Again we galloped alone; and as our horses' hoofs beat drummers' music out of the round earth our dialogue drifted into confessions of our own most private theories of conduct, character and creation. Now that this man's name was not--Cockerel, my heart opened to him and we began to admit to each other the perplexities of this great, strange thing called Life. Especially we confessed how every waking hour found us jostled and torn between two opposite, unappeasable tendencies of soul; one an upward yearning after everything high and pure, the other a down-dragging hunger for every base indulgence. I was warmed and fed. Yet I was pained to find him so steeped in presumptuous error, so wayward of belief and unbelief. The sweet ease with which he overturned and emptied out some of my arguments gave me worse failure of the diaphragm than a high swing ever did. Nevertheless I responded; and he rejoined; and I rejoined again, and presently he gave me the notion that he was suffering some cruel moral strain.
In a stretch of timber where we broke ranks for a short rest, unbitting but not unsaddling, a lot of fellows pressed me to tell them about the boat on the river. "You heard what was in it, didn't you?" asked one nearly as young as I.CHAPTER XI.
ONE:"Ah, me! Ah, me! Do you believe that, Dick?""Young lady, listen to me. I know your story is nearly all true. I know some good things about you which you have modestly left out; one of the rebels who stopped where you did last night and rode with you this morning was brought to me a prisoner half an hour ago. But he said your name was Rothvelt. How's that?"
TWO:Gholson's eyes turned green. "Does Ned Ferry give that as his reason?"Alice remembered the rapt look she had seen there, which her mother almost profanely had taken to be the sign of an insufficient breakfast, and thrilled at knowing the true interpretation of it. The rapt look was there again now, and seemed to her the most adorable expression she had ever seen on a human countenance. Mrs Keeling was more impressed now, and the moisture stood in her kind mild eyes.
THREE:There is a story current in Japan of a gentleman from Cincinnati who arrived one evening in Yokohama, and the following morning went into the country for a stroll. Everywhere the men, women, and children greeted him with the customary salutation, "Ohio, ohio," and the word rang in his ears till he returned to his hotel."There are the funniest cats in this country that you ever saw. They have the shortest kind of tails, and a good many of them haven't any tails at all any more than a rabbit. You know we expect every kitten in America to play with her tail, and what can she do when she has no tail to play with? I think that must be the reason why the Japanese cats are so solemn, and why they won't play as our cats do. I have tried to find out how it all happens, but nobody can tell. Doctor Bronson says the kittens are born without tails, and that is all he knows about it. I think they must be a different kind of cat from ours; but, apart from the absence of tails, they don't look any way dissimilar. Somebody says that an American once took one of these tailless cats to San Francisco as a curiosity, and that it would never make friends with any long-tailed cat. It would spit and scratch, and try to bite off the other cat's tail; but one day, when they put it with a cat whose tail had been cut off by a bad boy, it was friendly at once."
FORE:"Why? What do you mean?"
"Those? That one is the Virgin's sheaf; and those two are the Balances.""The man who brought the bundles of grain to the thresher had them slung over his shoulder, as they carry everything in this country; two bundles made a load for him, and they were not large bundles either. Such a thing as a farm-wagon is as unknown as a threshing-machine, and would not be useful, as the paths among the fields are very narrow, and a wagon couldn't run on them at all. Land is very valuable in the neighborhood of the towns, and they would consider it wasteful to have a wide strip of it taken up for a road. And, as I have just said, labor is very cheap, especially the labor of the coolies who carry burdens. All the men I saw at work in the field were barefooted, and probably[Pg 334] the wages they receive do not leave them much to spend on boots, after they have supported their families and paid their taxes. They must have a hard time to get along, but they appear perfectly cheerful and contented."Suddenly into the blanks, into the black erasures, there stole the images which just now he had tried in vain to recall. All else was erased, and Norah filled the empty spaces. Her presence, voice and gesture and form pervaded his whole consciousness: there was room for nothing else. They loved each other, and to each other they constituted the sum of all that was real. There was nothing for it but to accept that, to go away together, and let all the unrealities of life, The Cedars, the salmon, the slippers, pass out of focus, be dissolved, disintegrated.... And yet, and yet he knew that he did not make the choice with his whole self. Deep down in him, the very foundation on which his character was built, was that hidden rock of his integrity, of his stern Puritanism, of the morality of which his religion was made. He was willing to blow that up, he searched for{305} the explosive that would shatter it, he hacked and hammered at it, as if in experiment to see if he had the power to shatter it. It could hardly be that his character was stronger than himself: that seemed a contradiction in terms.
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