Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

“ Then came the astounding enlightenment that only a shred of reality was within the cramped prison of the box—just a darkened, dusty bit—that all the beautiful rest of it lay outside. These are the ones who, pressing up against the rough walls of the box, see, through their chinks, the splendor of what lies outside—see it and know that, one day, they shall have it.
The others, the Materialists, never come near the walls of the box, except to bang their heads. Their reality is inside. These call life a thing. ”

“ There was a long stillness in the dim room; the dashing rain and the muttering thunder were the only sounds in the world. The white dress was motionless in the chair, vague, impersonal—he could see only the blurred suggestion of a face above it; it got to be fantastic, a dream, a condensation of the summer lightning and the storm-clouds; unrealities seized the quick imagination of the man ”

“ Only—if it hurt the rector—if it hurt the work? And Theodore—but—someone else would do him—more good than I can. There ought to be—an older man—to belong. Surely God will look after His gift—His gift!" The quick lightning of the brilliant eyes, which in this man often took the place of a smile, flashed; then the changing face was suddenly grim with a wrenching feeling, yet bright with a wind of tenderness not to be held back. The soul came out of hiding and wrote itself on the muscles of the face. "She—that's it—that's the gist of it—fool that I am. To think—to dream—to dare to hope. ”

“ A soul that's going on living to eternity—do you want to blacken that at the start? Can't you forget your little moods and your despair of the moment?"
"No, I can't." The roses bobbed as she shook her head. The man, in his heart, knew how it was, and did not wonder. But he must somehow stop this determination which he had—she said—helped to form. A thought came to him; he hesitated a moment, and then broke out impetuously: "Let me do this—let me write to you; I'm not saying things straight. It's hard. ”

“ Who would have cured the tuberculosis lad—who would have sent the children south—who would have brushed through your uncle's garden hedge in Forest Gate, Illinois, and told you what you needed to be told? If you should turn out not to have the nerve—if, some day you—? Then what about your job? Nobody can ever do another person's real work, and, if it isn't done, I think it's likely we'll have to keep company with our undone, unattempted jobs forever. Mostly rather little jobs they are, too—so much the more shame for having dodged them. ”

“ If you only could see the mountains of whipped cream and Maraschino cherries, the cliffs of French clothes and automobiles, the morasses of afternoon teas and dances and calls and luxury in general that lie between me and any usefulness. It's the maddest dream that I, with my bones and my money and my bringing up, all my crippling ailments, could ever, ever climb those mountains and cliffs and wade through those bogs. It's mad, I say, you visionary, you man on the other side of all that, who are living, who are doing things. ”

“ Why do people shut themselves up in the air-tight box of a possible three score years and ten, and call it life? How can you, who are so alive, do so? It seems that you have fallen into the strangely popular error of thinking that clocks measure life. That is not what they are for. A clock is the contrivance of springs and wheels whereby the ambitious, early of a summer's day when sane people are asleep or hunting flowers on the hill-side, keep tally of the sun. ”

“ I like my pretty clothes and my car, and how I do love my two saddle-horses! And I like dancing, too—I turn into a bird in the tree-tops when I dance, with not a care, not a responsibility. I don't want to give all that up. Have I got to? Have I got to "lay down my life" to find it? For, somehow, cling as I will to all these things, something is pushing, pushing back of them, stronger than them. You started it. I want the big things now—I want to be worth while. But yet clothes and gayety and horses and automobiles—I'm glued tight in that round. I don't believe I can tear loose. ”

“ Geoffrey McBirney had taken a long jump, years back, and cleared the childishness, lifelong in most of us, of wanting the world. There is an attraction in a person who has done this and yet has kept a love of humanity. Witness St. Francis of Assisi and other notables of his ilk.
The people at Sea-Acres felt the attraction and tried to lionize the dark, tall parson with the glowing, indifferent eyes. But the lion would not roar and gambol; the lion was a reserved beast, it seemed, with a suggestion of unbelievable, yet genuine, distaste under attentions. ”

“ The rector had not failed to have his theories about this brilliant, hard-working, unaccountable, highly useful subaltern of his. His heart had one of its warmest spots for McBirney. Something was wrong with him, it had been evident for months; one must help him in the dark if better could not be done.
"Surely," said the rector.
There was a fast train west in an hour; the man and his bag were on it, and twenty-four hours later he was stumbling off a car at the solid, vine-covered, red brick station at Forest Gate. ”

“ The Job has stopped groaning, and wants to know if I'm "writing all night just because, or, for the reason that."
It's night now—big night, and so still down-town here. Sometimes I stay up late to realize that I'm alive. The days are so crammed with happenings. And late at night seems so wide and everlasting. You've got the idea that I do things. Well, I don't. There are whole rows of days when it seems just a muddle of half-started attempts—a manner of hopeless confusion. ”

“ And I want to hear more about North Baxter Court and such. You don't know how that stirred me. What a worth-while life you lead, doing actual, life-and-death things for people who bitterly need things done. It seems to me glorious. I could give up everything to feel a stream of genuine living through me such as you have, all your rushing days. Yes—I could—but yet, maybe I wouldn't make good. But I do care for "life, and life more abundantly," and the only way of getting it that I've known has been higher fences to jump, and more dances and better tennis and such. ”

“ I get so sick and tired of fighting myself—you don't know. Anyhow, suddenly there was a rustle in the gold and purple hedge, and there was Robert Halarkenden. I wish I could make you see him as he stood there, in his blue working blouse, a pair of big clippers in his hand, his thick, half-gray, silvery thatch of hair bare and blowing around his scholar's forehead, his bony Scotch face solemn and quiet. His deep-set eyes were fixed with such a gentle gaze on me. We are good friends, Robin and I. I call him Robin ”

“ If it is, it's a very precarious one, for though it thrills me to my bones sometimes to think that a real power might lift me and bring me through, if I just ask Him, yet sometimes all that hope goes and I drop in a heap mentally with no starch in me, no grip to try to hold to any idea—just a heap of tired, dull mind and nerves, and for my only desire that subtle, pushing desire to end it all quickly. ”

“ You said I ought to get beyond the view-point of a child; to realize the world outside myself.
I sat down, and in my limited way—I mean that, sincerely, humbly—I considered what I could do. No slumming—and, in any case, there's none to be done in Forest Gate. So I thought I'd better clear my vision with great books. I went to Robert Halarkenden, the only bookish person in my surroundings, and asked him about it—about what would open up a larger horizon for me. And he, not understanding much what I was at, recommended two or three things which I have been and am reading. ”

“ Reach after a few of the realities. Why not shut your questioning mind a while and open your soul? Live a little—begin to realize that there is a world outside yourself. Try to get beyond the view-point of a child. ”

“ What can be the meaning to one like you of the truth that we are made in the image of God? The Kingdom of Heaven—that whole whirling activity of the commonwealth of God—the citizenship towards which you might be pointing Baxter Court—you have not even imagined it. ”

“ Why, it is that that lifts us—that possibility of going on and on—out of imaginable bounds, into glory after glory—until the wisdom of the ages is foolishness and time has no meaning where, in the reaches of eternity, the climbing soul thinks with the mind of God. ”

“ Then I said nothing and he said nothing for quite a bit, and then he began talking gently about how everybody who counted had to go through things. "A character has to be hammered into the likeness of God," he said. "A soul doesn't grow beautiful by sunlight and rich earth," and he looked out at his scarlet and blue and gold September garden and smiled a little. "We're no like the flowers." ”

“ I came here to tell the rector." The grave eyes of the man, eyes whose clearness and youth seemed to be such an age-old youth and clearness as one sees in the eyes of the sibyls in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel—eyes empty of a thought of self, impersonal, serene with the serenity of a large atmosphere—the unflinching eyes of the man gazed at the girl as she talked.
She talked rapidly, eagerly, as if each word lifted pressure. "It's this way—I'm ill—hopelessly ill. Yes—it's absolutely so. I've got to die. Two doctors said so. But I'll live—maybe five years—possibly ten. ”

“ To lose one's life certainly does not mean to kill it, and to give it away one needn't fling it to the dogs. And when you do connect with your job you'll recognize it and you'll know how to do it. I'd like to watch you. Once get your imagination going properly again and the days are rose and gold. Oh, not all of them—but a good many—enough.
I nearly forgot about Theodore. There's humor for you—Theodore, "The Gift of God"—that's the name they gave him sixteen good years ago somewhere over in Scotland as you'd have guessed from the rest of it, which is Alan McGregor. ”

“ But it's all the keenest sport you can imagine, and it's going to be tremendously worth while if I can make a success of it. He's the right kind of bad, and he's getting ready to grow into a great, big, straight out-and-outer, with a mind like lightning and a heart like one of the sons of God. ”

“ Remember, you can't kill your soul. But, because you have been trusted with personality you can, if you wish, show an unforgiveable contempt for your beginning life. But, if you do that—if you treat your single opportunity like that—can you believe that another will be given you? ”

“ A woman, young, sat rocking back and forth, half smothering a baby in her arms. Nobody spoke. It took time to get the windows open and persuade the woman to lay the child on the bed in the corner. There wasn't anything else to use, so I fanned the baby with my straw hat—until, finally, it got away from North Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things they said and did—it was unhuman, indecent. ”

“ McBirney, that the middle-aged, lined face of my uncle's gardener was beautiful as he said those things. "Why did you leave the forest?" I asked him then; you may believe I'd forgotten about my bones by now.
"Ah, you'll find it grows irksome to be coddling one's own soul indefinitely," he confided to me with the pretty gentleness which breaks through his Scotch manner once in a while. "One gets tired of one's self, the spoiled body. I hungered to do something for somebody besides Robert Halarkenden. ”

“ But if a high-strung man gives himself out all day long, every day, recklessly, and is at the same time under a mental strain, he is likely to be ill. Geoffrey McBirney was close to an illness; his attitude toward life was warped; he was reasoning that he had made the girl a test case and that the case had failed; that it was now his duty to stand by the test and give up his work. And then, one day, the letter came. The weather had turned warm in Forest Gate and Arline Baker had got out her summer blouses. ”

“ If you really thought that all there is to life is that part of it we have here in this world—if you believed that—then what you contemplate doing would be nothing worse than unsportsmanlike. But you do not believe that. You are afraid of what might come—after. You came to me—or you came to the rector—in the hope of being assured that your fear was groundless. You had a human desire for the advice of a "professional." ”

“ You do not know what you believe because you believe nothing. Your most coherent conception of God is likely a hazy vision of a majestic figure seated on a cloud—a long-bearded patriarch, wearing a golden crown—the composite of famous pictures that you have seen. ”

“ I'd been thinking all along, that he was just a convenient fiction, useful for an address, and now he turns out about the realest person going. Sometimes I imagine perhaps it will be like that when we get through with this world and wake up into what's after—that the things we've passed over pretty much here and been vague about will blaze out as the eternal verities. A miracle happened that day in your September garden. You've surely read "Sur la Branche"—that book written around a woman's belief in the Providence of God? ”

“ That spoils things, and it's all to come right at the last, if we'll only let it.
Possibly you'll think it's silly or childish, but I believe maybe this life with its queer tasks and happenings is just the great, typical Fairy Story, with Heaven at the last. They're true—that's why unspoiled children love fairy stories. They begin, they march with incident, best of all, one finds always at the end that "'They' lived happily ever afterward." "They," is you, and I hope it's me. The trouble with people mainly is that they're too grown up. ”