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Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2> During the next few months, the necessity for bracing Teddy and his sisters to meet fate threw Bob Collingham's personal preoccupations more and more into the background. All that was implied by the fact that Jennie was his wife and he was her husband went into this single supreme task. Habit came to his aid by fitting them all to the situation as though they had never been in any other. They grew used to the fact that Teddy was in jail and might come out of it only by one exit. Teddy grew used to it himself. The family, once more at Marillo, grew used to the odd arrangement by which Bob and Jennie worked together and lived apart. The Collinghams grew used to the thought of the Folletts, and the Folletts to that of the Collinghams. "You get used to anything," Junia commented to her husband, as one who has made a new discovery. "It seems to me as if Edith's living in that flat on Cathedral Heights and keeping only one maid is all I'd ever dreamed for her." To Bob, this wonting of the mind was the easier because Wray stayed in California, his absence making it possible to leave in abeyance the subjects that couldn't yet be touched upon. The first chance of fortifying the three girls seemed to present itself on a night in that autumn when it was still warm enough to sit on the screened piazza. His car was, as usual, before the door, and in an hour or so he would be making his way to Marillo. As he had returned to his work at the bank, his spare time was now in the evenings. "If you want to do something for me, Gladys, there's a way." He said this in reply to an aspiration of all three, in which the youngest sister had been spokesman. Gladys's voice was eager and affectionate. "What way, Bob? Tell us. We'll do anything." Smoothing Pansy's back as she lay on his crossed knees, he considered how best to make it clear. Gladys sat close to him, as the one who most easily took him fraternally. Gussie, in whom he stirred an unusual self-consciousness, kept herself more aloof. Altogether in the shadow, Jennie was seemingly withdrawn, and yet more intensely aware of him than anyone. "It's this way," he tried to explain: "Living is like climbing a mountainside. You drag yourself up to a ledge where you can stand and take breath, and feel that you've reached somewhere. Then, just as you think that you can camp there and be comfortable for the rest of your life, you find yourself summoned to move to the next ledge higher up. At that some of us get discouraged; some fall off and go down; but most of us brace ourselves for another great big test. Do you see?" Gladys answered, doubtfully, "I see—a little." "Well then, the thing we need for the test is pluck, isn't it?" Gussie spoke dreamily. "We need pluck for everything." "So we do; and I often think that we don't make enough of it. Pluck is different from courage, because it's—how shall I say?—it's a little more cheery and intimate. Courage is like a Sunday suit that you wear for big occasions; but pluck is your everyday clothes, which you need all the time and feel easy in. Courage is noble and heroic—something we'd be shy about claiming. Pluck is the courage of the common man, which anyone can feel he has a right to." "I can't," Gussie confessed. "I'm the awfulest coward." With this Gladys agreed. "Yes, Gus is a regular scarecat. I'm not afraid of hardly anything." "We're all cowards in our way; but we could all be plucky when we mightn't like to call ourselves brave. Do you get what I mean?" Gladys made a sound of assent which seemed to answer for all three. "Well, what I'm trying to say is this: That the time has come when we're all being summoned—you three—and me—and Teddy—and all of us—to pull up to another ledge. It's going to be tough, but we can make up our minds that we can go through with it. I don't mean just knowing that we must go through with it, but knowing that we can." There was silence for the two or three minutes during which the girls thought this over. "You said," Gladys reasoned, "that it was something we could do for you. I don't see—" "You'd do it for me, because it's easier to pull with strong people rather than with weak ones. You see, this is something which no one of us can meet alone; we must all meet it together, and the stronger each of us is the stronger we all are. Being strong is a matter of knowing that you're strong, just as being weak is the same. If I was sure that none of you was going to break down, I could be stronger myself, and we could all buck up Teddy." After another brief silence, Gladys sighed. "All the same, it would be terrible—if they did anything to him." "Not more terrible than what millions of sisters faced in the last few years, with their brothers blown to bits. They were able to bear it by getting the idea that they could." Jennie spoke for the first time. "Ah, but that was glory, and this is disgrace." "Then it calls for more pluck—that's all. The test comes to one in one way and to another in another. Real glory is in meeting it." It was still Jennie who urged the difficulties. "But when it's the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world!" "Why, then, it's pluck again, and still more pluck. It is the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world. It's harder than when women hear their boys are missing, and never know what becomes of them; and that's pretty hard. But, Jennie, hard things are the making of us, and if we come through the hardest test in the world and still keep our kindlier feelings and our common sense, why, then, we come out pretty strong, don't we?" Jennie said no more. She liked to have him talk to them in this way. It took for granted that they were worth talking to, and to become worth talking to had been a secret aim since the day when she first learned the value of pictures and books. A good many times she had stolen in to confer with the genial custodian at the Metropolitan; a good many volumes she had hidden in her room to study after she went to bed. She had proved to herself that she had a mind; and now Bob was hinting at unknown resources of strength. It nerved her; it put new heart in her. Having always been taught to consider herself weak, the suggestion that she could come through her test victoriously—that she could help him and Gussie and Gladys and Teddy and her mother to do the same—thrilled her like a sudden revelation. To Bob himself the theme was not a new one, though it was the first time he had ever got any of it into words. He had been mulling over it and round it ever since the war first called him from a state of mental lethargy. Needing then a clew to life, he had cast about him without finding one. Neither Groton nor Harvard had ever given him anything he could seize. His parents hadn't given him anything, nor had their religion. Mentally, he had gone to France much as a jellyfish puts to sea, to be tossed about without volition of its own, and get its support from the food that drifts its way. Nothing much had drifted his way till he found himself in the hospital. There, in the long, empty days and sleepless nights, the "why" of things played in and out of his brain like a devil's tattoo. He hated to think that all he had witnessed was futility and waste, and yet no explanation that anyone gave him made it seem otherwise. The question of suffering was the one that most perplexed him. What was the good of it? Why had it to be? Even the agony of his slashed head and crushed foot was almost beyond bearing; and what was that in comparison with all the pain, physical and emotional, at that minute in the world? What was the idea? How did it get you anywhere? In as far as he received an answer, it came one night when he waked from a light doze. He waked repeating certain words which he recognized as vaguely familiar: "Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." He said them over two or three times before getting their significance. "That's it," he thought then. "That's why we have to go through all this rumpus. 'Thou therefore endure hardness!' Endure it! Accept it! Rub it in! That's it, by gum!" The expletive was the strongest in which his feeble state allowed him to indulge; but he continued: "That's what's the matter with me. I'm not hard. I'm soft. I'm soft inside. In my mind, in my heart, I'm like putty, like dough. It isn't that I'm tender; I'm just soft. If I've ever had to bear anything hard, I've kicked like the dickens; and that's why I'm such an ass now. 'Thou therefore endure hardness!' I'll be hanged if I won't try." So the trying came to be a kind of religion—not a very vital religion, or one as to which he was very keen, and yet a religion. During the winter he was seeing Jennie, and the spring he married her, and the summer he spent in South America, he had fumbled with it without getting hold of it. Not till he began his strivings with Teddy, and his efforts to divert the minds of Teddy's family, did it grow sharply defined to his vision as a way of life. Perhaps it was Teddy who taught him. Perhaps they mutually taught each other. He couldn't tell. He only became aware that something was working in the boy like the might of spirit in the inner man. Possibly Teddy was learning more quickly than himself because his lessons were more intensive. He noticed this first on the day when he went, at the lawyer's suggestion, to back up the argument that to plead guilty was the only hope. "I've done all I can with him," Stenhouse declared. "Now it's up to you. He thinks you're God; and so you may have some influence." "But I never will," Teddy answered, coolly. "I'd never have done society—as the chaplain calls it—any harm if society hadn't done me harm to begin with. I may be guilty in the second place, but society is guilty in the first, and no one will make me say anything different from that." "That's all very well, Teddy; but society won't accept the plea." "Then it can do the other thing." Bob's tone became significant. "And you realize what—what the other thing might be?" "You bet I do! You can't live in Murderers' Row without having that rubbed into you." They talked softly, in a corner of the visitors' room, because other little groups were scattered about, each centering round some sullen, swarthy man, wreathed in mystery and darkness. "That's all right, old chap," Bob agreed; "but you see, don't you, that it's only a stand for an idea?" "It's a stand for telling the truth, isn't it?" "The truth—as you see it?" "The truth as it is—as I'm willing to bank on it." "Banking on it in a way that—that may call for a great deal of pluck." "Well, I've got a great deal of pluck." "Yes—if you've got enough. It's one thing to say so now, and another to prove it when the time comes." In his suppressed vehemence Teddy grasped Bob's wrist, as the hands of both lay on the small table above which their heads came together. "I've got the pluck for anything but to go before their court and say what you want me to say. I took the money because my father and mother, after slaving for society all their lives, had a right to it; I shot a man because they'd got me so jumpy with all the wrongs they'd done me that I didn't know what my hand was up to. If they won't let me have my kind of justice, they'll just have to dope me out their own, and I'll swallow it." Another conversation, in the same spot, and with heads together in the same way, was gentler. "I know pretty well what they're going to hand me out—and it'll be all right. What kind of life would I have now, even if they acquitted me? What could I have had even if I'd never got into this scrape at all? I'm not cut out for big things. I'm just the same size as poor old dad, and I'd have gone the same way. Ma's got it straight—it's not good enough. Think of rotting in an office all your life just to reach the gorgeous sum of forty-five a week, and when you've got it to be chucked into the hell of the unemployed! Say, Bob, why can't everyone have enough in a world where there's plenty to go round?" "I guess it's because we haven't the right kind of world." "But why haven't we? We've been at it long enough." "Perhaps not. That may be where the trouble lies. When life came on this planet, to begin with, it took millions of years to get it anywhere. Nobody knows how long it was before the thing that lived in the water could creep on the land; but it was time to be reckoned by ages. When you come to ages, the human race is young. It's made a life for itself which it doesn't know how to swing. In a few more ages it may learn; but it hasn't learned as yet." Teddy reflected. "So you've just got to take it as it is." "That seems to be the number. We may kick because it isn't perfect, but we don't know how to make it perfect, and that's all there is to say." "It's easier for your kind to say than for ours." "It's not as easy as it seems for any kind. I don't see anyone, rich or poor, who hasn't to spend most of his energy in bucking up. The poor think it's easier for the rich, because they have the money; and the rich think it's easier for the poor, because they haven't the responsibilities. So there you are. I begin to think that making yourself strong—hard—tough in your inner fiber—is about the biggest asset you can bring to life." "Or death," Teddy said, softly. "Or death," Bob agreed. On another occasion, Teddy was in another mood. "If I didn't get it now, I guess it would have come along later; so that it's just as well to have it over." Bob's mind went back to Stenhouse's view of Teddy's character. "What do you mean by that?" "Oh, just what I say. You can't see red like me without being a more dangerous cuss than you mean to be. I'd have got into trouble sometime, even if I hadn't done this." Before Bob could find a response Teddy went on: "I suppose you think that because I don't say anything about Flynn I haven't got him on my mind. Well, you're wrong." "Oh, I didn't think that." "But what can I say? I think and think and think, and then begin thinking again. So that," he jerked out, "that's a reason, too." "A reason for what, Teddy?" He answered obliquely. "I can't keep up that kind of thinking. I'll go crazy if I do. I'd rather be sent to where I can get another point of view. I don't care what kind of point of view it is, so long as it isn't this one. If I could come face to face with Flynn, I believe I could make him understand. Do you suppose there's any chance of that?" It was inevitable that, in the long run, speculative questions should lead them farther still. "What do you suppose God is?" Teddy said, unexpectedly, one day. Bob smiled. "Ask me something easier." "But you must have some idea." "I'm not sure that I have." "Don't you believe in God? I should have thought that you'd be the kind of cuss who would." "I don't know that you can call it believing. It's more like—like having a kind of instinct—helped out by a little thinking." "Have I got the instinct?" "Can't you tell that yourself?" "If I told you you'd howl." "No, I shouldn't. Go to it." Teddy laughed sheepishly, as if he had ventured to peer into secrets which were none of his business. "I'll tell you the way God seems to me—it's all come to me while I've been in there." He nodded toward the cells. "I don't seem to get him as a great big man, the way the chaplain says he is. He's all right, the chaplain, only he don't seem to know anything about God. He can gas away to beat the band about law, and society, and the good of the community, and hell to pay when you don't respect them; but when it comes to God—it's nix." "Well, what do you make out for yourself?" "I haven't made it out exactly. It's as if some great big hand had pulled aside a curtain—but it's a curtain that I didn't know was there. See?" "Yes, I see. And what does it show you?" "That's the funny part of it. I can't tell you what it shows me. I don't exactly see it; I only know—mind you, I'm just telling you how it seems to me—I only know that it's God." "But I suppose, if you know that it's God, you have an idea of what it's like?" "Ye-es; it's like—like a country into which I'm traveling—not with my body—see?—but with my self. No," he corrected, "that's not it. It isn't a country; it's more like a life. Oh, shucks! I haven't got it straight yet. Now look! This is the way it is. Suppose that everything we see was alive—that these chairs were alive, and the walls, and the table—that every blamed thing we ever touch or use was alive, and had a voice. See?" Bob nodded that he saw. "Now, suppose every voice was trying to make you understand things. The table would say, 'This is the way God wants you to work'; and the chair, 'This is the way God wants you to rest'; and the walls, 'This is the way God stands round you and backs you up.' Everything would be helping you then, instead of putting itself dead against you the way we have it here." "I get the idea; but would that be God?" Over this question the boy's face brooded thoughtfully. "It mightn't be God in the way that you're you and I'm me. It would be more like a way of knowing God. It's like my case in the courts. It's set down as 'The People against Edward S. Follett.' But I don't see the People; I only feel what they do to me. It's something like that. I don't see God; but I kind of feel—" He broke with another apologetic laugh. "Oh, I guess it's all wrong. Gussie'd call me a gump. It just kind of gets you; that's all. It makes me feel as if I was moving on into something—but I guess I'm not." The pensive silence that followed was broken by Bob's saying: "That's what I mean by instinct." Teddy resumed as if he hadn't heard. "When I wake up in the night—and waking up in the night in that place, with snores and groans and guys talking in their sleep and having nightmares, is some stunt, believe me—but when I do, it's just as if I had great big arms round me, and some one was saying: 'All right, Teddy, I'm holding you. Keep a stiff upper lip. I'll make it as easy as I can for you and everyone else. I'm just drawing you—drawing you—drawing you—a wee little bit at a time—over here, where you'll get your big chance.' What's more, Bob," he went on, as if he touched on the heart of his interest, "it says it'll take care of Flynn and his wife and his poor little kiddies, and do the things—" Once more he broke off with his uneasy laugh. "Ah, what's the use? You think I'm a quitter, don't you?" "Why should I think that?" "Oh, I don't know. I talk like a quitter. But it isn't that. If I could still do anything for ma and the girls—" "I'm looking after them, old boy." "So there you are. What'd be the good of my staying?" He added, between clenched teeth, "God, how I'd hate to go back!" "Back into the world?" He spoke as if to himself: "You see—that day—the day the thing happened—and they came and caught me—and did all those things to me—and I saw Flynn lying by the road—it was—it was a kind of sickener. If putting me out of the way is the thing in the wind, it was done right there and then. Right there and then I seem to have begun—moving on." He drew a long breath. "And I'd rather keep moving, Bob—no matter to where—no matter to what—than turn back again to face a bunch of men." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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