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The Guest of Quesnay, a novel by Booth Tarkington |
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Chapter 14 |
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_ CHAPTER XIV "Ha, these philosophers," said the professor, expanding in discourse a little later--"these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell you that spirit is abstract!" He waved his great hand in a sweeping semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of honeysuckle. "Ha, the folly!" "What do YOU say it is?" I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden. "I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are only a question of names, and when I use the word 'spirit' I mean identity--universal identity, if you like. It is what we all are, yes-- and those flowers, too. But the spirit of the flowers is not what you smell, nor what you see, that look so pretty: it is the flowers themself! Yet all spirit is only one spirit and one spirit is all spirit--and if you tell me this is Pant'eism I will tell you that you do not understand!" "I don't tell you that," said I, "neither do I understand." "Nor that big Keredec either!" Whereupon he loosed the rolling thunder of his laughter. "Nor any brain born of the monkey people! But this world is full of proof that everything that exist is all one thing, and it is the instinct of that, when it draws us together, which makes what we call 'love.' Even those wicked devils of egoism in our inside is only love which grows too long the wrong way, like the finger nails of the Chinese empress. Young love is a little sprout of universal unity. When the young people begin to feel it, THEY are not abstract, ha? And the young man, when he selects, he chooses one being from all the others to mean--just for him--all that great universe of which he is a part." This was wandering whimsically far afield, but as I caught the good- humoured flicker of the professor's glance at our companion I thought I saw a purpose in his deviation. Saffren turned toward him wonderingly, his unconscious, eager look remarkably emphasised and brightened. "All such things are most strange--great mysteries," continued the professor. "For when a man has made the selection, THAT being DOES become all the universe, and for him there is nothing else at all-- nothing else anywhere!" Saffren's cheeks and temples were flushed as they had been when I saw him returning that afternoon; and his eyes were wide, fixed upon Keredec in a stare of utter amazement. "Yes, that is true," he said slowly. "How did you know?" Keredec returned his look with an attentive scrutiny, and made some exclamation under his breath, which I did not catch, but there was no mistaking his high good humour. "Bravo!" he shouted, rising and clapping the other upon the shoulder. "You will soon cure my rheumatism if you ask me questions like that! Ho, ho, ho!" He threw back his head and let the mighty salvos forth. "Ho, ho, ho! How do I know? The young, always they believe they are the only ones who were ever young! Ho, ho, ho! Come, we shall make those lessons very easy to-night. Come, my friend! How could that big, old Keredec know of such things? He is too old, too foolish! Ho, ho, ho!" As he went up the steps, the courtyard reverberating again to his laughter, his arm resting on Saffren's shoulders, but not so heavily as usual. The door of their salon closed upon them, and for a while Keredec's voice could be heard booming cheerfully; it ended in another burst of laughter. A moment later Saffren opened the door and called to me. "Here," I answered from my veranda, where I had just lighted my second cigar. "No more work to-night. All finished," he cried jubilantly, springing down the steps. "I'm coming to have a talk with you." Amedee had removed the candles, the moon had withdrawn in fear of a turbulent mob of clouds, rioting into our sky from seaward; the air smelled of imminent rain, and it was so dark that I could see my visitor only as a vague, tall shape; but a happy excitement vibrated in his rich voice, and his step on the gravelled path was light and exultant. "I won't sit down," he said. "I'll walk up and down in front of the veranda--if it doesn't make you nervous." For answer I merely laughed; and he laughed too, in genial response, continuing gaily: "Oh, it's all so different with me! Everything is. That BLIND feeling I told you of--it's all gone. I must have been very babyish, the other day; I don't think I could feel like that again. It used to seem to me that I lived penned up in a circle of blank stone walls; I couldn't see over the top for myself at all, though now and then Keredec would boost me up and let me get a little glimmer of the country round about--but never long enough to see what it was really like. But it's not so now. Ah!"--he drew a long breath--"I'd like to run. I think I could run all the way to the top of a pretty fair-sized mountain to-night, and then"-- he laughed--"jump off and ride on the clouds." "I know how that is," I responded. "At least I did know--a few years ago." "Everything is a jumble with me," he went on happily, in a confidential tone, "yet it's a heavenly kind of jumble. I can't put anything into words. I don't THINK very well yet, though Keredec is trying to teach me. My thoughts don't run in order, and this that's happened seems to make them wilder, queerer--" He stopped short. "What has happened?" He paused in his sentry-go, facing me, and answered, in a low voice: "I've seen her again." "Yes, I know." "She told me you knew it," he said, "--that she had told you." "Yes." "But that's not all," he said, his voice rising a little. "I saw her again the day after she told you--" "You did!" I murmured. "Oh, I tell myself that it's a dream," he cried, "that it CAN'T be true. For it has been EVERY day since then! That's why I haven't joined you in the woods. I have been with her, walking with her, listening to her, looking at her--always feeling that it must be unreal and that I must try not to wake up. She has been so kind--so wonderfully, beautifully kind to me!" "She has met you?" I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed. "She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day--the whole day! You see"--he began to pace again--"you see I was right, and you were wrong. She wasn't offended--she was glad--that I couldn't help speaking to her; she has said so." "Do you think," I interrupted, "that she would wish you to tell me this?" "Ah, she likes you!" he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself. "What I wanted most to say to you," he went on, "is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her--and about her husband?" "I remember." "It's different now. I don't want you to," he said. "I want only to know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn't hasten it. I wouldn't have anything changed from just THIS!" "You mean--" "I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the shore--oh, I don't want to know anything but that!" "No doubt you have told her," I ventured, "a good deal about yourself," and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman's strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady's losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George--possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account. But I couldn't have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed. It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him. "I've told her all I know," he said readily, and the unconscious pathos of the answer smote me. "And all that Keredec has let me know. You see I haven't--" "But do you think," I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to divert him from that channel, "do you think Professor Keredec would approve, if he knew?" "I think he would," he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. "I have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to tell him, afraid he might try to stop me--keep me from going to wait for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this, and-- it's very strange, but I--well, what WAS it that made him so glad?" "The light is still burning in his room," I said quietly. "You mean that I ought to tell him?" His voice rose a little. "He's done a good deal for you, hasn't he?" I suggested. "And even if he does know he might like to hear it from you." "You're right; I'll tell him to-night." This came with sudden decision, but with less than marked what followed. "But he can't stop me, now. No one on earth shall do that, except Madame d'Armand herself. No one!" "I won't quarrel with that," I said drily, throwing away my cigar, which had gone out long before. He hesitated, and then I saw his hand groping toward me in the darkness, and, rising, I gave him mine. "Good night," he said, and shook my hand as the first sputterings of the coming rain began to patter on the roof of the pavilion. "I'm glad to tell him; I'm glad to have told you. Ah, but isn't this," he cried, "a happy world!" Turning, he ran to the gallery steps. "At last I'm glad," he called back over his shoulder, "I'm glad that I was born--" A gust of wind blew furiously into the courtyard at that instant, and I heard his voice indistinctly, but I thought--though I might have been mistaken--that I caught a final word, and that it was "again." _ |
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