Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith
Polly Oliver's Problem
CHAPTER XII.
THE GREAT SILENCE
The months of April and May were happy ones. The weather was perfect, as only California weather understands the art of being; the hills were at their greenest; the wind almost forgot to blow; the fields blazed in wild-flowers; day after day rose in cloudless splendor, and day after day the Golden Gate shone like a sapphire in the sun.
Polly was inwardly nervous. She had the "awe of prosperity" in her heart, and everything seemed too bright to last.
Both she and Edgar were very busy. But work that one loves is no hardship, especially when one is strong and young and hopeful, and when one has great matters at stake, such as the health and wealth of an invalid mother, or the paying off of disagreeable debts.
Even the limp Mrs. Chadwick shared in the general joy; for Mr. Greenwood was so utterly discouraged with her mismanagement of the house, so determined not to fly to ills he knew not of, and so anxious to bring order out of chaos, that on the spur of the moment one day he married her. On the next day he discharged the cook, hired a better one the third, dunned the delinquent boarder the fourth, and collected from him on the fifth; so the May check (signed Clementine Chadwick Greenwood) was made out for eighty-five dollars.
But in the midst of it all, when everything in the outside world danced with life and vigor, and the little house could hardly hold its sweet content,–without a glimmer of warning, without a moment's fear or dread, without the precious agony of parting, Mrs. Oliver slipped softly, gently, safely, into the Great Silence.
Mercifully it was Edgar, not Polly, who found her in her accustomed place on the cushions, lying with closed eyelids and smiling lips.
It was half past five. . . . Polly must have gone out at four, as usual, and would be back in half an hour. . . . Yung Lee was humming softly in the little kitchen. . . . In five minutes Edgar Noble had suffered, lived, and grown ten years. He was a man. . . . And then came Polly,–and Mrs. Bird with her, thank Heaven!–Polly breathless and glowing, looking up at the bay window for her mother's smile of welcome.
In a few seconds the terrible news was broken, and Polly, overpowered with its awful suddenness, dropped before it as under a physical blow.
It was better so. Mrs. Bird carried her home for the night, as she thought, but a merciful blur stole over the child's tired brain, and she lay for many weeks in a weary illness of delirium and stupor and fever.
Meanwhile, Edgar acted as brother, son, and man of the house. He it was who managed everything, from the first sorrowful days up to the closing of the tiny upper flat where so much had happened: not great things of vast outward importance, but small ones,–little miseries and mortifications and struggles and self-denials and victories, that made the past half year a milestone in his life.
A week finished it all! It takes a very short time, he thought, to scatter to the winds of heaven all the gracious elements that make a home. Only a week; and in the first days of June, Edgar went back to Santa Barbara for the summer holidays without even a sight of his brave, helpful girl-comrade.
He went back to his brother's congratulations, his sister's kisses, his mother's happy tears, and his father's hearty hand-clasp, full of renewed pride and belief in his eldest son. But there was a shadow on the lad's high spirits as he thought of gay, courageous, daring Polly, stripped in a moment of all that made life dear.
"I wish we could do something for her, poor little soul," he said to his mother in one of their long talks in the orange-tree sitting-room. "Tongue cannot tell what Mrs. Oliver has been to me, and I 'm not a bit ashamed to own up to Polly's influence, even if she is a girl and two or three years younger than I am. Hang it! I 'd like to see the fellow that could live under the same roof as those two women, and not do the best that was in him! Has n't Polly some relatives in the East?"
"No near ones, and none that she has ever seen. Still, she is not absolutely alone, as many girls would be under like circumstances. We would be only too glad to have her here; the Howards have telegraphed asking her to spend the winter with them in Cambridge; I am confident Dr. Winship will do the same when the news of Mrs. Oliver's death reaches Europe; and Mrs. Bird seems to have constituted herself a sort of fairy Godmother in chief. You see everybody loves Polly; and she will probably have no less than four homes open to her. The fact is, if you should put Polly on a desert island, the bees and the butterflies and the birds would gather about her; she draws everything and everybody to her magically. Then, too, she is not penniless. Rents are low, and she cannot hope to get quite as much for the house as before, but even counting repairs, taxes, and furnishings, we think she is reasonably certain of fifty dollars a month."
"She will never be idle, unless this sorrow makes a great change in her. Polly seems to have been created to 'become' by 'doing.'"
"Yet she does not in the least relish work, Edgar. I never knew a girl with a greater appetite for luxury. One cannot always see the deepest reasons in God's providence as applied to one's own life and character; but it is often easy to understand them as one looks at other people and notes their growth and development. For instance, Polly's intense love for her invalid mother has kept her from being selfish. The straitened circumstances in which she has been compelled to live have prevented her from yielding to self-indulgence or frivolity. Even her hunger for the beautiful has been a discipline; for since beautiful things were never given to her ready-made, she has been forced to create them. Her lot in life, which she has always lamented, has given her a self-control, a courage, a power, which she never would have had in the world had she grown up in luxury. She is too young to see it, but it is very clear to me that Polly Oliver is a glorious product of circumstances."
"But," objected Edgar, "that is not fair. You are giving all the credit to circumstances, and none to Polly's own nature."
"Not at all. If there had not been the native force to develop, experience would have had nothing to work upon. As it is, her lovely childish possibilities have become probabilities, and I look to see the girlish probabilities blossom into womanly certainties."
Meanwhile Polly, it must be confessed, was not at the present time quite justifying the good opinion of her friends.
She had few of the passive virtues. She could bear sharp stabs of misfortune, which fired her energy and pride, but she resented pin pricks. She could carry heavy, splendid burdens cheerfully, but she fretted under humble cares. She could serve by daring, but not by waiting. She would have gone to the stake or the scaffold, I think, with tolerable grace; but she would probably have recanted any article of faith if she had been confronted with life-imprisonment.
Trouble that she took upon herself for the sake of others, and out of love, she accepted sweetly. Sorrows that she did not choose, which were laid upon her without her consent, and which were "just the ones she did not want, and did not need, and would not have, and could not bear,"–these sorrows found her unwilling, bitter, and impatient.
Yet if life is a school and we all have lessons to learn in it, the Great Teacher will be unlikely to set us tasks which we have already finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to develop her bravery, when she was already brave?
Courage was one of the little jewels set in her fairy crown when she was born, but there was a round, empty space beside it, where Patience should have been. Further along was Daring, making a brilliant show, but again there was a tiny vacancy waiting for Prudence.
The crown made a fine appearance, on the whole, because the large jewels were mostly in place, and the light of these blinded you to the lack of the others; but to the eye of the keen observer there was a want of symmetry and completeness.
Polly knew the unfinished state of her fairy crown as well as anybody else. She could not plead ignorance as an excuse; but though she would have gone on polishing the great gems with a fiery zeal, she added the little jewels very slowly, and that only on compulsion.
There had been seven or eight weeks of partial unconsciousness, when the sorrow and the loneliness of life stole into her waking dreams only vaguely and at intervals; when she was unhappy, and could not remember why; and slept, to wake and wonder and sleep again.
Then there were days and weeks when the labor of living was all that the jaded body could accomplish; when memory was weak; when life began at the pillow, and ended at the foot of the bed, and the universe was bounded by the chamber windows.
But when her strength came back, and she stood in the middle of the floor, clothed and in her right mind, well enough to remember,–oh! then indeed the deep waters of bitterness rolled over poor Polly's head and into her heart, and she sank beneath them without a wish or a struggle to rise.
"If it had been anything else!" she sobbed. "Why did God take away my most precious, my only one to live for, when I was trying to take care of her, trying to be good, trying to give back the strength that had been poured out on me,–miserable, worthless me! Surely, if a girl was willing to do without a father and sisters and brothers, without good times and riches, willing to work like a galley slave, willing to 'scrimp' and plan and save for ever and ever; surely 'they' might be willing that she should keep her mother!"
Poor Polly! Providence at this time seemed nothing more than a collection of demons which she classified under the word "they," and which she felt certain were scourging her pitilessly and needlessly. She could not see any reason or justification in "their" cruelties,–for that was the only term she could apply to her afflictions.
Mrs. Bird had known sorrow, and she did her best to minister to the troubled and wrong little heart; but it was so torn that it could be healed only by the soft balm of Time.
Perhaps, a long while after such a grief,–it is always "perhaps" in a great crisis, though the certainty is ours if we will but grasp it,–perhaps the hidden meaning of the sorrow steals gently into our softened hearts. We see, as in a vision, a new light by which to work; we rise, cast off the out-grown shell, and build us a more stately mansion, in which to dwell till God makes that home also too small to hold the ever-growing soul!
CHAPTER XIII.
A GARDEN FLOWER, OR A BANIAN-TREE
In August Mr. John Bird took Polly to the Nobles' ranch in Santa Barbara, in the hope that the old scenes and old friends might soothe her, and give her strength to take up the burden of life with something of her former sunshiny spirit.
Edgar was a junior now, back at his work, sunburned and strong from his summer's outing. He had seen Polly twice after his return to San Francisco; but the first meeting was an utter failure, and the second nearly as trying. Neither of them could speak of the subject that absorbed their thoughts, nor had either courage enough to begin other topics of conversation. The mere sight of Edgar was painful to the girl now, it brought to mind so much that was dear, so much that was past and gone.
In the serenity of the ranch-life, the long drives with Margery and Philip, the quiet chats with Mrs. Noble, Polly gained somewhat in strength; but the old "spring," vitality, and enthusiasm had vanished for the time, and the little circle of friends marveled at this Polly without her nonsense, her ready smiles, her dancing dimples, her extravagances of speech.
Once a week, at least, Dr. George would steal an hour or two, and saddle his horse to take Polly for a gallop over the hills, through the cañons, or on the beach.
His half-grave, half-cheery talks on these rides did her much good. He sympathized and understood and helped, even when he chided, and Polly sometimes forgot her own troubles in wondering whether Dr. George had not suffered and overcome a good many of his own.
"You make one great error, my child," he once said, in response to one of Polly's outbursts of grief; "and it is an error young people very naturally fall into. You think that no one was ever chastened as you are. You say, with Jeremiah, 'No prophet is afflicted like unto this prophet!' Now you are simply bearing your own share of the world's trouble. How can you hope to escape the universal lot? There are dozens of people within sight of this height of land who have borne as much, and must bear as much again. I know this must seem a hard philosophy, and I should not preach it to any but a stout little spirit like yours, my Polly. These things come to all of us; they are stern facts; they are here, and they must be borne; but it makes all the difference in the world how we bear them. We can clench our fists, close our lips tightly, and say, 'Since I must, I can;' or we can look up and say cheerfully, 'I will!' The first method is philosophical and strong enough, but there is no sweetness in it. If you have this burden to carry, make it as light, not as heavy, as you can; if you have this grief to endure, you want at least to come out of it sweeter and stronger than ever before. It seems a pity to let it go for nothing. In the largest sense of the word, you can live for your mother now as truly as you did in the old times; you know very well how she would have had you live."
Polly felt a sense of shame steal over her as she looked at Dr. George's sweet, strong smile and resolute mouth, and she said, with the hint of a new note in her voice:–
"I see, and I will try; but how does one ever learn to live without loving,–I mean the kind of loving I had in my life? I know I can live for my mother in the largest sense of the word, but to me all the comfort and sweetness seems to tuck itself under the word in its 'little' sense. I shall have to go on developing and developing until I am almost developed to death, and go on growing and growing in grace until I am ready to be caught up in a chariot of fire, before I can love my mother 'in the largest sense of the word.' I want to cuddle my head on her shoulder, that's what I want. Oh, Dr. George, how does one contrive to be good when one is not happy? How can one walk in the right path when there does n't seem to be any brightness to go by?"
"My dear little girl," and Dr. George looked soberly out on the ocean, dull and lifeless under the gray October sky, "when the sun of one's happiness is set, one lights a candle called 'Patience,' and guides one's footsteps by that!"
"If only I were not a rich heiress," said Polly next morning, "I dare say I should be better off; for then I simply could n't have gone to bed for two or three months, and idled about like this for another. But there seems to be no end to my money. Edgar paid all the bills in San Francisco, and saved twenty out of our precious three hundred and twelve dollars. Then Mrs. Greenwood's rent-money has been accumulating four months, while I have been visiting you and Mrs. Bird; and the Greenwoods are willing to pay sixty dollars a month for the house still, even though times are dull; so I am hopelessly wealthy,–but on the whole I am very glad. The old desire to do something, and be something, seems to have faded out of my life with all the other beautiful things. I think I shall go to a girls' college and study, or find some other way of getting through the hateful, endless years that stretch out ahead! Why, I am only a little past seventeen, and I may live to be ninety! I do not see how I can ever stand this sort of thing for seventy-three years!"
Mrs. Noble smiled in spite of herself. "Just apply yourself to getting through this year, Polly dear, and let the other seventy-two take care of themselves. They will bring their own cares and joys and responsibilities and problems, little as you realize it now. This year, grievous as it seems, will fade by and by, until you can look back at it with resignation and without tears."
"I don't want it to fade!" cried Polly passionately. "I never want to look back at it without tears! I want to be faithful always; I want never to forget, and never to feel less sorrow than I do this minute!"
"Take that blue-covered Emerson on the table, Polly; open it at the essay on 'Compensation,' and read the page marked with the orange leaf."
The tears were streaming down Polly's cheeks, but she opened the book, and read with a faltering voice:–
"We cannot part with our f–fr–friends. We cannot let our angels go. [Sob.] We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. . . . We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. [Sob.] We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had shelter. . . . We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. [Sob.] But we sit and weep in vain. We cannot stay amid the ruins. The voice of the Almighty saith, 'Up and onward for evermore!' . . . The sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all sorrow. . . . The man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men."
"She opened the book and read."
"Do you see, Polly?"
"Yes, I see; but oh, I was so happy being a garden flower with the sunshine on my head, and I can't seem to care the least little bit for being a banian-tree!"
"Well," said Mrs. Noble, smiling through her own tears, "I fear that God will never insist on your 'yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men' unless you desire it. Not all sunny garden flowers become banian-trees by the falling of the walls. Some of them are crushed beneath the ruins, and never send any more color or fragrance into the world."
"The garden flower had happiness before the walls fell," said Polly. "It is happiness I want."
"The banian-tree had blessedness after the walls fell, and it is blessedness I want; but then, I am forty-seven, and you are seventeen!" sighed Mrs. Noble, as they walked through the orange orchard to the house.
CHAPTER XIV.
EDGAR DISCOURSES OF SCARLET RUNNERS
One day, in the middle of October, the mail brought Polly two letters: the first from Edgar, who often dashed off cheery scrawls in the hope of getting cheery replies, which never came; and the second from Mrs. Bird, who had a plan to propose.
Edgar wrote:–
. . . "I have a new boarding-place in San Francisco, a stone's throw from Mrs. Bird's, whose mansion I can look down upon from a lofty height reached by a flight of fifty wooden steps,–good training in athletics! Mrs. Morton is a kind landlady and the house is a home, in a certain way,–
"But oh, the difference to me
'Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee!
"There is a Morton girl, too; but she neither plays nor sings nor jokes, nor even looks,–in fine, she is not Polly! I have come to the conclusion, now, that girls in a house are almost always nuisances,–I mean, of course, when, they are not Pollies. Oh, why are you so young, and so loaded with this world's goods, that you will never need me for a boarder again? Mrs. Bird is hoping to see you soon, and I chose my humble lodging on this hill-top because, from my attic's lonely height, I can watch you going in and out of your 'marble halls;' and you will almost pass my door as you take the car. In view of this pleasing prospect (now, alas! somewhat distant), I send you a scrap of newspaper verse which prophesies my sentiments. It is signed 'M. E. W.,' and Tom Mills says whoever wrote it knows you."
WHEN POLLY GOES BY
'T is but poorly I 'm lodged in a little side-street,
Which is seldom disturbed by the hurry of feet,
For the flood-tide of life long ago ebbed away
From its homely old houses, rain-beaten and gray;
And I sit with my pipe in the window, and sigh
At the buffets of fortune–till Polly goes by.
There 's a flaunting of ribbons, a flurry of lace,
And a rose in the bonnet above a bright face,
A glance from two eyes so deliriously blue
The midsummer seas scarcely rival their hue;
And once in a while, if the wind 's blowing high,
The sound of soft laughter as Polly goes by.
Then up jumps my heart and begins to beat fast.
"She 's coming!" it whispers. "She 's here! She has passed!"
While I throw up the sash and lean breathlessly down
To catch the last glimpse of her vanishing gown,
Excited, delighted, yet wondering why
My senses desert me if Polly goes by.
Ah! she must be a witch, and the magical spell
She has woven about me has done its work well,
For the morning grows brighter, and gayer the air
That my landlady sings as she sweeps down the stair;
And my poor lonely garret, up close to the sky,
Seems something like heaven when Polly goes by.
"P. S. Tony has returned to the university. He asked after the health of the 'sunset-haired goddess' yesterday. You 'd better hurry back and take care of me! No, joking aside, don't worry about me, little missionary; I 've outgrown Tony, and I hope I don't need to be reformed oftener than once a year.
"Yours ever, EDGAR.
"P. S. No. II. I saw you twice after–you know–and I was dumb on both occasions. Of all people in the world I ought to have been able to say something helpful to you in your trouble, I, who lived with you and your dear mother through all those happy months before she left us. It will be just the same when I see you again: I shall never be able to speak, partly, I suppose, because I am a man, or on the road to becoming one. I know this is making you cry; I can see the tears in your eyes across all the distance; but it is better even that you should cry than that you should think me cold or unmindful of your sorrow. Do you know one of the sacred memories of my life? It is that, on that blessed night when your mother asked me to come and live under her roof, she said she should be glad to feel that in any sudden emergency you and she would, have a near friend to lean upon. There was a 'royal accolade,' if you like! I felt in an instant as if she had bestowed the order of knighthood upon me, and as if I must live more worthily in order to deserve her trust. How true it is, Polly, that those who believe in us educate us!
"Do you remember (don't cry, dear!) that night by the fireside,–the night when we brought her out of her bedroom after three days of illness,–when we sat on either side of her, each holding a hand while she told us the pretty romance of her meeting and loving your father? I slipped the loose wedding ring up and down her finger, and stole a look at her now and then. She was like a girl when she told that story, and I could not help thinking it was worth while to be a tender, honorable, faithful man, to bring that look into a woman's face after eighteen years. Well, I adored her, that is all I can say; and I can't say even that, I have to write it. Don't rob me, Polly, of the right she gave me, that of being a 'near friend to lean upon.' I am only afraid, because you, more than any one else, know certain weaknesses and follies of mine, and, indeed, pulled me out of the pit and held me up till I got a new footing. I am afraid you will never have the same respect for me, nor believe that a fellow so weak as I was could be strong enough to lean upon. Try me once, Polly, just to humor me, won't you? Give me something to do,–something hard! Lean just a little, Polly, and see how stiff I 'll be,–no, bother it, I won't be stiff, I'll be firm! To tell the truth, I can never imagine you as 'leaning;' though they say you are pale and sad, and out of sorts with life. You remind me of one of the gay scarlet runners that climb up the slender poles in the garden below my window. The pole holds up the vine at first, of course, but the vine keeps the pole straight; not in any ugly and commonplace fashion, but by winding round, and round about it, and hanging its blossoms in and out and here and there, till the poor, serviceable pole is forgotten in the beauty that makes use of it.
"Good-by, little scarlet runner! You will bloom again some day, when the storm that has beaten you down has passed over and the sky is clear and the sun warm. Don't laugh at me, Polly!
"Always yours, whether you laugh or not,
"EDGAR."
"P. S. No. III. I should n't dare add this third postscript if you were near enough to slay me with the lightning of your eye, but I simply wish to mention that a wise gardener chooses young, strong timber for poles,–saplings, in fact! Mr. John Bird is too old for this purpose. Well seasoned he is, of course, and suitable as a prop for a century-plant, but not for a scarlet runner! I like him, you know, but I 'm sure he 'd crack if you leaned on him; in point of fact, he 's a little cracked now! E. N."
The ghost of a smile shone on Polly's April face as she folded Edgar's letter and laid it in its envelope; first came a smile, then a tear, then a dimple, then a sob, then a wave of bright color.
"Edgar is growing up so fast," she thought, "I shall soon be afraid to scold him or advise him, and
"'What will poor Robin do then, poor thing?'
"Upon my word, if I caught him misbehaving nowadays, I believe I should hesitate to remonstrate with him. He will soon be capable of remonstrating with me, at this rate. He is a goose,–oh, there 's no shadow of doubt as to that, but he 's an awfully nice goose."
Mrs. Bird's letter ran thus:–
"MY DEAREST POLLYKINS:–We have lived without you just about as long as we can endure it. The boys have returned to school and college. Mr. Bird contemplates one more trip to Honolulu, and brother John and I need some one to coddle and worry over. I have not spoken to you of your future, because I wished to wait until you opened the subject. It is too late for you to begin your professional training this year, and I think you are far too delicate just now to undertake so arduous a work; however, you are young, and that can wait for a bit. As to the story-telling in the hospitals and asylums, I wish you could find courage and strength to go on with that, not for your own sake alone, but for the sake of others.
"As I have told you before, the money is set aside for that special purpose, and the work will be carried on by somebody. Of course I can get a substitute if you refuse, and that substitute may, after a little time, satisfy the impatient children, who flatten their noses against the window-panes and long for Mias Pauline every day of their meagre lives. But I fear the substitute will never be Polly! She may 'rattle round in your place' (as somebody said under different circumstances), but she can never fill it! Why not spend the winter with us, and do this lovely work, keeping up other studies if you are strong enough? It will be so sweet for you to feel that out of your own sadness you can comfort and brighten the lives of these lonely, suffering children and these motherless or fatherless ones. It will seem hard to begin, no doubt; but new life will flow in your veins when you take up your active, useful work again. The joyousness that God put into your soul before you were born, my Polly, is a sacred trust. You must not hide it in a napkin, dear, or bury it, or lose it. It was given to you only that you should share it with others. It was intended for the world at large, though it was bestowed upon you in particular. Come, dear, to one who knows all about it,–one whom you are sweet enough to call
"YOUR FAIRY GODMOTHER."
"Mrs. Noble," said Polly, with a sober smile, "the Ancon sails on the 20th, and I am going to sail with her."
"So soon? What for, dear?"
"I am going to be a banian-tree, if you please," answered Polly.
