Nalbro Bartley

“She went to sleep-like,” Ali Baba told her, after the simple funeral. “She wasn’t what you would call in pain—just sighing and calling for people dead these forty years. She says to Hopeful, ‘The Watcher of the Dead has seen me’—and we knew then it was the end.”

“What about the watcher of the dead?” Thurley said softly.

“The watcher must have some one to keep him company and when the last one that has died has stayed with him long enough and goes away, they do say the watcher goes about the village looking into faces to see in which lies the shadow of death—and he loses no time in taking him so that he will have company. Miss Clergy remembered the story. She went to sleep sayin’, ‘Tell Thurley—to—use—her—own—judgment.’”

“Ali Baba—did she—” Thurley grasped his arm.

He nodded. “Just like I said—‘Tell—Thurley—to—use—her—own judgment,’—and then she looks up at me and she says, ‘An hour’s drive, Ali Baba—not too fast.’” His rough hand was across his eyes.

“Are you quite sure, Ali Baba, that she knew what she was saying?”

“As sure as I am what you are askin’,” the old man answered.

Miss Clergy’s will was dated the year that Thurley went with her to New York. It left, requiring neither bond nor security, everything to Thurley Precore.

But the excitement over the death and the disposal of the fortune was increased by Thurley’s prompt use of it. Even the war lost its prominence when Thurley in remarkably short time gave out a statement declaring her intentions.

Her contracts would be kept but after the present season Thurley Precore was to retire for a year at least, in which she would devote herself—secretly, she whispered, “to being a gray angel and helping Bliss,” but to the public she named it “to the philanthropic enterprise which, with Miss Clergy’s money, was to be started.”

She wrote Bliss Hobart as school-girlish and impulsive a note as one could imagine, setting forth her gray angel theories in superlative fashion, even underlining and putting exclamation points in pairs and punctuating sentences by a wriggling up and down mark which she said he was to consider as “a grin.”

“Of course you’ll be rushed to death when this reaches you,” she concluded, “but you must hear me out. Remember, I listened to all you told me! Never could I spend all that money for myself nor in a sense would it be right. Miss Clergy should have lived down her disappointment, married and raised her boys to fight and her girls to wait and serve. Why should I, stranger that I am, use the money for personal pleasures? I will not even buy a bankrupt title with it.” Here she drew a very large “grin” mark.

“I am buying all the deserted lake houses—we have begun negotiations for them and together with the Fincherie there will be a little city of ex-soldiers learning new trades, forgetting empty sleeves and wheel-chair means of travelling, shell shock, snagged souls—all the wilful things which prevent settling down to every day living.

“It seems to me, Bliss Hobart, it will always be up to one-tenth of the world to look after the other nine-tenths—so this enterprise will not end as the tapping of crutches dies away. The soldiers must, of necessity, come first. But there is to be a permanent ‘practical art’ colony there—to teach all who need to be taught the thing best fitted for him—or her. (Grin mark.) There are to be ‘hers’!

“Life may be shorn of fineries and extravagances and it may be simple—but it need never be sordid and unendurable and that is what I shall try to prove. My heart is set on having flower beds of deep, purple violets and mignonette for the lawns, sun dials with comforting mottoes—there will be a task—the carving of them. I want the one before the Fincherie itself to read:

“‘And as our years do run apace,

Let us love God

And live in peace.’

“Do you like it? (Grin mark.)

“I shall have huge, copper lanterns to light the roads at night, there must be yellow ivy and gorse about the walls and cool, gray lavender as a background for pink ramblers and yellow tea roses and, oh, gray angel, I must have a wind screen of willows. I shall build a great archway in the middle of the estate and a stone fence encircling it all. Over the archway I want a thick, oak slab with this motto cut in by a master hand: ‘God gave them a great thing to do—and they did it.’

“In each house there shall be particular equipment for particular occupations. Children’s theaters—and fine weaving—carving of wood and ivory and copying brocades. Just see the work to be done, the joy of it—and the pity, too! There must be a bee farm and a poultry annex and I’ve a regular bag of tricks up my sleeve. I’ve Ali Baba as overseer—Betsey and Hopeful as managers—and myself (grin mark) to demonstrate the practical worth of your vision.

“For you are the dreamer and I the doer. We are, in our relations, the same as that of science towards theology: ‘Nous nous saluons mais nous ne parlons pas.’ Is it not so? (Wee grin mark.) You speak but you are afraid to do and I am afraid to speak but I must do. There, write me you will come to my Fincherie and see my children and give us your blessing,

“Thurley.”

She received her answer via wire the night she returned to New York unwillingly to sing her first concert.

All New York whispered that “the Precore voice” was more ravishing than ever, particularly when it sang love songs!

While Thurley bustled about between her season and her remodelling of the lake colony and assembling her new family, the original family underwent some thrilling events.

Hobart was taken unawares with a fresh budget of duties which kept him West without respite, although he went so far as to send Thurley numerous flowergrams and offer donations towards her Fincherie, writing notes in which he demanded more details as to the work and advice as to her career.

Polly Harris had a mysterious surprise which resolved itself into a great success. It was not the grand opera that Polly stubbornly dreamed of during the lean years of struggle; without warning, she composed and had published camp songs which roused the country to topnotch enthusiasm. They were jingles, really, but with sincere sentiments, a tinge of humor and a vigorous little melody—they sprang from the depths of Polly’s loyal heart, bravely relinquishing opera ambitions because “a song fights as well as an army,” she decided, locking her attic door and preparing to drudge.

“I feel light-headed,” she informed Thurley when she came to the latter’s apartment to tell all about it. “As if I were going to open my eyes to find myself in a dentist’s chair, following the taking of old fashioned laughing gas while I lost a wisdom tooth! That it would be the same ‘’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the broad ’ighway’ for yours truly! Oh, don’t ask how I wrote them—how do you sing or Bliss direct—or Collin paint?” she added softly.

“Come, sit in my lap, Polly,” said Thurley suddenly. “I’ve always wanted to have you, you’re such a featherweight and I’m so huge. I always wanted to capture you and make you hear me out. You don’t know how glad I am for you and what wonderful things are ahead for every one.” She beckoned so enticingly that Polly, the same, unspoiled Polly in brown smock and shabby boots, perched herself on Thurley’s knee while they talked it all out. The Fincherie Colony and Hobart’s precious dreams, the useless, selfish work Caleb was doing, Ernestine’s amusingly complaining letters, Lissa’s lack of success in finding a duke or a blue-blooded patroness, the threat that she might have to cut her hair short if she was really going to stay—what would become of that lazy rascal of a Mark?—and here was Collin giving no one a hint as to what he was doing. And then Polly flushed and she said awkwardly:

“Perhaps he will come to care a little, now, Thurley—success sometimes makes people seem different—more desirable, doesn’t it? I know it ought not to be the bait—but when you have cared so long—you are reckless. Money never brings a person the real things, does it?” And Polly began to sob, as she had refrained from sobbing for years while Thurley rocked her in her arms, playing comforting gray angel and understanding woman all in one. They ended quite normally by a heated argument as to whether Polly should or should not—now that she was to be placed on a pedestal with Francis Scott Key—wear a distinctive costume while she toured the country and sang her songs—say a bright red sailor and a blue cloth cape with a single line of white braid—and didn’t she feel ashamed to make such distressing faces because Thurley was planning a pink chiffon evening dress for her—base ingratitude of these newly arrived!

So Polly toured the country in the costume Thurley designed, singing her songs and meeting with success, while music shops plastered their windows with Polly Harris’ latest, and news of her triumph echoed in the trenches to startle Ernestine into cabling congratulations and Lissa into groaning in envy. Polly was to join Bliss in San Francisco for a spring campaign and, when she visited Thurley at the Fincherie, she took endless photographs and mental notes of the colony with which to regale him, asking if there was any special message Thurley wished him to have.

“How wonderfully it is coming on! How kind every one is and workmen seem to do wonders in no time! We shall have the last house restored by July—and tell him we have two hundred boys here and they say they never want to move along—”

“I mean personal message,” Polly interrupted.

Thurley shook her head.

“I’ll use my own judgment,” Polly added, not knowing how dangerously near she came to repeating words of grave and liberating importance.

The third event of the family happened in June when Ernestine and Caleb met each other at the steamer pier. Having faced reality and realized what she was not capable of doing, Ernestine was flying home in honest haste to try to do what she felt was her duty.

She looked forward to meeting Caleb as the same sentimental person who would propose to her before they had passed down the gangway. Ernestine had discovered that reality, while a stern friend at first, was a sincere and lasting one. The ooze had vanished from her scheme of things since she faced the horrors of—not war—but of the jumblers-in such as Lissa and Mark and the hysterical young things from Birge’s Corners. She had even come across Hortense Quinby who was occupied by making intellectual love to a thick-set young private who contemptuously accepted her affection with the excuse, “An educated dame is better than no one—but when I get back to my girl in Harlem—” while Hortense told herself that this Jo Carter had a soul above being an elevator boy; his was a spirit destined to lead men; and she tried to check his constant assault on the King’s English and planned on being his “fairy godmother” when he should return to America! Ernestine had watched with disapproval the onslaught of dÉbutantes upon the regulars who accepted the adoration with scornful grins and conceited smirks, allowing these delicately bred and reared young creatures who had been so bored or misunderstood by their families, to lavish their attentions on them unchecked. She had seen, by way of contrast, the capable, heroic men and women who managed with admirable tact to suppress these feverish young things from doing their worst and yet not allow them to escape without a whirl at the grindstone. Ernestine looked upon these young things as one does at straggling boys, stray dogs and hoboes who invariably follow the wind-up of any dignified and splendid procession, tagging after and convinced in their own minds they are attracting as much attention as the mounted police who swish along in advance.

Having looked honestly at reality and judged it fairly, Ernestine had honestly judged of both her former and her present self. She felt she could never return to the unreal, intensive selfishness which she had fostered and excused under the title of “being different”—that she could greet Caleb in almost flapper fashion, saying,

“Here I am, ready to marry you! Let’s have a general confession. First, one Caleb Patmore has never done his best work—but he will. Secondly, one Ernestine Christian has been a neurotic, selfish soul but she is going to reform.”

Caleb met her, to be sure. But before he spoke she knew some catastrophe had happened in his affairs. As he piloted her to her apartment, trying to ask interested questions, and saying that she looked fagged and he thanked heaven she was not going for public talks, Ernestine waited for him to speak of himself.

To her amazement, he would have left her at the doorway. But she took his arm, as Thurley might have done, in impulsive fashion and commanded him to come inside.

Rather unwillingly, he obeyed, telling about Thurley and her “rather far-fetched scheme,” and Polly’s success and her tour of the country with Bliss who must be “completely out of his element” boosting for this and that and actually prophesying a near and sudden peace. Had she seen much of Mark? How was Lissa getting on? And where was Collin,—no need for him to rush over to fight beside bricklayers!

“What has happened,” Ernestine asked. “You are trying to lie to me—by silence. Don’t—don’t you care any more?” feeling a reluctance to speak of her own change of heart.

“Of course, but you can’t love a beggar,” he flung back roughly. “You don’t mean to say that when it’s too late you’ve come back prepared to marry a bankrupt—a failure,” his teeth gritted together.

“What are you babbling of? Please don’t be like a Henry James conversation, say it! I’ve learned to honor directness of speech and action.”

“I’ll oblige you and take my leave. The damned public is as fickle as a weather vane. They raved over my ‘Patriotic Burglar’—I made more off of it than any three of my other books. The public couldn’t get enough of it. And I went ahead, as I always do,” this with insolent assurance, “on my next best seller, ‘Military Molly’—no plot but a pretty girl, German spy and Yankee hero—it is enough for these days—there was to be a red, white and blue cover on it and Molly in her nursing costume. And the firm refused it! They dared to say the tide has turned against war fiction, people felt reality too keenly to want imaginary woes and victories pictured for them—they said that to me, Caleb Patmore,” he was unconscious of his absurdity, “when my books have made more money for them than any other author they have. They said it was thin and I had better take a long rest ... that an editor’s greatest need in the world was to discover whether or not an author was trying to kid himself and to disillusionize him as quickly and painlessly as possible—” he tried to laugh.

“That is not so bad,” Ernestine said quietly, “it had to come some time. Rest for a year and then see what your viewpoints are.”

“But I’m stony broke! I never dreamed I’d be turned down! They dared tell me the story had nothing to commend it save questionable cleverness in nomenclature.... Why, I was hard to convince when they first wrote me; I had made some bad plays on the stock market—I counted on ‘Military Molly’ to pull me out of the hole and my next book, ‘The Battles of Billy Girl,’ to get me back to where I was a year ago. I guess there will never be any more of my books, unless some one stakes me to publish independently and every one shies when you hint of it ... would you, Ernestine?”

“Not if you were never to speak to me.”

He gave a half snarl, half exclamation. “You always wanted to see me a failure! Enjoy yourself,”—picking up his hat.

“Caleb, I came back because I was not needed over there. I came back to be a real woman—and my first job is to make you a real man. I shall marry you, almost before I unpack my trunks, and proceed to show you that the really great things in life are never written out; that your firm have had the courage, no matter what their motive, to show you the truth, and your wife is going to see that you follow it!”

As he stared at her, half enraged and half delighted, he realized that here spoke a new and rejuvenated woman and artist combined. The clever, sallow face was blushing prettily and there was something softly beautiful in the dark eyes.

At that moment neither knew they were about to join Thurley’s angel-band and with the gray angels not to sing—but to do.

“Suppose I’m a permanent failure, grumbling and jealous of your success and bitter towards the world at large? You want to take such a risk? And it is a risk, laugh all you wish and shake your head, I’m terribly done up, feel gone to bits, brain of an oyster and my nerves are shaky—”

“You remind me of nothing more terrible, Caleb, than the picture over which the world has often smiled: the tiny lad sitting on a doorstep and murmuring in hopes cruel relatives will overhear and be grief-stricken and remorseful, ‘I’m going into the garden to eat worms!’ And we all know, relatives included, what a stampede indoors there would be if some one called out, ‘But, oh, Jack, before you do, let’s go to the circus and have pink lemonade—’.”