roots, and nuts like those great,
burnished horse-chestnuts there--yes, and cattails, and poke-berries, and skunk
cabbages, give forth an entirely new outfit of fruits and vegetables?"
Berber smiled his young ruminating smile; then, with inevitable courtesy, he
seemed to remember that he had not answered her question. "I am not
surprised that you and Mr. Strang thought such things about me. I wonder that
you have not questioned me before--only you see _now_--I can't answer!"
The boy gave her his slow, serious smile, reminding her.
"You must remember that I am like a
foreigner--only worse off, for foreigners pick up a few words for their most
vital needs, and I have no words at all--for what--for what vital things I used
to know--so that perhaps in time I shall come to forget that I ever knew
anything different from--other persons' knowledge." Berber paused,
regarding his mistress intently, as if wistfully trying to see what she made of
all this. Then he continued:
"One of our professors at college
died, and the men of his class were gloomy; some even cried, others could not
trust themselves to speak of him.... I noticed that they all called him 'poor'
Landworth.... I could see that they felt something the way I do when I miss out
on a chemical experiment, or spoil a valuable specimen--only more so--a great
deal more." The boy knit his brows, puzzling it all out. "Well, it's
queer. I liked that professor, too; he was very kind to me--but when I saw him dead
I felt glad--glad! Why"--Berber looked at her searchingly--"I grew to
be afraid some one would find out _how_ glad!"
The young fellow, still anxiously searching
her face, dropped his voice. "You are the only person I dare tell this
to--for I understand the world--" She noted that he spoke as if "the
world" were a kind of plant whose needs he had fathomed. "But after
that," concluded Berber, speaking as if quite to himself--"after that
I somehow came to see that I had been--well, educated _backward_."
She moved impatiently; the youth, seeing
the question in her face, answered the demand of its trembling eagerness,
explaining:
"Do you not see--I have--sometimes
_known_, not 'guessed' nor 'believed,' but _known_ that death was a wonderful,
happy thing--a fulfilment, a satisfaction to him who dies--but I have been
educated backward into a life where people cannot seem to help regarding it as
a sad thing. And----"
"Yes?--Yes?" breathed the eager
woman. "Tell me--tell me----"
But he had come suddenly to a full stop. As
if appalled to find only empty words, or no words at all, for some astounding
knowledge he would communicate to her, he stammered painfully; then, as if he
saw himself caught in guilt, colored furiously. Evelyn Strang could see the inevitable
limitations of his world training creep slowly over him like cement hardening
around the searching roots of his mind. She marveled. She remembered Strang's
pet phrase, "the plaster of Paris of so-called 'normal thinking.'"
Then the youth's helpless appeal came to her:
"Do you not think that I am doing
wrong to speak of these things?" Berber asked, with dignity.
The mistress of Heartholm was silent.
Recklessly she put by all Doctor Mach's prophecies. She could not stop here;
her whole soul demanded that she go further. There were old intuitions--the
belief that she and Strang had shared together, that, under rationalized
schemes of thought, knowledge of inestimable hope was being hidden from the
world. Here was this boy of the infinite vision, of the "_backward
educated_" mind, ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe.
Could she strike him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the
open grave and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips!
Suddenly, as if in answer to her struggle,
Berber spoke. She was aware that he looked at her curiously with a sort of
patient disdain.
"The world is so sure, so contented,
isn't it?" the youth demanded of her, whether in innocence or irony she
could not tell. "People are trained, or they train themselves, by the
millions, to think of things in exactly one way." He who had once been
"Gargoyle" looked piercingly into the eyes of this one being to whom
at least he was not afraid to speak.
"Anything you or I might guess outside
of what other people might accept," the boy reminded her, austerely,
"could be called by just one unpleasant name." He regarded the face
turned to his, recognizing the hunger in it, with a mature and pitying candor,
concluding: "After to-day we must never speak of these things. I shall
never dare, you must never dare--and so--" He who had once been
"Gargoyle" suddenly dropped his head forward on his breast,
muttering--"and so, that is all."
Evelyn Strang rose. She stood tall and
imperious in the waning afternoon light. She was bereaved mother, anguished
wife; she was a dreamer driven out of the temple of the dream, and what she had
to do was desperate. Her voice came hard and resolute.
"It is _not_ all," the woman
doggedly insisted. The voiceless woe of one who had lost a comrade by death was
on her. In her eyes was fever let loose, a sob, like one of a flock of
imprisoned wild birds fluttered out from the cage of years. "Oh
no--no!" the woman pleaded, more as if to some hidden power of negation
than to the boy before her--"Oh no--no, this _cannot_ be all, not for me!
The world must never be told--it could not understand; but _I_ must know, I
_must_ know." She took desperate steps back and forth.
"John Berber, if there is anything in
your memory, your knowledge; even if it is only that you have _imagined_
things--if they are so beautiful or so terrible that you can never speak of
them--for fear--for fear no one would understand, you might, you might, even
then, tell me--Do you not hear? You might tell _me_. I authorize it, I command
it."
The woman standing in the autumn gardens
clenched her hands. She looked round her into the clear air at the dense green
and gold sunshine filtering through the colored trees, the softly spread patens
of the cosmos, the vivid oriflammes of the chrysanthemums. Her voice was anguished,
as if they two stood at a secret door of which Berber alone had the key, which
for some reason he refused to use.
"I--of all the world," her
whisper insisted. "If you might never speak again--I should
understand."
Berber, his face grown now quite ashen,
looked at her. Something in her expression seemed to transfix and bind him.
Suddenly shutting his teeth together, he stood up, his arms folded on his broad
chest. The afternoon shadows spread pools of darkness around their feet, the
flowers seemed frozen in shapes of colored ice, as his dark, controlled eyes
fixed hers.
"You--you dare?" the youth
breathed, thickly.
She faced him in her silent daring. Then it
seemed to her as if the sky must roll up like a scroll and the earth collapse
into a handful of dust falling through space, for she knew that little Gargoyle
of the "undressed mind"--little Gargoyle, looking out of John
Berber's trained eyes as out of windows of ground glass, was flitting like a
shadow across her own intelligence, trying to tell her what things he had always
known about life and death, and the myriads of worlds spinning back in their
great circles to the Power which had set them spinning.
Not until after the first halting, insufficient
words, in which the boy sought to give his secret to the woman standing there,
did she comprehend anything of the struggle that went on within him. But when suddenly
Berber's arms dropped to his sides and she saw how he shivered, as if at some unearthly
touch on his temples, she was alert. Color was surging into his face; his
features, large, irregular, took on for the instant a look of speechless,
almost demoniac power; he seemed to be swimming some mental tide before his
foot touched the sands of language and he could helplessly stammer:
"I cannot--It--it will not come--It is
as I told you--I have been taught no _words_--I _cannot_ say _what I
know_."
His powerful frame stood placed among the
garden surroundings like that of a breathing statue, and his amazed companion
witnessed this miracle of physical being chained by the limitations of one
environment, while the soul of that being, clairaudient, clairvoyant, held
correspondence with another environment. She saw Berber smile as if with some
exquisite sense of beauty and rapture that he understood, but could not communicate,
then helplessly motion with his hands. But even while she held her breath,
gazing at him, a change came over the radiant features. He looked at her again,
his face worked; at last John Berber with a muffled groan burst into terrible
human tears.
She stood there helpless, dumfounded at his
agony.
"You--you cannot speak?" she
faltered.
For answer he dropped his face into his
strong hands. He stood there, his tall body quivering. And she knew that her
dream was over.
She was forced to understand. John Berber's
long and perfect world training held him in a vise. His lips were closed upon
his secret, and she knew that they would be closed for evermore.
They remained, silently questioning each
other, reading at last in each other's speechlessness some comfort in this
strange common knowledge, for which, indeed, there were no human words, which
must be forever borne dumbly between them. Then slowly, with solemn tenderness,
the obligation of that unspoken knowledge came into Evelyn Strang's face. She
saw the youth standing there with grief older than the grief of the world
stabbing his heart, drowning his eyes. She laid a quiet hand on his shoulder.
"I understand." With all the
mother, all the woman in her, she tried to say it clearly and calmly. "I
understand; you need never fear me--and we have the whole world of flowers to
speak for us." She gazed pitifully into the dark, storming eyes where for
that one fleeting instant the old look of "Gargoyle" had risen,
regarding her, until forced back by the trained intelligence Of "John
Berber," which had always dominated, and at last, she knew, had killed it.
"We will make the flowers speak--for us." Again she tried to speak
lightly, comfortingly, but something within the woman snapped shut like a door.
Slowly she returned to the garden seat. For a moment she faltered, holding
convulsively to it, then her eyes, blinded from within, closed.
Yet, later, when the mistress of Heartholm
went back through the autumnal garden to the room where were the books and
treasures of John Strang, she carried something in her hand. It was a lily bulb
from which she and Berber hoped to bring into being a new and lovely flower.
She took it into that room where for so many years the pictured eyes of her husband
had met hers in mute questioning, and stood there for a moment, looking
wistfully about her. Outside a light breeze sprang up, a single dried leaf
rustled against the window-pane. Smiling wistfully upon the little flower-pot,
Mrs. Strang set it carefully away in the dark.
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