Part 4

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 protégé 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.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1921, by Edwina Stanton Babcock.

GHITZA[4]

#By# KONRAD BERCOVICI

From _The Dial_

That winter had been a very severe one in Roumania. The Danube froze solid a week before Christmas and remained tight for five months. It was as if the blue waters were suddenly turned into steel. From across the river, from the Dobrudja, on sleds pulled by long-horned oxen, the Tartars brought barrels of frozen honey, quarters of killed lambs, poultry and game, and returned heavily laden with bags of flour and rolls of sole leather. The whole day long the crack of whips and the curses of the drivers rent the icy atmosphere. Whatever their destination, the carters were in a hurry to reach human habitation before nightfall--before the dreaded time when packs of wolves came out to prey for food.

In cold, clear nights, when even the wind was frozen still, the lugubrious howling of the wolf permitted no sleep. The indoor people spent the night praying for the lives and souls of the travellers.

All through the winter there was not one morning but some man or animal was found torn or eaten in our neighbourhood. The people of the village at first built fires on the shores to scare the beasts away, but they had to give it up because the thatched roofs of the huts in the village were set on fire in windy nights by flying sparks. The cold cowed the fiercest dogs. The wolves, crazed by hunger, grew more daring from day to day. They showed their heads even in daylight. When Baba Hana, the old gypsy fortune-teller, ran into the school-house one morning and cried, "Wolf, wolf in the yard," the teacher was inclined to attribute her scare to a long drink the night before. But that very night, Stan, the horseshoer, who had returned late from the inn and had evidently not closed the door as he entered the smithy, was eaten up by the beasts. And the smithy stood in the centre of the village! A stone's throw from the inn, and the thatch-roofed school, and the red painted church! He must have put up a hard fight, Stan. Three huge dark brown beasts, as big as cows' yearlings, were found brained. The body of big Stan had disappeared in the stomachs of the rest of the pack. The high leather boots and the hand that still gripped the handle of the sledgehammer were the only remains of the man. There was no blood, either. It had been lapped dry. That stirred the village. Not even enough to bury him--and he had been a good Christian! But the priest ordered that the slight remains of Stan be buried, Christian-like. The empty coffin was brought to the church and all the rites were carried out as if the body of Stan were there rather than in the stomachs of wild beasts.

But after Stan's death the weather began to clear as if it had been God's will that such a price be paid for His clemency. The cold diminished daily and in a few days reports were brought from everywhere on the shore that the bridge of ice was giving way. Two weeks before Easter Sunday it was warm enough to give the cows an airing. The air cleared and the rays of the sun warmed man and beast. Traffic on the frozen river had ceased. Suddenly one morning a whip cracked, and from the bushes on the opposite shore of the Danube there appeared following one another six tent wagons, such as used by travelling gypsies, each wagon drawn by four horses harnessed side by side.