Gouverneur Morris

“ Do you remember when poor old Rose went mad, and tried to get at us through the bars of the kennel? Blizzard looked like that--like a mad dog." She shuddered.
The surgeon's high spirits were dashed as with cold water.
"He ought not to be helped," said Barbara; "he ought to be shot, as Rose was."
But Dr. Ferris shook his head gravely. "If he is that sort of a man," he said, "who made him so? Who took the joy of life from him? Barbara, my dear, there is nothing that man could do that I couldn't forgive." ”

“ Wilmot was at first bewildered.
"My legs?"
"They are to be grafted on my poor old stumps," said Blizzard. "You won't die. You'll just be as I am now. And I--I," his eyes shone with an unholy light, "shall be as you are now--a biped--a real man--a giant of a man. You are going to consent?"
"How do I know that you will let Miss Ferris go?"
"You shall have news of her freedom and safety in her own writing."
"When I have that assurance," said Wilmot, "I will consent to anything. Any decent man would give his life for a woman--why not his legs? Is Dr. Ferris to operate?" ”

“ Wilmot could find nothing to say. It was no mere gust of passion that had swept over him, but a storm. He was physically tired, as if he had rowed a long race. He no longer wished to play the master. He would rather a thousand times have rested his hot forehead on Barbara's cool hand, and fallen quietly asleep like a little child come in at last to his mother after too much play in the hot sun.
"Life," he said at last, "is a nuisance, Barbs. Isn't it? Would you, honestly, be happier if I disappeared, and never bothered you again? Sometimes I feel that I ought to." ”

“ He did not add that he haunted Washington Square and McBurney Place, where her studio was, in the hope that his face, which he knew to be different and more terrible than other faces, might kindle a fire of inspiration in her. He believed rightly that if a woman once looked him in the eyes she would never forget him. But hitherto Barbara had not so much as glanced at him, since she carried her lovely head very high, and looked straight before her as she went. While, as for him, he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf, beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall. ”

“ But you aren't Barbs now; you are my confessor. I confess to you, then, that I am in pretty much the same boat with Harry West. I am going away, partly, to get over you--if I can. Love is a fire. Feed it, and it grows. Let it alone, and it dies. Confessor, there is a certain girl--one Barbara Ferris, I love her with all my heart and soul and have so done for many years. ”

“ Scupper, sure that he was not actually going to be hit, escaped with an ease and jauntiness which he was far from feeling. And Barbara, the high tension relieved, burst out laughing.
It was Wilmot's turn to look sullen. He had felt that the sheer animal force of his love was holding and even moulding Barbara to his will, as no tenderness and delicacy had ever done. But at the sculptor's entrance, the honest if brutal cave-man had fled, like some noble savage before a talking-machine, and left in a state of civilized helplessness a young gentleman who could not find anything to say for himself. ”

“ Brown, level eyes, neither hard nor soft, but of a twinkling habit, a nose straight, thick, finely chiselled, an emphatic chin, and a large mouth of extraordinary sweetness, were not lost upon Barbara, but that which served most to arrest her attention was that resemblance which she at once perceived to exist between the young workman and the legless beggar. Yet between Bubbles, who also resembled Blizzard in her eyes or in her imagination, and the youth from the hardware store, she was unable, swiftly comparing them, to find anything in common. ”

“ Barbara in great glee watched him for ten minutes. She was possessed of a devilish longing to fashion out of paper a small water-bomb and drop it on his head. Memories of water-bombs brought up memories of Wilmot Allen and old days. She drew back from the window and was no longer gleeful. Why should men trouble her heart, since she wished and had elected to live, not a woman's life but a man's? She paced the studio, her soul at odds with the rest of her.
Had she ever encouraged Wilmot? Yes. West? Yes. ”

“ Nothing so makes for insomnia as a man's knowledge that he has made a fool of himself. Between Chicago and New York Wilmot Allen did not even have his berth made up. He visited the dining-car at the proper intervals, hardly conscious of what he ordered or ate. He bought newspapers, books, magazines, and opened none of them. For the most part he looked out the window of his compartment into rushing daylight or darkness. His mind kept travelling the round of a great circle that began and ended in humiliation. He had been as confiding in Blizzard's hands as an undeveloped child of seven. ”

“ He had been dreaming about Barbara--horrible dreams. His first conscious thought was that she, too, was a prisoner in the house of Blizzard, and that somehow or other he must save her. Having tried in vain to break the bright, delicate-looking handcuffs, he tried in vain to think calmly. Hours passed. Nobody came. He worked himself gradually into a fever of impotent rage. Civilization slipped away from him. He was ready, if necessary, to fight with his teeth, to gouge eyes, to inflict any barbarous atrocity upon his enemy. ”

“ To society the tragedy of Barbara's back-sliding into art was very real. Dozens of men said very frankly that they missed her like the very devil. "There is nobody else," they said, "quite so straightforward, or quite so good-looking."
Hers was a face not less vivid than a light. It seemed that in her, the greatest artist of all, abandoning the accepted conventions of beauty, had created an original masterpiece. If she had been too thin, her eyes, tranquil, sea-blue, and shining, must have been too large. ”

“ He was like a man, thigh-deep in water, who attempts to run at top speed. Yet his hands were within inches of her dress, when daring and nerve at last thrilled through Barbara, and returned her muscles into the keeping of her mind. She darted backward and to one side. In that instant the legless man overreached himself and fell heavily. Here seemed an inestimable advantage for Barbara, and yet the great body, shaken with curses and already rising to its stumps, was between her and the door.
XXXIII
For once the legless man had been deserted by the power of cool reasoning. ”

“ If her plastic training was equal to catching and fixing that expression in clay or marble, she would be made according to the mould of her ambition. The flame of art burned white and clear in the inmost shrine of her being. She saw before her, and beneath her, not a human being, but an inspiration. And since inspiration is a thing swift, electric, and trebly enticing from the fact that it presents itself shorn of all those difficulties which afterward, during execution, so terribly appear and multiply, her heart beat already with the exquisite bliss of an immortal achievement. ”

“ It was better for a man, a good horse between his knees, to find out what lay beyond the Ridges than whether steel was going up or down. He looked back upon his past life, not, it is true, with contempt and loathing, but with amused tolerance, as a man wise and reliable looks back upon the pranks of his boyhood.
He loved Barbara with all his heart, but no longer with the feeling that the loss of her would put an end to all the possibilities of life. Indeed he was coolly resolved in the event of her marrying somebody else to marry somebody else himself. ”

“ One day came strangers with picks and shovels, and the next day came more. And these began to scratch among the sage-brush and to explode sticks of dynamite against the faces of hills. Claims were staked; shanties built; a hotel with saloon attached, all of shining tin and tar paper, arose in the night. The first thing Barbara knew Wilmot began to talk of a stretch of sage-brush as Main Street. And the same day she heard a man with red beard speak of the little town as "Allen."
One night a man was shot dead among the sage-bushes of Main Street. ”

“ And it may be very showy to live for fame, but it isn't good enough. When we turned that bust you began into mud pies, we did a wise thing. We amused ourselves, and we said the last word on art as opposed to life. The best thing in this world is to be children and to have children--and the next best thing is nowhere."
"Would you," said Barbara, and her eyes twinkled a little, "really rather be a parent than a Praxiteles?"
"It looks to me," said Wilmot sadly, "sometimes--in moments of despondency--as if the honorable gentleman was never going to be either. ”

“ I know all about you, Bubbles, from Lichtenstein, from Dr. Ferris, from Wilmot Allen and--and others. And you're a good boy. I drove your mother crazy, I let you drift into the streets--to sink, I thought, and perish; but you're a good boy. I gave you no education, but you have picked up reading and writing and God knows what else. Once I was going to wring your neck. I didn't. That's the only favor you ever had at my hands. You'll grow up to be a good man--a fine, clever, understanding man. ”

“ Barbara laughed. "It would be greedy. My new model has the face of a man who has never stopped at anything that has stood in his way. I fancy that he has murders up his sleeve and every other crime in the calendar. And sometimes memory of them brings the most wonderful look of sorrow and remorse into his face, and at the same time he looks resolved to go on murdering and burning and sinning because he can't get back to where he was when he began to fall, and must go on falling or perish. Don't you think that if I can cram that into a lump of clay I'll make a reputation for myself?" ”

“ He was no longer a beggar, but a magnate. He swelled with power, and twenty girls of almost as many nationalities, plaiting straw hats by the gas-light, cringed in their hearts, and redoubled the speed of their hands. About the twenty girls who slaved for Blizzard there were two peculiarities which at once distinguished them from any other collection of female factory-hands on the East Side. They were all strong and healthy looking, and they were all pretty. He had collected them much as rich men in a higher station of life collect paintings or pearls. ”

“ Unfortunately Savage, hitherto patiently self-controlled, had heard the compounded epithet hurled at Barbara, and in a moment his fighting blood was beyond control, and he was out of the cab raining heavy blows upon a bloated chalky-white face, and receiving worse than he gave from a dozen fists and feet. Strong as a bull, always in training, his strength was beaten and kicked from him in twenty seconds, and with Bruce and the driver--who, bravely enough, if reluctantly, had leaped to his assistance--things were no better. ”

“ There's a magic taxi in the city--just one. You get in, you give your order, and lo and behold, rivers and seas are crossed, countries and continents, until finally you fetch up in the place where you would be, and when you look at the meter you find that it hasn't registered as much as a penny."
"Time," said Barbara, "flies even faster than a magic taxicab. So if you are going to 'phone--"
"Is there no drop of sentiment in that exquisite shell which the world knows as Barbara Ferris? Didn't any man ever mean anything to you, Barbs?" ”

“ To Barbara it seemed on that day that "Clovelly" was the loveliest place in all the world, and her father, who had fashioned it out of rough farm lands, one of the world's most charming artists. "Why paint with oils, when you can draw with trees and flowers and grass and water?" she asked herself.
"In the time it took me to do Blizzard's bust," she said, "I could have planted millions of flowers and seen them bloom."
"At least," said her father, "you can finish a bust, but a garden that is finished isn't a garden. ”

“ That afternoon Wilmot Allen drove Barbara down to Meadowbrook. He had borrowed a sixty-horse-power runabout for the occasion, but displayed no anxiety to put the machine through its higher paces. "I've had a rough week," he said, "and my nerves are shaky. Do you mind if we take our time?"
"No," said Barbara, "my nerves are shaky, too. And I want to talk to you without having the words blown out of my mouth and scattered all over Long Island."
He bowed over the steering-wheel, and said: "It's good to know that you want to talk to me. Is it to be about you, about me--or us?" ”

“ Just as a fine motor-car, perfect in mechanism, punctures a tire and is stalled by the side of the road, so works of genius like Barbara's head of Blizzard do not progress in one swift rush from start to finish. There were whole mornings during which it seemed that things went backward instead of forward, and when she was so discouraged that, had it not been for the legless man's almost fiery confidence in her ability to overcome all obstacles, she must have taken a hammer and pounded her fine sketch back into the lump of clay from which it had been evolved. ”

“ Whatever we are to each other, we are that--best friends. We have our roots so deep in the happenings of years and years that we can't be moved--and get away with it."
"We shall see," said Wilmot almost solemnly. "It isn't going to be easy for me, either. But time will soon show. If after a year we find that we cannot do without each other's friendship--why, then we must see each other again. That's all there is to it."
"At least you'll write?"
He shook his head.
"But I will."
"No, Barbs. The sight of your writing would be too much fuel for the fire." ”

“ When Barbara was kind he despised his anomalous position and strove to free himself from it; but even the best man has to live.
And during those intervals when he thought he could do without her, Wilmot sank deeper and deeper into methods of self-advancement which, if not actually base and culpable, at least smirched the finer qualities of his nature, and hardened his heart.
If the father's heritage, drink and women, were spared him, or at least that part of him which was really noble, a love of cleanness, clear-mindedness, and purity, died hard. But gambling was second nature to him. ”

“ He would be run to earth without much doubt and put where even the sweet memory of vengeance would taste bitter in his mouth. It is perhaps pleasant to pluck the fruits of vengeance, but a man requires time in which to eat and digest them. If they are snatched from his hand the moment they are picked, his vengeance fails of all sweetness and justification.
On the other hand, Blizzard, in order to revenge himself on the man who had maimed him, was willing to give, if not his liberty, his life.
If he could not abduct Barbara and go free, he would kill himself when they came to take him. ”

“ Give him a new pair of legs, if you can; and forget about him, as I shall. When you first told me about him, I thought we owed him anything he chose to ask. At one time I thought that if he wished it, it would be right for me to marry him."
"Barbara!"
"Yes, I did--I thought it strongly. Shows what a fool a girl who's naturally foolish can make of herself! Why, father, what if he has suffered through your mistake? That mistake turned your thoughts to the new surgery--and for the one miserable man that you have hurt you will have given the wonder of hope to the whole of mankind." ”