Chapter XXXVII

“And the way to end dreams is to break them,
Stand! Walk! Go!”

ROBERT BROWNING.

“And to-morrow,” said Katherine, “my holiday begins.”

“Oh! Good! Good!” cried the American. The hot, dry end of another summer found them still in London, in empty London, when the park seats are stacked together, and the sun hot in the sky, shows unrelentingly the deep coating of dust under which the tired world lies, and the people who don’t go away grow old before their time.

“Only,” said Katherine, looking at the heavy, crawling waters of the Thames, “I don’t know where to go! Do you believe,” she said, eyeing her companion sternly, “in treating people as they deserve?”

“Good Heavens, no!” cried Bert in dismay. “Besides, how do you know what they deserve?”

“Oh, it is so easy to make allowances for people,” said Katherine angrily, “so easy to let things pass, and be tolerant, that is how people behave toward wrong! They look away from it, and call it a ‘Pity!’ It is not fair on those that do right. It is a premium on sin. I am tired of the doctrine of ease, and a standard of Blindness. If people were half as casual about their incomes as they are about their conduct, they would, most of them, be beggars. But in questions of right and wrong, we take the ostrich attitude and make the world a great, vague place of lost truths and buried treasures. I am sick of cheap excuses for sin!” Bert looked at her in surprise; he had never heard her talk before, and he found it suited her almost as excellently, as her silences and short replies. He had to pull himself together, as he had to do more often than ever of late, when watching her face took the place of listening, to what she said.

“You are trying to think hardly of someone,” he said, “but I wouldn’t if I were you. You see, we know so little about each other anyway, and temptation is such a very real thing. There is never more than a hair’s breadth of difference between right and wrong, and sometimes when one gets lifted off one’s feet by an immense emotion, the ‘oughts’ drop out. Haven’t you ever known a time when the ‘oughts’ dropped out?”

“No,” said Katherine; “I have done wrong frequently, but not like that, I have been quite able not to. I believe one can always help it.”

“Maybe that’s so,” said Bert, “and that makes it pretty easy for us if it is so, but it doesn’t prove anything about other people. I guess there are times for most of us when one almost _can’t_ help it. When one sees red or blue as the case may be, and then goes for it. It is all very well for someone who doesn’t see it to look shocked, and say one might have gone somewhere else, but they’re way off. It’s not their funeral. You’ve lived a very simple life, Miss Linton, and I don’t mean by simple an easy one. The easy ones are generally the most complicated, and the hard ones sometimes pretty straight, but wait till you get to the cross roads before you make statements, and when other people take the wrong way, just give ’em a chance to come back. You see, there isn’t much virtue in doing right if you haven’t with all your heart longed to do wrong—and not done it.”

“I could not trust anyone who had committed certain great sins, wilfully,” said Katherine.

“Well! it wouldn’t be sin, you know, if it wasn’t wilful,” said Bert, smiling; “besides, what do you mean by great, and what do you mean by trust?”

“Oh, you do quibble,” exclaimed the girl impatiently.

“Why, no!” said Bert; “words have such loose meanings, I wanted to be quite sure. You see what you might call a great sin someone else might think a poor kind of a mistake, and trust——! Well ‘trust’ means any amount of things. There are men one could trust with one’s money, but not with a little tale, and there are some one could trust with all one’s little tales, but not with half-a-crown.”

“I couldn’t trust anyone at all unless I could trust them entirely,” said Katherine.

“Well, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Bert gently, “because human nature is sure to give way somewhere. Better wait for the Angels.”

Katherine had received a letter from her mother asking her to come and spend her holiday with them, at a lovely little place on the Thames. Her father warmly seconded her mother’s invitation. Katherine looked doubtfully at her companion.

“There seems very little to be said for the people who do right from your point of view,” she said shortly.

“They don’t need anything to be said for them,” Bert replied, smiling. “They can get along without.”

“I shall probably spend the next fortnight with my mother,” said Katherine.

“All the time with your mother?” Bert pleaded, holding out his hand.

“What’s that for?” Katherine asked, scornfully.

“The address,” said Bert, “I want to see—your mother.” Katherine gave it to him.

“Come on Sunday, then, if you like,” she said, a little ungraciously. “It will make no difference.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too sure,” said Bert as she turned to leave him, “it all depends on what you mean by difference.”

Bert walked to the edge of the embankment and gazed out over Westminster. It was a view that he loved, but meant to leave. Deep down in his heart the call of the hurrying, shouting continent, he called his home, could be heard very plainly—and of late very frequently.

As he looked at the stately grey towers, and the slow, small river before him, his eyes saw more clearly still the great sweep of New York harbour, and the huge, incongruous, marvellous city rose up out of its water home, to beckon to him. There were many tyrants in his city of liberty, but there was the clear, dry air, the friendly sun, and myriads of his brothers, a hustling, inconsequential, kindly horde. All going as fast as they could, with humorous knowledge of their own speed, towards uncertain gigantic goals of their own imagining.

He had lived two years in England, and he had learnt how to hide crude longings, and big dreams, and just how long afternoon-tea took, and how to show a dignified friendliness with footmen, and a self-respecting reverence to little personages. But he was getting tired of it, sick and weary of the neat little days, and the carefully drawn little lines. “The twice-breathed air blew damp.” There was only one thing, one motive, which had kept him there so long. The steady-eyed, rather inarticulate girl who had just left him. Then he began to realize just how he wanted her to see America. They would go and stay with his brother for awhile, and then look around for a little house somewhere quiet near New York. Maybe they would come back to visit England. He turned back resolute and inspired. “I guess,” he said, with a wave of militant Americanism getting the better of his newly-acquired English manner, “I guess little old New York is good enough for me!”