Gouverneur Morris

“ But if, as you say, you are seriously ill, you must go to your sister Dorothy. She is the proper person to appeal to. And I feel sure that if anything were to happen to you, she would feel it her duty to take your son into her own family and do by him as by her own."
"You advise me," she said excitedly, "to leave my son with a woman who would bring him up as I was brought up—in a cold, dark house, with a cold, dark God in the parlor and a red-hot hell in the basement! That's what you would advise me to do!"
"Don't talk so wildly, Harmony," said Judge Tyler. ”

“ I can see her coming up to me, so tall and straight and beautiful and everything—music playing—everybody craning necks to look at her—the men eating their hearts out with envy. 'Who taketh this woman!' 'That do I, Tomas Beauling, for ever and ever, God bless her, Amen.' 'Who is this woman?' 'She is the woman that everybody has been wanting ever since the beginning of the world, and will go on wanting till the end of the world, and afterward. But Tomas Beauling has got her, and she is going to belong to him for ever and ever and afterward! Oh, you Phylis! ”

“ Arriving at San Francisco, a delay of ten days would be torture infernal. You would grow thin, your temper would spoil—you could just manage to live through it. But suppose your beloved was in the very next room, the wall of which was too thick to transmit sound, and you were compelled to wait there for ten days! It would be impossible. Your heart would knock out your sides, you would go mad as to your mind, and you would die after three quarters of an hour by the clock. If precisely that had happened to Beauling, he would have simplified matters by knocking the wall down ”

“ Truly, your pearl-oyster is like a strong man with a clean soul—rough without, full fair within. All his days he passeth content in the deep seas, fashioning the beautiful to the glory of nature. And what is his most beautiful work we shall never know, for the most desirable pearl remaineth forever in the sea, and is the missing link that proveth the immortality of the soul.
A junk of Chinamen came out of the east to the beaches while I was there, and these are great enslavers of Sir Oyster, for they do catch him and put him in a tank and within his house a thin metal image of Buddha. ”

“ A draft has not come, and my divers are clamoring for their pay. We are back from the fishing-grounds, with the smell of the rotting shell still in our nostrils, and many pearls under lock and key. The flower out of decay, out of the oyster the pearl! And if a draft doesn't come I cannot pay my bills, and my pearls will be stolen from me. Some of them are beauties. It is great sport, pearl-fishing—more exciting than whales, because there is a bigger element of greed, and twice as dangerous, for the boats are more fragile and the storms more severe. ”

“ Any practised writer can do it for volumes—many do, alas!—and without proper guidance you cannot find anything of the real Jack in the pages of his one and only book. You must remember that he was only fifteen, very much in love—with a passion that had endured longer than do the passions of most grown men—and dying. Then the book, if you can find a copy anywhere, would burn for you with a pure light—small, like that of a candle—and occupy your heart It is so fearless and optimistic and healthy: not good work—far from it—but brave work. ”

“ What is left over—a blackened stump, looking like a great folded bat—they chuck into the river, and whoever it once was—mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, lover, sweetheart—goes bobbing down with the current, growing less in bulk as the black crows tear at it—wetting their precious feet and protesting, but too hungry not to eat—until finally the last fragment goes down the gullets of the sharp-toothed sharks of the ocean. ”

“ Behind the desk, a black, big, fat Italian, with yellow whites to his eyes, a great expanse of dirty shirtfront, and stocky fingers yellowed with cigarettes, and finished as to the nails with new moons the color of ebony, grunted with the first squall of an important rage when he saw her, and wriggled ingratiatingly, like a newly caught eel, when he realized that she was cavaliered by so large a man as Beauling.
"Excellence will understand—excellence always does," he said rapidly. ”

“ Along the muddy Ganges are stairways of stone, stairways that have slidden into the river, stairways that are falling to pieces, stairways worn hollow, stairways that are building; above is a jagged line of many-colored temples and green trees. In the early morning you go a-boating in a fat boat with a roof; upon the roof you sit in a wicker chair, and rollop along the devout shore. The people bathe in all their clothes in the early morning, for the waters of this river are known to make a soul holy, and confidently supposed to make a body clean. Thousands of people bathing to their chins ”

“ The harbor swarmed with evil-smelling junks and sampans. War-ships of France, England, Germany, and Russia, compact as watches, of dirtied colors but extreme cleanliness and threatening design, rode in the harbor, and rose above the huddling junks as unfeelingly as robber castles stand above villages on the Rhine. Far up the harbor, by the dry-docks, a mud-colored raft, pointed at both ends, supported two squat, mud-colored turrets and a giddy flag, much too big for it, that was just beginning to be known and feared in the far East. ”

“ I was never the kind that is 'fit to die,' Judge Tyler. I was only fit to live, to be gay, to laugh, to dance, to sing, to play, to make people laugh, and later to make some man happy. For I was a good girl, even if I was only fit to live. ”

“ He paced the moon out of the sky and the stars to their beds; he paced away the night, and the dew rose under his feet. He paced up the dawn, but in the early hours of the white day he was rolled westward in a train of cars, his feet on the seat opposite, a pipe in his mouth, and a song in his heart. He saw the names upon the stations: Cawnpore—Lucknow—Delhi. He read them thus: "This is the way home, Tom Beauling." "This is the way to the haven where you would be." "This is the way to Phylis." ”

“ But the present Harmony was only a pale, tired, thin copy of the Harmony in the photograph. It made Judge Tyler start to see her again as he remembered her.
"I've changed, haven't I?" said she.
Women say so many things that only women can answer.
"I might not know this man if I met him on the street," said Judge Tyler. "It is already faded, and was taken evidently at an age when the marks of a man's character, whatever it may be, are still held in abeyance by the youth of his face. Here are no lines of race, no marks of profession. Five years may have changed his face completely. ”

“ Judge Tyler handed him the photograph.
"That is your father and your mother," he said. "Tommie," he said, "if ever you meet your father, you tell him that an old man was made happy by his sin."
Tommie looked at the photograph during an interval that was neither short nor long. Then, with a little gulp, he knelt by the judge and threw his arms about him.
"Tommie, sometime I will have to go and leave you. You're down in my will for everything I've got. It isn't much, but you need never want for most things. I'll hate to go and leave you, Tommie. What are you going to do with your life—boy?" ”

“ Just as stones continually dropped in the center of a placid pond send gentle waves to the shores, so the Holy Man of Benares, dropping golden words in the center of India, sends out waves of gentleness to the confines of gentle religion. And his people, who love animals—even the serpent—because God made them, take to themselves wings and fly into heaven or ever they come to die. ”

“ I used to stick flowers in my hair and dance before a glass. You remember our house—all horse-hair and mahogany, a stuffed duck under glass in the parlor. Fancy! The rooms were always darkened when the sun was shining its brightest. Our house was cool on the hottest days. But the air in it was never fresh, always stuffy—old-fashioned air. I remember when my uncle died. I saw him in his coffin. Fancy letting a child—a little child—see a dead person in a coffin! It seemed to me that his coffin was like a small edition of our house—a stricter interpretation of the spirit of our house. ”

“ What does it cost a man on the home trail to double and go back? I think it cost Beauling not even a pang. It seemed so much righter to break a lance for a poor little, sobbing, silly woman than to rush like a whirlwind into the very arms of the world's desire. He tiptoed into the sick-room to have a last look at Jack. Jack was so thin that you were hardly conscious of his body under the sheet He was more like an abstract intellect gone mad than a sick physical being. ”

“ I told her she would better go to Dorothy,—I assure you I spoke thoughtlessly,—and she said that was like advising her to bury her boy alive. Harmony was quite right."
The vehemence with which he said this left Judge Tyler quite out of breath.
"There!" he gasped.
"Poor little beggar!" said the doctor, reflectively.
"Harmony was quite right," repeated the judge.
"People who have had enough trouble usually are," said the doctor. ”

“ The infant advanced upon the judge, or rather from beneath him,—undermined him, as it were,—and looked him in the face, as if to determine whether or not that black-clothed, gray-headed man was trustable. In the course of his life Judge Tyler had spoken to more felons than children. He was quite at a loss.
"Come," he said presently, in a gruff voice, and forced himself to hold out a finger. The child's hand closed on the finger as a grown man's hand closes on money that is owing to him. ”

“ The rich saloon-keeper, who drives his fast horse out of town to City Island of a Sunday; the man who scorches thither with his best girl upon the same blessed occasion, and the father of the family—eleven, to one horse, with lunch in paper bags—who similarly spends his day of rest, all know that the enchanting forest, held in bounds by a low stone wall, on the right, just after you cross Pelham bridge—Pelham bridge is falling down!—is the mile-thick screen to the private life of that great financier. ”

“ O Phylis, you and I belong to a race of feeble will and small faith!
Here also in the early morning the dead are burned. Shrouded, they lie with their feet in the Ganges until the faggoty pyre is ready. The relatives and friends sit on the edge of a sort of wharf, dangle their legs, gossip, and watch the disappearance of the deceased with a kind of "Well-there-goes-Bill" expression and empty pockets, for it is cruel costly to burn the dead. ”

“ The best thing for me to do is to go to her and say, 'Phylis, I've tried to be a mountain, but I'm only a rolling stone—no good to anybody—and I've got the call and I want out, and if you like me a little you must forget all about it. I'm no good, and I'm going—good-by,' and a string of lies like that, and then go. Yes, that will be kindest in the long run. And the rest! I couldn't forget, but somehow—somehow there must be uses for a maimed man and things for him to do. There is the friendly old sea, and deserts and forests, and places other people can't get to. ”

“ As a young and vivid force that might one day develop into symmetry and management of self, he was a charm to the speculating eye. But of finished beauty he had only two features—the eyes, big, bold, and gray, and the big, sweet mouth. ”

“ A wild one lives in the jungle, and is a yellow streak full of people's pet dogs. All of which has nothing to do with the impatient morning I have passed. I wanted to go so! You go very light, and carry a stick like a broom-handle with a hunting-knife lashed to one end, and after you've run up and down hill for three or four hours you catch the elk—at bay in a pool of the river!—and stick him until he is dead, and come home triumphans. ”

“ The maiden trip of a letter is apt to be a better managed affair than the latest excursion of an experienced globe-trotter. Phylis's letter and her father's hastened on their joint mission by train and steamer, and came to Beauling side by side on a brass platter stamped with gods, in the hands of a wrinkled Hindu, who was rather afraid of them—the letters, not the gods ”

“ The ordinary boy grows up disappointing, and slaps his parents and benefactors right and left. I can't be expected to let myself in for anything of that kind. Furthermore, this boy comes of parents that were—I will not say vicious, though it is probable his father was—say, very indiscreet; stands a pretty poor show of turning out well—a worse show than most boys, and that's saying a great deal; and besides," concluded Judge Tyler, triumphantly, "even you will admit that a child ought to be brought up by a woman. There are things about children that only women understand." ”

“ Beauling looked what he could not say.
"I thought it right," said Dunbar, "to tell Mrs. Dunbar and my daughter what I had heard. Women are more rigorous about such matters than men, and I thought it right to tell them. You are the best judge of what they thought'" he added, with a faint smile.
Beauling laid his great hands on Dunbar's shoulders. ”

“ Chapter XIII THERE is no large body of water which can assume the profound smoothness of the Indian Ocean; to every other ocean there is a ground swell, as if it had never settled from the rude measures of the Creation. The Indian Ocean on good behavior is smoother than the sky above it—by day sunnier and bluer, starrier by night. It is so warm that the sun goes to bed naked, with an unperverted smile ”

“ The week went on with a night trip through darkest Canton, where a million people live in boats in a river, and push into the water between them the people they do not like. There were rickshaw and horseback rides in the moonlight. A dinner for the Chamber of Commerce, at which the English merchants opened their mouths to talk and said nothing, and Chinese merchants opened their mouths to eat and spoke volumes. It was a whirl of a week, out of which incidents stood only by recollection. ”

“ The moon struck the sand with all the force of her imagination, paraded armies of monsters, created pinnacled cities, fashioned abandoned women of mountainous size who searched for their betrayers with ophthalmic eyes—an orchard of peach-trees in blossom, the gates of hell. ”

“ That was strong language for Dorothy. It had a peculiar effect upon Judge Tyler. He began to quiver and get white in the face.
"Nauseating!" he said—"Nauseating! Then it's you that are nauseating, young woman—you and your kind. You needn't come any further. I do not need you. Your poor sister is dead in my house—but I will look after that. Go back to your children—God help them, and may God help such women as you not to have children!—but don't you speak or look a word at Tom Beauling! You understand me? ”