The Red Book Magazine/Volume 20/Number 2/The Lover of Life

by Edwin Balmer

 

The
Lover
of Life

by
EDWIN
BALMER

Co-Author of “The Surakarta,” and Author of “The Sleeping Ship,” etc.

SNOW!” Elizabeth heard the news shouted from the next room. “Mother, there’s snow again!” And Elizabeth, fully awakened, sat up in bed, smiling and looking out.

Snow indeed,—light, flaky snow,—the second snow of the winter to cover the ground, had fallen during the night. It had ceased before dawn and the sky had cleared; so the bright December sun, as it lifted above the summit of East Mountain, dazzled down the crisp slopes. It had reached Elizabeth’s little house in the valley, shot in through Dicky’s open window, and waked her little boy.

“Snow, Mother!” he repeated the news, running into her room. Elizabeth Sprang up to close her open window, but feeling upon her throat the fresh, crisp air, she left the sash up while she stood looking out.

Illustration: A man on horseback was coming up the valley toward the house.

No one was in sight anywhere on the slope of East Mountain. The nearer rise was all clear, not even a fence showing; only naked bushes and berry-briars, and here and there a mullen stalk or tussock of grass, stood above the snow; higher up, where the trees began, the bare beeches and maples stood apart to disclose anyone moving there. Only a rabbit leaped away, its blue shadow more distinct than its white winter coat in the sunlight under the trees. But unmistakable marks in the white surface upon the hill fifty yards from the house told that, early as it was, some one had passed.

Elizabeth drew down the sash, and followed Dicky into his playroom, where old Oliver already had the logs blazing in the fireplace.

As her little boy stood at her knee while she secured obstinate buttons in bagging buttonholes, she spoke to him, as always in the morning, of his father.

The picture of the father looked down at them from the wall. It was wonderfully like the father, Elizabeth always said. It was no mere photograph, but a photograph of a marvelous portrait of his father painted by the greatest portrait painter in the country—a face which seemed to change from one serious-smiling, kindly look to another deeper, and then to quite a different look of love and joy in all life, as one gazed into the gentle, direct eyes.

The great painter, Dicky knew, had come there to that house to paint his father’s picture, just after Dicky was born. A very great many people—some very poor people like Oliver, and very rich—had each given a little to pay for painting the portrait. For everyone had loved his father on account of the books his father had written about the animals and the little birds that lived through the mountains.

Dicky’s mother read the books often to him—the beautiful books with the wonderful photographs of the little animals and birds which had been taken by his father. The pictures showed how close his father could go to them all—how none of them, not even the foxes, seemed afraid. The stories with the pictures told how greatly his father had. loved the little birds and animals and wished them always to live happily in the woods.

So the people who paid for painting the portrait gave money also to buy the woods all about the house for the little animals to live in. These people had the portrait taken to the big city after it was painted; but after his father died next year, they made a wonderful photographic copy of it and sent it to his mother to keep.

Elizabeth had explained how some of these people who loved his father still came to the house. This morning, in case Dicky might see signs of a stranger which she had seen now for the third or fourth time, she told her boy how a few of his father’s friends often came to the valley and were content just to revisit the forest, without coming to the house. But this explanation did not satisfy herself. Immediately after breakfast, she set out to follow the foot-prints in the snow to see where they led.

The dazzling white cover over the ground made all the slope of East Mountain seem as it was when her husband first brought her there. As she entered the woods, here and there hemlocks showed scars where, at one time, they had been torn by tanners, and maples bore marks of tapping; but that was all. The wolf’s howl and the scream of the puma long had been silenced; but from somewhere further up the slope, a fox barked. The tracks of hare and porcupine in the snow were the common marks; the extraordinary ones were the prints of the city boots, city-narrow and city-heeled, sharp cut in the snow.

As she followed the trail, Elizabeth noticed that, though he had a good start, he had stopped so often that she was gaining upon the man. Here, having discovered the tiny tunnel being made by the little deer mice under the new snow, he had dropped on hands and knees to trace carefully the just perceptible ridge which indicated the tunnel’s course from one tree to another. At the end of the passage, he had stood aside and waited, evidently to see the little creatures enter their tunnel or leave it.

Immediately this confirmed to Elizabeth that the stranger could not be one of her husband’s intimates. He did not know that the stitchings of the fine, hurried strides of the deer mouse are sewn upon the surface of the snow seldom except at night.

Yet how careful he had been to do no slightest damage to the little mice.

Here he had followed the lace-points of a partridge track, here the soft pads of a hare, here the digitigrade of a squirrel—stepping over when he crossed them to leave the little trails intact.

So she came upon him suddenly. He had stopped again and was standing with his back to her—a tall, well-formed man, but rather spare for his height, as Elizabeth had guessed from his tracks. His suit, city-made, but rough and thick, let him dispense with an overcoat; his hands at that moment were bare and clasped behind him. They were long, strong hands, but delicate—delicate and extraordinarily sensitive.

He turned. Elizabeth did not know him. He had so unusual a face that she could be certain she had never seen him before, or she could not completely have forgotten him. Yet she was conscious that, as he turned, he not only knew her but was startled as though he had expected she must recognize him. She was aware, indeed, that he seemed in suspense till it was clear that she did not know him. Color came to his face and he pulled off his cap.

His hair was shot here and there with gray, but he was young—not five years older than Elizabeth herself and not older than her husband when he died. He could have been little more than thirty-five. His deep blue eyes were direct and clear, the brows dark, his nose straight, the mouth mobile, sensitive. But as soon as he saw she did not know him, it expressed uneasiness no longer.

“I was wondering what to do just now,” he said quietly. “What did your husband do in cases like this, Mrs. Braillie? What do you do?”

Elizabeth, following the direction of his nod, recognized that he meant the little struggle going on in the trunk of the dead tree before him. Inside the tree, deer mice had laid by their store of beechnuts, each kernel carefully shelled. A red squirrel had discovered the store-chamber. Halfway up the trunk he found a hole leading to it and was busy gnawing the entrance large enough to admit him. But at the bottom of the tree, the mice had another hole and through this, after their first panic, they were scurrying to remove their supply, kernel by kernel, and to take it down through a new tunnel under the snow before the squirrel could seize their store.

“What were you going to do?” Elizabeth asked.

The stranger smiled. “I started to drive the squirrel away, of course. I’m from the city. But I remembered seeing something in one of your husband’s books—or was it John Burroughs’—about almost exactly this sort of thing. He—your husband or Burroughs, if it were he—just left them alone to have it out, didn’t he?”

Elizabeth hesitated to answer. She was used to being recognized and spoken to by strange visitors at other seasons. But this man, she knew, was no ordinary visitor and he asked more than the mere question he worded. And now he answered that himself.

“He did. I remember I couldn’t understand why he never let himself interfere in the little affairs about here. Yet I know that it was because he didn’t interfere that everyone wanted to come here—that I myself wanted to come.”

Elizabeth wished him to continue. “Because he didn’t interfere?”

“Yes; because he could always sit by and watch and not interfere and see how the little animals got along in their own way, living just by themselves and—for themselves.”

“And for themselves?” Elizabeth repeated quickly, on account of the way he had said it.

“Yes,” the man said simply. “So he made it a goal for me to come here, when I could. May I, when I can?”

“Of course!” Elizabeth replied.

“Thank you!” he said. “Thank you!” He repeated it with such strange earnestness that Elizabeth found herself staring at him. He bowed to her, quietly, and moved off.

Elizabeth returned to her house, wondering—wondering not only at the man but at herself. She had never seen him before; they had exchanged only a few words. Yet for the first time since, as a girl, she had met her husband, she was comparing another man’s face with his.

II

The publishers of her husband’s books were preparing a new edition which required additional photographs to illustrate it. So Elizabeth spent most sunshiny mornings in the hills with her camera. She found at different times traces of the visits of the tall city man; but it was more than a week later that she again encountered him. That morning he too had a camera; and she found him lying at length in the snow, like a boy, waiting for a grey squirrel to come down from a tree to be photographed.

He jumped up, flushed and shaking himself, as he heard Elizabeth behind him. He answered her smile by feeling into a pocket, drawing out an envelope and offering it to her awkwardly.

“I got that last Friday,” he explained. “I was going to mail it to you. I must have been awfully lucky to get it.”

Elizabeth opened the envelope. It contained a clear, excellent photograph of a fox in the woods at night—all alive, alert, just as the click of the mechanism which discharged the flash-light surprised him. Elizabeth exclaimed her pleasure.

Illustration: He jumped up, flushed and shaking himself

“A fox! I didn’t even hope to get one! Thank you so much! But,”—she tried not to let her tone change—“why were you going to mail it? Why weren’t you going to leave it at the house?”

He put his hand again in his pocket for his only answer and drew out other photograph prints.

“I got these Saturday morning and some of them before,” he said as he offered them. “I’d be glad if you could use any of them.”

Elizabeth examined them enviously. They were among the best photographs she had ever seen of the little wood animals taken close to the camera.

“What mechanism did you use?” she asked.

“Mechanism?”

“They are so close,” she explained; but then she saw that he had not failed to understand—she recognized the same rush of sensitiveness she had noticed the first time they spoke together.

“I didn’t have to use mechanism—except for the fox,” he replied at last. “They—they aren’t any more afraid of me than of anyone else.”

The words in themselves were nothing; what she had asked him was but natural to anyone. Yet Elizabeth knew that somehow she had hurt this strange man, and that she could see no reason for it, did not lessen her guilt. Wonder of it almost forced from Elizabeth the question direct; but she modified it.

“You were a friend of my husband’s?”

“I met him once,” he almost rebuffed her.

Elizabeth could ask him no more. She felt as if he not only meant to dismiss discussion of himself, but, with the same sentence, meant to dismiss her. She put his prints away safely and again thanked him for them.

“I want them for a new edition of my husband’s books, you know,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “I know.”

“If you want to help me with more pictures, I can show you what I have and what I need—if you will stop at the house.”

“Thank you,” he said in such a way that Elizabeth knew that he did not mean to come. And he did not. Hardly a week through the winter but one day found him in the valley. And though he still avoided the house, he frankly offered himself as companion for Elizabeth and for Dicky upon their many, busy expeditions.

Elizabeth laughed sometimes to herself in the evenings at how very well she and Dicky and the man from the city were getting to know and to like each other—and how completely he had avoided every personal allusion. He had not even told her his name. Old Oliver, who made investigations at Rushton—the little town upon the railway—discovered only that he came up from the city and kept his horse at Rushton.

He himself had volunteered that much to Elizabeth, with the additional information that he bunked for his week-ends and stabled his horse in the cabins the barkmen had left upon Craggy Mountain.

Yet Elizabeth realized that they had become almost friends, and scarcely less instinctively than Dicky, she trusted him.

III

Successively the close prints upon the snow of a tiny foot scarcely larger than the grey squirrel’s, had told that the skunks had awakened from their mid- winter nap; another new and sharper and larger foot-print had showed that the raccoons had roused from their longer hibernation, and starving thin, had left their dens in the ledges.

Then the snow had gone; the rabbits cast off their winter colors. Bees boomed from their hives; all the slopes became green, and life called everywhere.

Even upon the dead trees the staccato raps of the woodpeckers preparing new holes mixed with the squabbles of the nuthatches and chickadees for the possession of the old ones. Pewees flew past, bearing bits of moss and lichens for their tiny nests among the living branches, and pairs of orioles tore at the asclepias for flax to hackle and weave into their high-swinging nests looped to the tops of the tallest trees.

And all the little beasts guarded broods of young.

It was upon a warm, clear evening, all deep green upon the mountains and all glorious red and gold upon the clouds above them from the setting sun, that Elizabeth saw a man on horseback coming up the valley toward the house, and she saw it was her friend of outdoors.

To see if he would come into the house, if he wished now to see her, she retreated into the library and waited till old Oliver brought him in.

She could not see his face well, for the last sunlight glow was behind him as he entered; but his first movement was a surprise.

Scarcely having spoken to her, he glanced at her reading table and crossed to it; and there possessing himself of a magazine, still in its mailing wrapper, he breathed his relief almost audibly and turned about.

“You will excuse me,” he apologized. “I did not hear till this morning what was in this. I thought that you would get it.”

Elizabeth did not attempt to conceal her astonishment. “My husband used to write for that magazine; so the publishers still send it to me.”

He held the magazine behind his back.

“Mrs. Braillie,” he demanded abruptly, “you want me to be able to come here?”

Elizabeth, not able to see his face in the failing light, evaded.

“What do you mean?”

“I want to be able to come here—and come when I can. I need—you must not misunderstand me—but I need now more than I thought would be enough when I first came here. You see, I thought before I came here, that it would be enough—-enough just to get out for a day or two away from everything else here in your hills with the little animals—and be just like a friend to them, as your husband was. But I have come to need more, you see; and you—you let me come to need it. I didn’t come in here at first; I didn’t try to meet you—though I knew you wanted to know everyone who came about here—because I didn’t dare hope you and I could possibly become friends. But we have, haven’t we?”

Elizabeth did not answer. She fumbled with the chimney of the lamp upon the table beside her.

“We have,” he answered himself. “And I’m asking for nothing more than I’ve had—to come here, as I have been coming, and see you and talk with you and go about with you. And I can,”—he held the magazine in front of him—“if you can only throw this away without opening it or let me tear out a page before giving it to you.”

She lighted the lamp and, turning the wick so the light glowed softly, looked up into the man’s face.

“But if I cannot?” she replied at last.

“I cannot see you—I cannot come here again.”

She took the magazine.

“You mean I would not let you if I read what is in this about you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then what is here about you is true?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you not want me to know it?”

“Because I cannot tell you the other side of that truth.”

“Cannot?”

“I mean I could not come here for myself—it would not help me to come if you knew.”

She pressed both her hands over the magazine in her doubt. Her slender, firm little fingers showed pale and transparent in the lamp’s yellow glow. His eyes, watching her hands, suddenly ceased to await merely their action; he gazed at her hands and suddenly, with a shudder, hid his own behind him.

“What is it?” she cried.

“Your hands have never hurt a living thing!”

“What have you done?” she demanded.

As quickly as he had lost control of himself, he regained it.

“It is there,” he said quietly. “You will know the account from my picture which they put with it. You can read it.” And he turned and left her.

Elizabeth heard him outside; he spoke to his horse, mounted and rode away. For a moment more she stood listening where he had left her, as if she expected the scurry of the horse’s hoofs to turn back; but they died away; the darkness had fallen so swiftly in the little valley that Elizabeth, as she went to the window, could barely make out the man and horse as a moving blur far off.

She came back to the lamp and slowly tore the wrapper from the magazine; but before she opened it she heard Dicky behind her.

The boy came in flushed and excited.

“Mother, is he gone? I was way off with Oliver; didn’t he come to see me? Mother, when’s he coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth answered; and suddenly she realized her words herself.

She dropped the magazine in the bottom of a drawer and locked it.

Illustration: “I cannot see you—I cannot come here again.”

Who was this man? What had he done which—if she knew it—must keep him from ever seeing her again? Was it not her right—her duty to know that? Ought she not to want to find out now that she knew—as she had last seen him—she could not keep herself from comparing his face with her husband’s, as she had the first time she met him?

To end the absurdity of the comparison, she went up to the room where her husband’s picture hung, and lighted the lamp and studied it. But instead of ending the feeling, it brought to her a sense of dissatisfaction with the picture that she had not had before. There was a lack which, of course, was in the portrait—there could have been no such lack in her husband. She was letting the portrait replace her own memory of her husband for, half an hour before, this strange man had seemed to possess something noble which her husband had not.

A score of times, in the days that followed, she took the key and unlocked the drawer into which she had dropped the magazine—but she went no further.

Then the summer heat descended; and with its parch and dryness, a plague of which she had heard but vaguely in years before—a plague which they called the children’s plague—came spreading up from the city. Here it struck and then there, with terrible quickness and without understood cause or connection. Elizabeth shuddered when she learned of how it left the children; but she believed that Dicky, at least, must be safe—until, suddenly, one morning, she bent over his bed and knew that the sickness had come upon her child.

She sent Oliver galloping to Rushton with a telegram for the doctor from the nearest town, though she knew the doctor could do almost nothing. Yet when the physician came and admitted his helplessness, she clutched him wildly. “Nothing?” she cried. “Can no one in all the world do anything?”

The old doctor, who had known her husband, told her of the only possible chance as mercifully as he could.

“My dear, I shall not say that there is no one who can do anything. I have heard only this week that”—he hesitated “that physician Thorpe has—” He got no further.

“Thorpe!” she cried. “He? The monster! ‘Thorpe, the vivisectionist, whom my husband denounced?”

Che doctor waited to quiet her.

“Elizabeth, my dear,” he said then, “I am not sure that even he can save Dicky. I can tell you only that they say in the city he has at last proved his serum for which—”

“He has been slaughtering little dumb creatures!”

“But now he is saving children—hundreds of children—sick like Dicky here. He is saving them all—or almost all—to whom he can get in time.”

“It can’t be so!” Elizabeth cried. “My husband said God never meant for good to come from such things as Thorpe has done! God—our God who gives us all life—could not let good come from such suffering of his little dumb creatures. My baby shall get well. Yes! And he will walk and run again, too! He will!” Upon the tree just outside her window, a little furry brown form moved and scampered away. Elizabeth pointed to it. “God would never leave that little beast to run and climb and not permit it to my baby!”

Illustration: “Have you ever thought that what made Thorpe do what he has done might be courage—not cruelty?” the old doctor asked.

“No,” the old doctor agreed, “he couldn’t—without leaving us power to transfer some of that life to save our babies, if we could find a man skillful and brave enough.”

“Brave enough?” Elizabeth echoed.

“Have you never thought that what made Thorpe do what he has been doing might be courage—not cruelty?”

“Courage?” Elizabeth faltered.

So for a moment the doctor let her think alone. She returned to the window and as she looked out, her eyes met the lower branch of the tree upon which Dicky used to climb and from which his swing now hung, motionless. Her little boy had been so active and quick and strong, climbing upon that low limb and tossing high and free in the swing. But suddenly now she saw him a cripple in a chair under that tree. She sprang up, and ran down for Oliver and sent him riding again to Rushton to telegraph. Then, on her knees beside the bed, she waited.

V

Late in the afternoon, a horseman appeared far down the valley. On chance that it might be Thorpe, she ran to meet him. Then she saw that it was only her new friend.

“Stop!” she cried to him. “You must go back! You must go back to Rushton and telegraph Thorpe for me—do you hear? I have sent for him; but he may not come for me! So you must telegraph to him—to your friends; to anyone!”

“Thorpe!” the man cried back. But he had not turned and now was beside her.

“No!” She attempted to prevent him from hurrying on foot to the house. “I say I have sent for him; but for what we have said—what my husband did—he may not come! If you have any influence at all, you must use it! For Dicky is sick—sick with—” She could not speak it. “He—Thorpe is the only one that can help him! And he must come in time!”

She fought physically with the man, but he kept on to the house. He spoke to her, but she could not hear him.

“I say you must get him—Thorpe! The one whom my husband denounced!” She tried to make him understand. “I am myself. I know what I say. Get him!”

So now, as they were at the door, he had to seize her and by his greater strength quiet her in his arms.

“I am he—Thorpe! Can’t you see now?” he cried to her. “Let me go in!”

VI

In an hour the child was safe and they knew that he would run again and be active and strong.

Elizabeth followed Thorpe to the room where they parted the month before.

“So this is what you were doing! This was that which you could not tell me—for you could not make me understand, except it came to me like this!”

“No,” Thorpe replied gently. “No, this is what I wanted to keep from you for my own sake, so—so you would not have to think of it with me and remind me of it.”

“Remind you of it?”

“I’ve finished this, thank God! For what I’ve had to do to get this, I’ve made—reparation. I almost gave up once. But then—I came here; you talked to me as to anyone else; and I went on.

“I thought I would not have to do any more when I finished this, but there is so much more work still to be done! So many other diseases, bad ones, that nobody’s been able te do much with, that a man feels it’s up to him to—to keep at them.” She felt the convulsive clutch of his arm.

“Yes, and you can conquer them!”

“If you will help me, I know I can; but I need your help, for I haven’t got hardened to the way I must work. I shall be able to go on with my work with the animals in the city only if I can come back often and be among the little animals here where no one touches them or interferes with them in any way. I want to get entirely away from my work in the city when I come here, so I want you to know no more about it and try to understand no more. Thousands of women could understand, but they couldn’t help me. You can help me most by helping me forget while I am here. I want the little animals still to think I am like you, so they wont be more afraid of me, and Dicky will see them come to me just as to you.”

He hurried from her and down to where old Oliver held his horse, but before he had mounted Elizabeth ran after him.

“You must go, I know. No, don’t get down. I only wanted to tell you that I’ve found where the little foxes have their hole on North Mountain. I'll show it to you when you come back. They let me come very near; and you can go nearer. I didn’t understand how it could be before. You see, they are less afraid of you than they were of even—my husband.”