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Young Lives, a novel by Richard Le Gallienne |
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Chapter 37. Stage Waits, Mr. Laflin |
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_ CHAPTER XXXVII. STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN
Here was news! At last a foundation-stone of the new heaven was to be laid! In a week's time Mike would be working at one of the alabaster walls. Perhaps in two years' time, perhaps even in a year, with good fortune, the roof would be on, the door wreathed with garlands, and a modest little heaven ready for occupation. Now all that remained was to make the momentous break with the old life. Old Mr. Laflin had been left in peaceful ignorance of the mine which must now be exploded beneath his evening armchair. Mike loved his father, and this had been a dread long and wisely postponed. But now, when the moment for inevitable decision had come, Mike remembered, with a certain shrinking, that responsibility of which Dot had spoken,--the responsibility of being a man. It was his dream to be an actor, to earn his bread with joy. To earn it with less than joy seemed unworthy of man. Yet there was another dream for him, still more, immeasurably more, important--to be Esther's husband. If he stayed where he was, in slow revolutions of a dull business, his father's place and income would become his. If he renounced that certain prospect, he committed himself to a destiny of brilliant chances; and for the first time he realised that among those chances lurked, too, the chance of failure. Esther must decide; and Henry's counsel, too, must be taken. Mike thought he knew what the decision and the counsel would be; and, of course, he was not mistaken. "Why, Mike, how can you hesitate?" said Esther. "Fail, if you like, and I shall still love you; but you don't surely think I could go on loving a man who was frightened to try?" That was a little hard of Esther, for Mike's fear had been for her sake, not his own. However, that and the even more vehement counsel of Henry had the desired bracing effect; and Mike nerved himself to deal the necessary blow at his father's tranquillity. As the writer of this book takes no special joy in heart-breaking scenes with fathers, the painful and somewhat violent scene with Mr. Laflin is here omitted, and left to the imagination of any reader with a taste for such unnatural collisions. Any one over thirty will agree that all the reason was on Mr. Laflin's side, as all the instinct was on his son's. Luckily for Mike, the instinct was to prove genuine, and his father to live to be prouder of his rebellion than ever he would have been of his obedience. This scene over, it was only a matter of days--five alone were left--before Mike must up and away in right good earnest. "Oh, Mike," said Esther, "you're sure you'll go on loving me? I'm awfully frightened of those pretty girls in ----'s company." "You needn't be," said Mike; "there's only one girl in the world will look at a funny bit of a thing like me." "Oh, I don't know," said Esther, laughing, "some big girls have such strange tastes." "Well, let's hope that before many months you can come and look after me." "If we'd only a certain five pounds a week, we could get along,--anything to be together. Of course, we'd have to be economical--" said Esther, thoughtfully. On the last night but one before his leaving, it was Mike's turn for a farewell dinner. Half-a-dozen of his best friends assembled at the "Golden Bee," and toasts and tears were mingled to do him honour. Henry happily caught the general feeling of the occasion in the following verses, not hitherto printed. Henry was too much in earnest at the time to regard the bathos of rhyming "stage waits" with such dignities as "summoning fates," except for which _naivete_ the poem is perhaps not a bad example of sincere, occasional verse: Stage waits! and we who love our brother so Some of your lovers may be half afraid Stage waits! and shall you fear and make delay? Nay, take your breeze, drink in your strengthening rain, Stage waits! and we must loosen now your hand,
This was to be Esther and Mike's first experience of parting, and their hearts sickened at the thought. Love surely does well in this world, so full of snares and dangers, to fear to lose from its eyes for a moment the face of its beloved; and in this respect the courage of love is the more remarkable. How bravely it takes the appalling risks of life! To separate for an hour may mean that never as long as the world lasts will love hear the voice it loves again. "Good-bye," love has called gaily so often, and waved hands from the threshold, and the beloved has called "good-bye" and waved, and smiled back--for the last time. And yet love faces the fears, not only of hours, but of weeks and months; weeks and months on seas bottomless with danger, in lands rife with unknown evils, dizzily taking the chances of desperate occupations. And the courage is the greater, because, finally, in this world, love alone has anything to lose. Other losses may be more or less repaired; but love's loss is, of its essence, irreparable. Other fair faces and brave hearts the world may bring us, but never that one face! Alas! for the most precious of earthly things, the only precious thing of earth, there is no system of insurance. The many waters have quenched love, and the floods drowned it,--yet in the wide world is there no help, no hope, no recompense. The love that bound this little circle of young people together was so strong and warm that it had developed in them an almost painful sensibility to such risks of loss. So it was that expressions of affection and outward endearments were more current among them than is usual in a land where manners, from a proper fear of exaggeration, run to a silly extreme of unresponsiveness. They never met without showing their joy to be again together; never parted without that inner fear that this might be their last chance of showing their love for each other. "You all say good-bye as if you were going to America!" Myrtilla Williamson had once said; "I suppose it's your Irish grandmother." And no doubt the _empressement_ had its odd side for those who saw only the surface. Thus for those who love love, who love to watch for it on human faces, Mike's good-bye at the railway station was a sight worth going far to see. "My word, they seem to be fond of each other, these young people!" said a lady standing at the door of the next carriage. Mike was leaning through the window, and Esther was pressing near to him. They murmured low to each other, and their eyes were bright with tears. A little apart stood a small group, in which Henry and Angel and Ned were conspicuous, and Mike's sisters and Dot and Mat were there. A callous observer might have laughed, so sad and solemn they were. Mike's fun tried a rally; but his jests fell spiritless. It was not so much a parting, one might have thought, as a funeral. Little was said, but eyes were eloquent, either with tears, or with long strong glances that meant undying faithfulness all round; and Mike knew that Henry's eyes were quoting "_Allons_! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!" Henry's will to achieve was too strong for him to think of this as a parting; he could only think of it as a glorious beginning. There is something impersonal in ambition, and in the absorption of the work to be done the ambitious man forgets his merely individual sensibilities. To achieve, though the heavens fall,--that was Henry's ambition for Mike and for himself. No one really believed that the train would have the hard-heartedness to start; but at last, with deliberate intention, evidently not to be swayed by human pity, the guard set the estranging whistle to his lips, cold and inexorable as Nero turning down the thumb of death, and surely Mike's sad little face began to move away from them. Hands reached out to him, eyes streamed, handkerchiefs fluttered,--but nothing could hold him back; and when at last a curve in the line had swallowed the white speck of his face, they turned away from the dark gulf where the train had been as though it were a newly opened grave. A great to-do to make about a mere parting!--says someone. No doubt, my dear sir! All depends upon one's standard of value. No doubt these young people weighed life in fantastic scales. Their standard of value was, no doubt, uncommon. To love each other was better than rubies; to lose each other was bitter as death. For others other values,--they had found their only realities in the human affections. _ |
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