Chapter XIX

All the next day she kept testing herself to see if that decision was final. By evening she was satisfied that she had found the deeper necessity. And now what could she do for the girl she had lost, and the man she had given up? There must be active and disinterested sympathy for both.

As for Elsie, she must find her before she could stand by her. And when she had found her, she must show an interest in Westermarck on marriage, and no fear of Marie Sukloff. A personal in the newspapers would be the simplest method, but this had not occurred to her while she had been bewailing scorpions and crickets. That evening she wrote out a personal:

Elsie.—Simply must resume Westermarck. Not afraid of Marie or
anybody like her.—Edith.

As for Trench, Elsie’s words about the socialists came to her aid. Socialists were trying to make earth a reasonable sort of heaven. Their disbelief in a future life helped them to work at this task not less cheerfully, but more cheerfully. Doubtless many a scientific man was working in exactly that way. She must grasp this point of view at its best, and present it to Trench on the twenty-eighth of June, instead of quarrelling about a hopelessly technical problem. Incidentally she must read some current history, and try to dispel his absurd fear of an impending war. The days of great wars were over.

Easter morning dawned glorious, and she thanked God for it. The Easter after her mother had died had been so raw and rainy that it was no fit symbol of the resurrection, and good dry bones would have preferred to stay underground. But this morning, this twelfth of April, 1914, was everything that it should be. She could reflect calmly that she was not anxious about her new clothes, though she had some, and no longer worried to death about her soul.

At breakfast she found by her place a glorious lily with a blurred card—“From Clara to her best friend, and I got one for Elsie, too.”

Bless her heart—that good red little heart, to which no theory of physiology could ever do justice! An idea! Edith would add that message to the personal. She did so, after breakfast, and when later in the day her druggist telephoned the personal to four papers, it read:

Elsie.—Simply must resume Westermarck. Not afraid of Marie or
anybody like her. And Clara has a lily for you.—Edith.

At half-past ten the whole family descended from the car and entered the church. It was an old building, rich with autumnal glass. It was a church of gentlemen for gentlemen, as Cardinal Newman would ironically have said, but social problems were not bothering Edith Bridgman this morning.

At the opening of the service, Guilmant’s “Marche Funebre et Chant Seraphique” was played, and she yielded gladly to its spell. “The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis we musicians know,” she quoted to herself, and wondered if Trench ever heard any music. She laid a plot to get him to the concerts of the Symphony Society.

She had come intending to get a good deal out of the sermon, but she heard nothing after the first words of the exegesis. “We shall be changed, in a moment”—and the Greek for moment was the Greek for atom. Instantly she recalled Trench’s contemptuous designation of himself. She would take him at his word for a few atomic moments and note the result.

Flowers and preacher vanished. Light-years rolled back. Out of nothing but unguessed energy arose innumerable centres of it—ethereal but ponderable. They combined, but not by impersonal passion or personal command. They melted into two great drifts of stars and nebulæ. One of the whirling spirals spun till its core shone independent, and the rings condensed into eight planets. She watched the third from the centre as it whirled and grew. Planetesimals fell into it with flash and shock, and at last it held the atoms which would some day be Trench and his students, and Elsie and Clara and Edith. Then it gave off gases which formed an atmosphere, a great delicate bubble rippling with storms. This in turn distilled water, which spread like dew on a grape. The ever revolving flash of sun against the earth had power at last to gather from lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere the elements of a third sphere, the film of life. It pulsed faintly opalescent. It was green, with flecks of red, and tiny white scars. Every millimetre of that tissue bore some wound from which it had recovered. If now she shut out the green and heightened the aurora-red to carmine, she could see all the blood. To her it seemed a ruby, and for her it obliterated the scars triumphantly, as the blood of the Lamb obliterates sin. But Trench was bound not to object if that rich, meaningless, unvalued stuff was bought and sold. He was bound not to flinch as he saw the currents pass from body to body by agonised birth or pitiless crunching of teeth. And the teeth and bones were calcium, caught up from the rock to support the flesh tints of the bubble. But the hot life pulsed and shock, and the calcium fell like snow. Life clung to the rock, depositing death at every pore. It damascened smooth surfaces with fossils, it floored the sea with chalk and limestone and marble. It fell on fields of battle from pole to pole. Had these bones cost no more to the breeding than to impearl a rifle ball?

Trench would answer no. But how could he live by such a view? No man could hold the impersonal focus steady—she herself had felt her eye-muscles shorten and lengthen as her human interest inevitably drew some spot of the picture nearer. And if Trench really insisted that the only reality was atomic energy, he would face a blank field in which there were only equations, mass having vanished like Shelley’s skylark, lost in the light of heaven. Of such a universe he could say nothing, and yet he was doomed to express himself in the system of faded mythology which goes by the name of the English language.

What was more, he was in that web of life to stay. If he thought he could lessen the pain of it by leaving no child, he was just plain stupid. The minute his calcium fell, the sunlight would laugh at him, pick up his atoms, and put him back into the web. He would begin as plant food, but presently he would be back in human bodies.

She couldn’t tell him so, but she could tell him that he was fated to stand as he stood, touching the web with steel or medicine, to make it rosier. If—when he banished pallor with oxygen, or with tincture of fern flicked out canker from the roseleaf tissue, or with a moonlight trace of silver brushed a foul film from a baby’s eye—he could not see that it was worth while, he must at least see that it was fated. He was himself a part of the web, and every red cell that emerged from the marrowy caverns of his bones was literally breathing, and almost as literally breathing hope.

She could not leave the vision till she had drawn him closer and analysed him. She did so, dissolving him into a dozen impersonal Trenches—muscular, arterial, lymphatic, boney. But she could not find his very self, even in his nerves—that shadowy seaweed ghost, swept by ethereal tides. She could not find him in his brain—starred with all children but hers—where between the centres flashed a lacy midnight of orderly pale lightning. And when at last she reduced him to atoms and peered among his shining electrons, he faded and was lost in the light of heaven. She loved him still, but she understood no atom of what she loved. Never mind! The sciences which yesterday had frightened her, to-day cheered her. He was apparently linked with everybody and everything in the universe, and she would have to show courtesy to all his brethren. Why! that was the theory of God, wasn’t it? In spite of all the bloodshed of life, God loved the world with a love more than personal, more than impersonal.

Oh, she would open his eyes on the twenty-eighth of June. She would operate on them as he had operated on her throat. That was a mere metaphor, but she had a right to all the metaphors she wanted. To express her new faith she would even say that God’s personal love pulses to the very star-tips of the universe. To crown all, Trench would some day be the most surprised man that ever waked up in heaven. For herself she asked no better heaven than to see him kneel and kiss little Mildred.

When the Hallelujah Chorus burst forth, she was ready to join in. When the benediction had been said, and all stood for a minute in silent prayer, she prayed that Elsie might be found and Trench might be changed.

And when she turned round, she saw Trench.

It was impossible. Yet there he stood in the rear of the room, no vision, but real as hope or heaven. He was waiting, and the crowd began to pass him on its way out. He spoke to nobody, though many directed well-bred glances at him as they passed.

John made his way forward to shake hands with the minister. And now through the thinning stream she saw Trench advancing.

“Good morning, Miss Bridgman. Good morning, Mrs. Drummond. Hello, scout!”

“We’re terribly glad to see you, doctor,” said Helena. “You have given us the most blessed Easter we have ever known. Where do you usually worship?”

“Nowhere, Mrs. Drummond. I am a wandering sheep. This is the first time I’ve been to church since I used to go with my mother.”

“You poor man! You poor overworked faithful doctor. You must come home to dinner with us.”

Up to this time Edith had said nothing. She had been standing there with strange new sensations—a shyness she had never felt before. Helena’s invitation made her panicky. She simply couldn’t have him accept.

“Were you in at the first, Dr. Trench?”

“I followed you in. I heard it all.”

“Did the music please you?”

Trench lifted his eyes, and a curious tenderness seemed to stream from their grey depths. “Yes. Somehow it made me think of this rascal here. You put up a good fight, scout.”

Bobbie swung the hand he was holding—“It’s only two more years before I’ll be a really and truly.”

“Good business! Here comes your father.”

John was indeed coming, and he struck Trench like a planet.

“Hello, Director! Did you think I had forgotten?”

“Am I to be honest?”—Trench’s hand was being squeezed too hard.

“Always be honest with your banker.”—John only tightened his grip.

“Then I did think so. I came here with the base design of finding out.”—Trench managed to free his hand.

“You are a wise youth, doctor. You deliberately picked out the one day when you thought I might possibly loosen up.”

“I’m not denying it. It was a shabby trick.”

“Nothing of the sort. Perfectly justifiable. But you don’t know what a time I’ve had getting the land.”

“You have bought? You have it already? I offer the most abject apologies.”

“I’ve got it—the whole block south—quit claim—all straight, and back to the Indians. But the owner held out for impossible figures.”

“Mr. Drummond, you are what I call a normal man, so far as a man can be who is entangled in our present financial system. I offer you a health certificate from our faculty.”

“What on earth are you two men talking about?”

“Sh! not so loud, Helena. There’s just a little matter that I haven’t mentioned to you and Edith. But while nobody’s looking this way, let me present Dr. Isham Trench, Director of the Drummond Children’s Pavilion of Lister Hospital.”

Helena looked at him—looked at him hard, and thought at first that she saw him, but everything disappeared as the April rose to her eyes.

But Edith stepped up to her brother and kissed him before everybody. “John, I’m a cypripedium, and Dr. Trench is an atom—he told me so himself—but you are a dear. Doctor, you must accept my sister’s invitation.”

“That’s right, Director, and we’ll talk business. I feel an inch taller already.”

And this time Drummond had him by one arm, and Bobbie by the other.