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such things about me. I wonder that you have not questioned me before—only you see now—I can't answer!" The boy gave her his slow, serious smile, reminding her.
"You must remember that I am like a foreigner—only worse off, for foreigners pick up a few words for their most vital needs, and I have no words at all—for what—for what vital things I used to know—so that perhaps in time I shall come to forget that I ever knew anything different from—other persons' knowledge." Berber paused, regarding his mistress intently, as if wistfully trying to see what she made of all this. Then he continued:
"One of our professors at college died, and the men of his class were gloomy; some even cried, others could not trust themselves to speak of him. … I noticed that they all called him 'poor' Landworth. … I could see that they felt something the way I do when I miss out on a chemical experiment, or spoil a valuable specimen—only more so—a great deal more." The boy knit his brows, puzzling it all out. "Well, it's queer. I liked that professor, too; he was very kind to me—but when I saw him dead I felt glad—glad! Why"—Berber looked at her searchingly—"I grew to be afraid some one would find out how glad!"
The young fellow, still anxiously searching her face, dropped his voice. "You are the only person I dare tell this to—for I understand the world—" She noted that he spoke as if "the world" were a kind of plant whose needs he had fathomed. "But after that," concluded Berber, speaking as if quite to himself—"after that I somehow came to see that I had been—well, educated backward."
She moved impatiently; the youth, seeing the question in her face, answered the demand of its trembling eagerness, explaining:
"Do you not see—I have—sometimes known, not 'guessed' nor 'believed,' but known that death was a wonderful, happy thing—a fulfilment, a satisfaction to him who dies—but I have been educated backward into a life where people cannot seem to help regarding it as a sad thing. And——"
"Yes?—Yes?" breathed the eager woman. "Tell me—tell me——"
But he had come suddenly to a full stop. As if appalled to find only empty words, or no words at all, for some astounding knowledge he would communicate to her, he stammered painfully; then, as if he saw himself caught in guilt, colored furiously. Evelyn Strang could see the inevitable limitations of his world training creep slowly over him like cement hardening around the searching roots of his mind. She marveled. She remembered Strang's pet phrase, "the plaster of Paris of so-called 'normal thinking.'" Then the youth's helpless appeal came to her:
"Do you not think that I am doing wrong to speak of these things?" Berber asked, with dignity.
The mistress of Heartholm was silent. Recklessly she put by all Doctor Mach's prophecies. She could not stop here; her whole soul demanded that she go further. There were old intuitions—the belief that she and Strang had shared together, that, under rationalized schemes of thought, knowledge of inestimable hope was being hidden from the world. Here was this boy of the infinite vision, of the "backward educated" mind, ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe. Could she strike him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the open grave and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips!
Suddenly, as if in answer to her struggle, Berber spoke. She was aware that he looked at her curiously with a sort of patient disdain.
"The world is so sure, so contented, isn't it?" the youth demanded of her, whether in innocence or irony she could not tell. "People are trained, or they train themselves, by the millions, to think of things in exactly one way." He who had once been "Gargoyle" looked piercingly into the eyes of this one being to whom at least he was not afraid to speak.
"Anything you or I might guess outside of what other people might accept," the boy reminded her, austerely, "could be called by just one unpleasant name." He regarded the face turned to his, recognizing the hunger in it, with a mature and pitying candor, concluding: "After to-day we must never speak of these things. I shall never dare, you must never dare—and so—" He who had once been "Gargoyle" suddenly dropped his head forward on his breast, muttering—"and so, that is all."
Evelyn Strang rose. She stood tall and imperious in the waning afternoon light. She was bereaved mother, anguished wife; she was a dreamer driven out of the temple of the dream, and what she had to do was desperate. Her voice came hard and resolute.
"It is not all," the woman doggedly insisted. The voiceless woe of one who had lost a comrade by death was on her. In her eyes was fever let loose, a sob, like one of a flock of imprisoned wild birds fluttered out from the cage of years. "Oh no—no!" the woman pleaded, more as if to some hidden power of negation than to the boy before her—"Oh no—no, this cannot be all, not for me! The world must never be told—it could not understand; but I must know, I must know." She took desperate steps back and forth.
"John Berber, if there is anything in your memory, your knowledge; even if it is only that you have imagined things—if they are so beautiful or so terrible that you can never speak of them—for fear—for fear no one would understand, you might, you might, even then, tell me—Do you not hear? You might tell me. I authorize it, I command it."
The woman standing in the autumn gardens clenched her hands. She looked round her into the clear air at the dense green and gold sunshine filtering through the colored trees, the softly spread patens of the cosmos, the vivid oriflammes of the chrysanthemums. Her voice was anguished, as if they two stood at a secret door of which Berber alone had the key, which for some reason he refused to use.
"I—of all the world," her whisper insisted. "If you might never speak again—I should understand."
Berber, his face grown now quite ashen, looked at her. Something in her expression seemed to transfix and bind him. Suddenly shutting his teeth together, he stood up, his arms folded on his broad chest. The afternoon shadows spread pools of darkness around their feet, the flowers seemed frozen in shapes of colored ice, as his dark, controlled eyes fixed hers.
"You—you dare?" the youth breathed, thickly.
She faced him in her silent daring. Then it seemed to her as if the sky must roll up like a scroll and the earth collapse into a handful of dust falling through space, for she knew that little Gargoyle of the "undressed mind"—little Gargoyle, looking out of John Berber's trained eyes as out of windows of ground glass, was flitting like a shadow across her own intelligence, trying to tell her what things he had always known about life and death, and the myriads of worlds spinning back in their great circles to the Power which had set them spinning.
Not until after the first halting, insufficient words, in which the boy sought to give his secret to the woman standing there, did she comprehend anything of the struggle that went on within him. But when suddenly Berber's arms dropped to his sides and she saw how he shivered, as if at some unearthly touch on his temples, she was alert. Color was surging into his face; his features, large, irregular, took on for the instant a look of speechless, almost demoniac power; he seemed to be swimming some mental tide before his foot touched the sands of language and he could helplessly stammer:
"I cannot—It—it will not come—It is as I told you—I have been taught no words—I cannot say what I know."
His powerful frame stood placed among the garden surroundings like that of a breathing statue, and his amazed companion witnessed this miracle of physical being chained by the limitations of one environment, while the soul of that being, clairaudient, clairvoyant, held correspondence with another environment. She saw Berber smile as if with some exquisite sense of beauty and rapture that he understood, but could not communicate, then helplessly motion with his hands. But even while she held her breath, gazing at him, a change came over the radiant features. He looked at her again, his face worked; at last John Berber with a muffled groan burst into terrible human tears.
She stood there helpless, dumfounded at his agony.
"You—you cannot speak?" she faltered.
For answer he dropped his face into his strong hands. He stood there, his tall body quivering. And