Puslapio vaizdai
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pense. "And a room for her near by," he added. "Everything for them! Everything! Everything!"

So there he was now, the lad, or what there was left of him, this quiet Sunday, in a pleasant room opposite the cathedral. The air was like early summer. The windows were open. He lay on his back, not seeing anything. The skin of his forehead had been torn entirely off; there was a bandage over his eyes. And there were bruises on his body and on his face, which was horribly disfigured. The lips were The lips were swollen two or three thicknesses; it was agony to speak. When he realized what had happened, after the operation, his first mumbled words to her were:

"They will never have me now."

About the middle of the forenoon of this still Sunday morning, when the doctor left, she followed him into the hall as usual, and questioned him once more with her eyes. He encouraged her, and encouraged himself:

"I believe he is going to get well. He has the will to get well, he has the bravery to get well. He is brave about it; he is as brave as he can be."

"Of course he is brave," she said stolidly. "Of course he is brave.”

"The love of such a mother would call him back to life," the doctor added, and he laid one of his hands on her head for a moment.

ing boughs seemed to quiver with happiness. Her eyes wandered farther down to the row of the houses at the foot of the park. She could see the dreadful spot on the street, the horrible spot. She could see her shattered window-panes up above. The points of broken glass still seemed to slit the flesh of her hands within their bandages.

She shrank back, and walked to the end of the transverse hall. Across the road was the cathedral. The morning service was just over. People were pouring out through the temporary side doors and the temporary front doors so placidly, so contentedly! Some were evidently strangers; as they reached the outside they turned and studied the cathedral curiously as those who had never before seen it. Others turned and looked at it familiarly, with pride in its progress. Some stopped and looked down at the young grass, stroking it with their toes; they were saying how fresh and green it was. Some looked up

at the sky; they were saying how blue it was. Some looked at one another keenly; they were discussing some agreeable matNot one looked across at the hospital. Not a soul of them seemed to be even aware of its existence. Not a soul of them.

ter.

Particularly her eyes became riveted upon two middle-aged ladies in black who came out through a side door of the cathedral-slow-paced women, bereft, full of

"Don't do that," she said. "I shall pity. As they crossed the yard, a gray break down."

Everybody had said he was brave, the head nurse, the day nurse, the night nurse, the woman who brought in the meals, the woman who scrubbed the floor. Each day as she wiped the floor around the bed she kept muttering to herself, "What shame!" All this gave her something to live on. If anybody paid any kind of tribute to him, realized in any way what he was, she lived on that.

a

squirrel came jumping along in front of them on its way to the park. One stooped and coaxed it and tried to pet it: it became a vital matter with both of them to pour out upon the little creature which had no need of them their pent-up, ungratified affection. With not a glance across to the window where she stood, with her mortal need of them, her need of all mothers, of everybody-her mortal need of everybody! Why were they not there at his bedside? Why had they not heard? Why had not all of them heard? Why had anything else been talked of that At the end of one hall she could look day? Why were they not all massed down on the fragrant, leafy park. Yes, around the hospital doors, clamoring their summer was nigh. Where a little while sympathies? How could they hold serbefore had been only white blossoms, there vices in the cathedral-ordinary services? were fewer white now, more pink, and Why was it not crowded to the doors some red, and many to match the yellow with the clergy of all faiths and the layof the sun. The whole hillside of sway- men of every blood, lifting one outcry

After the doctor left, as the nurse was with him, she walked up and down the halls, too restless to be quiet.

against such destruction? Why did they not stop building temples to God, to the God of life, to the God who gave little children, until they had stopped the murder of children, His children!

Everybody had been kind. Even his little rivals who had fought with him over the sale of papers had given some of their pennies and had bought flowers for him, and one of them had brought their gift to the great hospital entrance. Every day a shy group of them had gathered on the street while one came to inquire how he was. Kindness had rained on her; it could not keep from raining, for there was that in the sight of her that unsealed kindness in every heart that was not stone.

She had been too nearly crazed to know all this. Her bitterness and anguish broke through the near cordon of sympathy, and went out against the whole brutal and careless world that did not care-to legislatures that did not care, to magistrates that did not care, to juries that did not care, to officials that did not care, to drivers that did not care, to the whole world that did not care save only those who mourned for the maimed and the dead.

Through the doors of the cathedral the people streamed out unconcerned. Beneath her, along the street, young couples passed, flushed with their climb of the park hillside, and flushed with young love, young health. Sometimes they held each other's hands; they mocked her agony in their careless joy.

One last figure issued from the side door of the cathedral hurriedly, and looked eagerly across at the hospital-looked straight at her, and came straight toward her, the choir-master. She had not sent word to him or to any one; but he, when his new pupil had failed to report as promised, had come down to find out why. And he, like all the others, had been kind; and he was coming now to inquire.

THE bright, serene hours of the day passed one by one in nature's carelessness. It was afternoon and near the hour for the choral even-song across the way at the cathedral, the temporary windows of which were open.

She had relieved the nurse, and was alone with him. Often during these days he had put out one of his hands and groped about with it to touch her, turn

ing his head a little toward her under his bandaged eyes, and feeling much mystified about her, but saying nothing. She kept out of his reach, but leaned over in response, and talked ever to him, barely stroking him with the tips of her stiffened fingers.

The afternoon was so still that by and by through the opened windows a deep note sent a thrill into the room-the awakened soul of the organ. And as the two heard it in silence, soon there floated over to them the voices of the choir as the line moved slowly down the aisle, the blended voices of the chosen band, his school-fellows of the altar. By the bedside she suddenly rocked to and fro, and then she bent over and said with a smile in her tone:

"Do you hear? Do you hear them?" He made a motion with his lips, but they hurt him. So he nodded: he heard them.

A moment later he tugged at the bandage over his eyes.

She saw it, and sprang toward him. "O my precious one, you must not tear the bandage off your eyes!"

"I want to see you!" he said. "It has been so long since I saw you!"

VI

THE class had been engaged with another model. Their work was forced and listless. As days passed without her return, their thought and their talk dwelt more and more upon her disappearance. Why had she not come back? What had befallen her? What did it all mean? Would they never know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work, the teacher of the class entered. There was a shock in his eyes; his look shocked them; an instant sympathy ran through them. He spoke quietly, with some effort:

"She has come back. She is downstairs. Something has befallen her indeed. She told me as briefly as possible, and I tell you all I know. Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral choir school was run over. A mention of it-the usual story-was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers? They bore us; they are He was taken to St.

not even news.

Luke's, and she has been at St. Luke's, and the end came at St. Luke's, and all the time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it. Such is New York! It was for his musical education that she first came to us, she said. And it was the news that he had been chosen for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw brighten her day by day. Now she comes again for the same small wage, with other need, no doubt; the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for his breast. She told me this as calmly as though it caused her no grief. It was not my privilege, not our privilege, to share her tragedy; she does not impose it upon us.

row.

"She has asked to go on with the sittings. I have told her to come to-morBut she does not realize all that this involves. You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new portrait. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, for she has hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light that was in her face, which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The look is gone. It is gone, and will never come back-the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee-that great earthly beacon-light of humanity in women of ages past. It was brutally put out, but it did not leave darkness behind it. As it died, there came in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old-the look of faith in immortal things. Now she is not the mother with the tenderness of this earth, but the mother with the expectation of eternity. Her eyes have followed some one who has left her arms and gone into a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance."

WHEN she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning, so changed, with one impulse of respect they all rose to her. She took no notice,-perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice, but she advanced, and climbed to the platform without faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders. Then, to study the effect from different

angles, he went behind the easels, passing from one to another. As he returned, with the thought of giving her pleasure, he brought along with him one of the students' sketches of herself, and held it out before her.

"Do you recognize it?" he asked.

At first she refused to look. Then with indifference she glanced at it, arousing herself. But when she beheld there what she had never seen, how great had been her love of him; when she beheld the light now gone out and the end of happy days, quickly she shut her eyes, and jerked her head to one side with a motion for him to take the picture away. But brought too close to her bereavement and to the fount of self-pity, suddenly over her hands she bent like a broken reed, and the storm of her anguish came upon her.

They started up. They fought one another to get to her. They crowded around the platform, and tried to hide her from one another's eyes, and knelt down, and wound their arms about her, and sobbed beside her; and then they lifted her and guided her behind the screens.

"Now, if you will allow them," he said, when she came out with them, “some of these young friends will go home with you. And whenever you wish, whenever you feel like it, come back to us. We shall be ready. We shall be waiting. We shall all be glad."

ON the heights the cathedral risesslowly, as the great houses of its faith have always risen.

Years have dritted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have sifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted them. Well nigh a generation of human lives has already. crumbled about its corner-stones. Farbrought, many-tongued toilers, toiling on the rising walls, have dropped their work and stretched themselves for their sleep; others have climbed to their places; the work goes on. Upon the shoulders of the images of the Apostles, which stand about the chancel, generations of pigeons, the doves of the temple whose nests are in the

niches-upon the shoulders of the Apostles generations of pigeons, having been born in the niches and having learned to fly, have descended out of the azure with the benediction of shimmering wings. Generations of the wind-borne seeds of wild flowers have lodged in low crevices and have sprouted and blossomed, and as seeds again have been blown on, harbingers of vines and mosses on their venerable way.

A mighty shape begins to answer back to the cathedrals of other lands and ages, bespeaking for itself admittance into the league of the world's august sanctuaries. It begins to send its annunciation onward into ages yet to be, so remote, so strange, that we know not in what sense the men of it will even be our human brothers save as they are children of the same Father.

Between this past and this future, the one of which cannot answer because it is too late, and the other of which cannot answer because it is too soon-between this past and this future the cathedral stands in a present that answers back to it more and more. For a world of living men and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs for a little space between the two eternities-a road strewn with the dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross, but with eyes turned toward the same cross.

As on some mountain-top a tall pinetree casts its lengthened shadow upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun, so the cathedral flings hither and thither athwart the whole land its spiritual shaft of light. A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it, begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form. In imagination they see its chapels bathed in the glories of the morning sun; they remember its unfinished dome gilded at the hush of sunsets. Between the roar of the eastern and of the western ocean its organ tones utter peace above the storm. Pilgrims from afar off, known only to themselves as pilgrims, being pilgrim-hearted, but not pilgrim-clad, reach at its gates the borders of Gethsemane. Bowed as penitents, they hail its lily of forgiveness and the resurrection.

Slowly it rises, in what unknown years

to stand finished! Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped of better laws. Finished and standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for the order of the land, for order in the secret places of the soul, and order throughout the world. Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country which invites all lives into it, and cuts down lives most ruthlessly-lives which it stands there to

save.

So it speaks to the distant through space and time; but it speaks also to the

near.

Although not half risen out of the earth, encumbering it rough and shapeless, already it draws into its service many who dwell around. These seek to cast their weaknesses on its strength, to join their brief day to its innumerable years, to fall into the spiritual splendor of it as out in space small darkened wanderers drop into the orbit of a sun. Anguished memories begin to bequeath their jewels to its shrine; dimmed eyes will their tears to its eyes, to its windows. Old age with one foot in the grave drags the other peacefully about its crypt. In its choir sound the voices of children herded in from the green hillside of life's April.

RACHEL TRUESDALE'S life became one of these near-by lives which it blesses, a darkened wanderer caught into the splendor of a spiritual sun. It gathered her into its service; it found useful work for her to do; and in this new life of hers it drew out of her nature the last thing that is ever born of the mother-faith that she is separated a little while from her children only because they have received the gift of eternal youth.

Many a proud, happy, jealous thought became hers as time went on. She had had her share in its glory, for it had needed him whom she had brought into the world. It had called upon him to help give breath to its message and build that ever-falling rainbow of sound over which Hope walks into the eternal.

Always as the line of white-clad choristers passed down the aisle, among them was one who brushed tenderly against her as he walked by, whom no one else saw. Rising above the actual voices, and heard by her alone, up to the dome soared a voice sweeter than the rest.

Often she was at her window, watch ing the workmen at their toil as they brought out more and more a great shape on the heights. Often she stood there looking across at the park hillside opposite. Whenever spring came back, and the slope lived again with young leaves and white blossoms, always she thought of

him. In Elysium she saw him playing in an eternal April. When autumn returned, and leaves drifted and dropped, thinking of herself.

Sometimes standing beside his piano. Always in her face the look of the immortal.

The cathedral there on its rock for ages.

AN ENGLISHMAN'S REVIEW OF PRESIDENT WILSON'S FIRST YEAR

BY A. MAURICE LOW

For many years Washington Correspondent of the London "Morning Post."
Author of "The American People: A Study in National Psychology"

HIRTY-FIVE days after Mr. Wil

held the Presidential office by the ridicule

TURTO the oath as President of the many of their messages excited. And thus

United States he appeared in the House of Representatives and addressed Congress assembled in joint session, thus reverting to the practice of the first President. It was a startling and almost bold thing to do.

Many persons doubted its wisdom. To a people fond of novelty, as the American people is, it made its appeal.

In itself this departure from custom was less important than interesting, but it helps amazingly to understand the President's character and his purposes, and to gain an insight into a complicated and, in some respects, conflicting nature. As historian and student of the machinery of government, Mr. Wilson knew that "The President's Message" had forfeited its high estate and become almost contemptuous. Droned out by a clerk to empty benches, it was read by nobody. Intended originally as a means to convey information to Congress "of the state of the Union," it had degenerated into a rehash of the reports of the heads of the departments or platitudinous observations that Congress and the country treated with the respect they deserved.

An institution that becomes ridiculous soon falls into decay. Mr. Wilson may have asked himself whether his predecessors, as the guardians of the high dignity of the Presidency, had not been guilty of lessening the esteem in which the public

thinking, as perhaps he did, one can very well see that Mr. Wilson would conclude that the respect demanded of the Presidency required that when the President spoke he should be listened to with attention not merely by the few hundreds of Congress, but by the many millions of the country; and to command his audience, the President must not make himself cheap by frequent talk, or weary by excessive length, or disgust by the trivial.

Wisdom, says Carlyle, is intrinsically of silent nature. Of such silent nature is Woodrow Wilson, whose reticence would have delighted Carlyle, scornful of talk and intolerant of words with no meaning. But reticence is not a quality to attract in a day when mankind is vocal and a man can escape listening only by talking. When Mr. Wilson came to the Presidency a year ago he was so little known that virtually he was unknown, the first American President of whom that can be said. He has done nothing to dispel that ignorance. An enigma then, an enigma he remains.

Nearly every public man in America has a dual personality. There is the character, largely mythical, fashioned by the country out of its own imagination; there is the man he really is as Washington, sometimes unjust, but more often fairly accurate, in its judgment, knows him from

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