Part 40

What was there for me to do? I ran. Once on the dock above, misgivings assailed me. I was too young, and the night was too appalling. I had forgotten the wind, down in the cabin, but in the open here I felt its weight. It grew all the while; its voice drowned the world now, and there was spindrift through it, picked from the back shore of the island and flung all the way across. Objects were lost in it; ghostly things, shore lights, fish-houses, piers, strained seaward. I heard the packet's singing masts at the next wharf, but I saw no packet. The ponderous scow below me became a thing of life and light, an eager bird fluttering at its bonds and calling to the wide spaces. To my bewildered eyes it seemed to move--it _was_ moving, shaking off the heavy hands of bondage, joining itself with the wind. I got down on my knees of a sudden and peered at the deck.

"_Yen Sin!_" I screamed. "_What you doin' out there?_"

I saw him dimly in the open air outside his door, fumbling and fumbling at something. This was his great adventure, the thing that had gleamed in his eyes and had tapped that unguessed reservoir of strength. His voice crept back to me, harassed by the wind,

"This velly funny countly, Mista Boy. Mista Yen Sin go back China way."

His bow-line was fast to an iron ring on the wharf. I wanted to hold him back, and I clutched at the rope with my hands as if my little strength were something against that freed thing. The line came up to me easily, cast off from the scow at the other end.

He was waning. His window and door and the little fan-light before the door were all I could see now, and even that pattern blurred and became uncertain and ghostly on the mat of the night. He was clear of the wharves now, and the wind had him--sailing China way--so peaceful, so dreamless, surrounded by his tell-tale cargo of Urkey's unwashed collars.

* * *

I don't know how long it was I crouched there on the timbers, staring out into the havoc of that black night, and listening to the hungry clamor of the Bight. I must have been crying for the minister, over and over, without knowing it, for when my cousin Duncan's hand fell on my shoulder and I started up half out of my wits, he pointed a finger toward the outer edge of the wharf.

And there they were in a little close group, Sympathy Gibbs standing straight with the child in her arms, and Minister Malden down on his knees. There were many people on the pier, all with their eyes to sea, all except Sympathy Gibbs; hers were up-shore, where Mate Snow lay in state on his own counter, all his sweet revenge behind him and gone.

I thought little Hope was asleep in the swathing shawl, till I saw the dark round spots of her eyes. If it was a strange night for the others, it was stranger still to her.

The wind and the rain beat on Minister Malden's bended back. He loved it that way. The missionary was praying for the soul of the heathen.

NONE SO BLIND[21]

[Note 21: Copyright 1917, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright 1918, by Mary Synon.]

BY MARY SYNON

From _Harper's Magazine_.

We were listening to Leila Burton's music--her husband, and Dick Allport, and I--with the throb of London beating under us like the surge of an ocean in anger, when there rose above the smooth harmonies of the piano and the pulsing roar of the night a sound more poignant than them both, the quavering melody of a street girl's song.

Through the purpling twilight of that St. John's Eve I had been drifting in dreams while Leila had gone from golden splendors of chords which reflected the glow on westward-fronting windows into somber symphonies which had seemed to make vocal the turbulent soul of the city--for Dick Allport and I were topping the structure of that house of life that was to shelter the love we had long been cherishing. With Leila playing in that art which had dowered her with fame, I was visioning the glory of such love as she and Standish Burton gave each other while I watched Dick, sensing rather than seeing the dearness of him as he gave to the mounting climaxes the tense interest he always tendered to Leila's music.

I had known, before I came to love Dick Allport, other loves and other lovers. Because I had followed will-o'-the-wisps of fancy through marshes of sentiment I could appreciate the more the truth of that flame which he and I had lighted for our guidance on the road. A moody boy he had been when I first met him, full of a boy's high chivalry and of a boy's dark despairs. A moody man he had become in the years that had denied him the material success toward which he had striven; but something in the patience of his efforts, something in the fineness of his struggle had endeared him to me as no triumph could have done. Because he needed me, because I had come to believe that I meant to him belief in the ultimate good of living, as well as belief in womanhood, I cherished in my soul that love of him which yearned over him even as it longed for him.

Watching him in the dusk while he lounged in that concentrated quiet of attention, I went on piling the bricks of that wide house of happiness we should enter together; and, although I could see him but dimly, so well did I know every line of his face that I could fancy the little smile that quivered around his lips and that shone from the depths of his eyes as Leila played the measures we both loved. I must have been smiling in answer when the song of the girl outside rose high.

Not until that alien sound struck athwart the power and beauty of the spell did I come to know how high I had builded my castles; but the knocking at the gate toppled down the dreams as Leila swept a discord over the keyboard and crossed to the open window.

In the dusk, as she flung back the heavy curtains, I could see the bulk of Brompton Oratory set behind the houses like the looming back-drop of a painted scene. Nearer, in front of a tall house across the way, stood the singer, a thin girl whose shadowy presence seemed animated by a curious bravery. In a nasal, plaintive voice she was singing the words of a ballad of love and of loving that London, as only London can, had made curiously its own that season. The insistence of her plea--for she sang as if she cried out her life's longing, sang as if she called on the passing crowd not for alms, but for understanding--made her for the moment, before she faded back into oblivion, an artist, voicing the heartache and the heartbreak of womankind; and the artist in Leila Burton responded to the thrill.

Until the ending of the song she stood silent in front of the window, unconscious of the fact that she, and not the scene beyond her, held the center of the stage. Not for her beauty, although at times Leila Burton gave the impression of being exquisitely lovely, was she remarkable, but rather for that receptive attitude that made her an inspired listener. In me, who had known her for but a little while, she awakened my deepest and drowsiest ambition, the desire to express in pictures the light and the shade of the London I knew. With her I could feel the power, and the glory, and the fear, and the terror of the city as I never did at other times. It was not alone that she was all things to all men; it was that she led men and women who knew her to the summits of their aspirations.

Even Standish Burton, big, sullen man that he was, immersed in his engineering problems, responded to his wife's spiritual charm with a readiness that always aroused in Dick and myself an admiration for him that our other knowledge of him did not justify. He was, aside from his relationship to Leila, a man whose hardness suggested a bitter knowledge of dark ways of life. Now, crouched down in the depths of his chair, he kept watching Leila with a gaze of smouldering adoration, revealing that love for her which had been strong enough to break down those barriers which she had erected in the years while he had worked for her in Jacob's bondage. In her he seemed to be discovering, all over again, the vestal to tend the fires of his faith.

Dick Allport, too, bending forward over the table on which his hands fell clenched, was studying Leila with an inscrutable stare that seemed to be of query. I was wondering what it meant, wondering the more because my failure to understand its meaning hung another veil between my vision and my shrine of belief in the fullness of love, when the song outside came to an end and Leila turned back to us.

Her look, winging its way to Standish, lighted her face even beyond the glow from the lamps which she switched on. For an instant his heavy countenance flared into brightness. Dick Allport sighed almost imperceptibly as he turned to me. I had a feeling that such a fire as the Burtons kindled for each other should have sprung up in the moment between Dick and me, for we had fought and labored and struggled for our love as Standish and Leila had never needed to battle. Because of our constancy I expected something better than the serene affectionateness that shone in Dick's smile. I wanted such stormy passion of devotion as Burton gave to Leila, such love as I, remembering a night of years ago, knew that Dick could give. It was the old desire of earth, spoken in the street girl's song, that surged in me until I could have cried out in my longing for the soul of the sacrament whose substance I had been given; but the knowledge that we were, the four of us, conventional people in a conventional setting locked my heart as it locked my lips until I could mirror the ease with which Leila bore herself.

"I have been thinking," she said, lightly, "that I should like to be a street singer for a night. If only a piano were not so cumbersome, I should go out and play into the ears of the city the thing that girl put into her song."

"Why not?" I asked her, "It would be an adventure, and life has too few adventures."

"It might have too many," Dick said.

"Not for Leila," Standish declared. "Life's for her a quest of joy."

"That's it," Dick interposed. "Her adventures have all been joyous."

"But they haven't," Leila insisted. "I'm no spoiled darling of the gods. I've been poor, poor as that girl out there. I've had heartaches, and disappointments, and misfortunes."

"Not vital ones," Dick declared. "You've never had a knock-out blow."

"She doesn't know what one is," Standish laughed, but there sounded a ruefulness in his laughter that told of the kind of blow he must once have suffered to bring that note in his voice. Standish Burton took life lightly, except where Leila was concerned. His manner now indicated, almost mysteriously, that something threatened his harbor of peace, but the regard Leila gave to him proved that the threat of impending danger had not come to her.

"Oh, but I do know," she persisted.

"Vicariously," I suggested. "All artists do."

"No, actually," she said.

"You're wrong," said Standish. "You're the sort of woman whom the world saves from its own cruelties."

There was something so essentially true in his appraisal of his wife that the certainty covered the banality of his statement and kept Dick and myself in agreement with him. Leila Burton, exquisitely remote from all things commonplace, was unquestionably a woman to be protected. Without envy--since my own way had its compensations in full measure--I admitted it.

"I think that you must have forgotten, if you ever knew," she said, "how I struggled here in London for the little recognition I have won."

"Oh, that!" Dick Allport deprecated. "That isn't what Stan means. Every one in the world worth talking about goes through that sort of struggle. He means the flinging down from a high mountain after you've seen the glories, not of this world, but of another, the casting out from paradise after you've learned what paradise may mean. He spoke with an odd timbre of emotion in his voice, a quality that puzzled me for the moment.

"That's it," said Standish, gratefully. "Those are the knock-out blows."

"Well, then, I don't know them"--Leila admitted her defeat--"and I hope that I shall not."

Softly she began to play the music of an accompaniment. There was a familiar hauntingness in its strains that puzzled me until I associated them with the song that Burton used to whistle so often in the times when Leila was in Paris and he had turned for companionship to Dick and to me.

"I've heard Stan murder that often enough to be able to try it myself," I told her.

"I didn't know he knew it," she said. "I heard it for the first time the other day. A girl--I didn't hear her name--sang it for an encore at the concert of the Musicians' Club. She sang it well, too. She was a queer girl," Leila laughed, "a little bit of a thing, with all the air of a tragedy queen. And you should have heard how she sang that! You know the words?"--she asked me over her shoulder:

"And because I, too, am a lover, And my love is far from me, I hated the two on the sands there, And the moon, and the sands, and the sea."

"And the moon, and the sands, and the sea," Dick repeated. He rose, going to the window where Leila had stood, and looking outward. When he faced us again he must have seen the worry in my eyes, for he smiled at me with the old, endearing fondness and touched my hair lightly as he passed.

"What was she like--the girl?" Standish asked, lighting another cigarette.

"Oh, just ordinary and rather pretty. Big brown eyes that seemed to be forever asking a question that no one could answer, and a little pointed chin that she flung up when she sang." Dick Allport looked quickly across at Burton, but Stan gave him no answering glance. He was staring at Leila as she went on: "I don't believe I should have noticed her at all if she hadn't come to me as I was leaving the hall. 'Are you Mrs. Standish Burton?' she asked me. When I told her that I was, she stared me full in the face, then walked off without another word. I wish that I could describe to you, though, the scorn and contempt that blazed in her eyes. If I had been a singer who had robbed her of her chance at Covent Garden, I could have understood. But I'd never seen her before, and my singing wouldn't rouse the envy of a crow!" She laughed light-heartedly over the recollection, then her face clouded. "Do you know," she mused, "that I thought just now, when the girl was singing on the street, that I should like to know that other girl? There was something about her that I can't forget. She was the sort that tries, and fails, and sinks. Some day, I'm afraid, she'll be singing on the streets, and, if I ever hear her, I shall have a terrible thought that I might have saved her from it, if only I had tried!"

"Better let her sort alone," Burton said, shortly. He struck a match and relit his cigarette with a gesture of savage annoyance. Leila looked at him in amazement, and Dick gave him a glance that seemed to counsel silence. There was a hostility about the mood into which Standish relapsed that seemed to bring in upon us some of the urgent sorrows of the city outside, as if he had drawn aside a curtain to show us a world alien to the place of beauty and of the making of beauty through which Leila moved. Even she must have felt the import of his mood, for she let her hands fall on the keys while Dick and I stared at each other before the shock of this crackle that seemed to threaten the perfection of their happiness.

From Brompton came the boom of the bell for evensong. Down Piccadilly ran the roar of the night traffic, wending a blithesome way to places of pleasure. It was the hour when London was wont to awaken to the thrill of its greatness, its power, its vastness, its strength, and its glory, and to send down luminous lanes its carnival crowd of men and women. It was the time when weltering misery shrank shrouded into merciful gloom; when the East End lay far from our hearts; when poverty and sin and shame went skulking into byways where we need never follow; when painted women held back in the shadows; when the pall of night rested like a velvet carpet over the spaces of that floor that, by daylight, gave glimpses into loathsome cellars of humanity. It was, as it had been so often of late, an hour of serene beauty, that first hour of darkness in a June night with the season coming to an end, an hour of dusk to be remembered in exile or in age.

There should have come to us then the strains of an orchestra floating in with the fragrance of gardenias from a vendor's basket, symbols of life's call to us, luring us out beneath stars of joy. But, instead, the bell of Brompton pealed out warningly over our souls, and, when its clanging died, there drifted in the sound of a preaching voice.

Only phrases clattering across the darkness were the words from beyond--resonant through the open windows: "The Cross is always ready, and everywhere awaiteth thee.... Turn thyself upward, or turn thyself downward; turn thyself inward, or turn thyself outward; everywhere thou shalt find the Cross;... if thou fling away one Cross thou wilt find another, and perhaps a heavier."

Like sibylline prophecy the voice of the unseen preacher struck down on us. We moved uneasily, the four of us, as he cried out challenge to the passing world before his voice went down before the surge of a hymn. Then, just as the gay whirl of cars and omnibuses beat once more upon the pavements, and London swung joyously into our hearts again, the bell of the telephone in the hall rang out with a quivering jangle that brought Leila to her feet even as Standish jumped to answer its summons.

She stood beside the piano as he gave answer to the call, watching him as if she expected evil news. Dick, who had moved back into the shadow from a lamp on the table, was staring with that same searching gaze he had bestowed on her when she had lingered beside the window. I was looking at him, when a queer cry from Standish whirled me around.

In the dim light of the hall he was standing with the instrument in his hands, clutching it with the stupidity of a man who has been struck by an unexpected and unexplainable missile. His face had gone to a grayish white, and his hands trembled as he set the receiver on the hook. His eyes were bulging from emotion and he kept wetting his lips as he stood in the doorway.

"What is it?" Leila cried. "What's happened, Stan? Can't you tell me? What is it?"

Not to her, but to Dick Allport, he made answer. "Bessie Lowe is dead!"

I saw Dick Allport's thunderstruck surprise before he arose. I saw his glance go from Standish to Leila with a questioning that overrode all other possible emotion in him. Then I saw him look at Burton as if he doubted his sanity. His voice, level as ever, rang sharply across the other man's distraction.

"When did she die?" he asked him.

"Just now." He ran his hand over his hair, gazing at Dick as if Leila and I were not there. "She--she killed herself down in the Hotel Meynard."

"Why?" Leila's voice, hard with terror, snapped off the word.

"She--she--I don't know." He stared at his wife as if he had just become conscious of her presence. The grayness in his face deepened, and his lips grew livid. Like a man condemned to death, he stared at the world he was losing.

"Who is Bessie Lowe?" Leila questioned. "And why have they called you to tell of her?" Her eyes blazed with a fire that seemed about to singe pretense from his soul.

His hand went to his throat, and I saw Leila whiten. Her hand, resting on the piano, trembled, but her face held immobile, although I knew that all the happiness of the rest of her life hung upon his answer. On what Standish Burton would tell her depended the years to come. In that moment I knew that she loved him even as I loved Dick, even as women have always loved and will always love the men whom fate had marked for their caring; and in a sudden flash of vision I knew, too, that Burton, no matter what Bessie Lowe or any other girl had ever been to him, worshiped his wife with an intensity of devotion that would make all his days one long reparation for whatever wrong he might have done her. I knew, though, that, if he had done the wrong, she would never again be able to give him the eager love he desired, and I, too, an unwilling spectator, waited on his words for his future, and Leila's; but his voice did not make answer. It was Dick Allport who spoke.

"Bessie Lowe is a girl I used to care for," he said. "She is the girl who sang at the Musicians' Club, the girl who spoke to you. She heard that I was going to be married. She wanted me to come back to her. I refused."

He was standing in the shadow, looking neither at Leila nor at me, but at Standish Burton. Burton turned to him.

"Yes," he muttered thickly, "they told me to tell you. They knew you'd be here."

"I see," said Leila. She looked at Standish and then at Dick Allport, and there came into her eyes a queer, glazed stare that filmed their brightness. "I am sorry that I asked questions, Mr. Allport, about something that was nothing to me. Will you forgive me?"

"There is nothing to be forgiven," he said. He turned to her and smiled a little. She tried to answer his smile, but a gasp came from her instead.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "so sorry for her!"