But even while Mrs. Caldwell spoke, Sheila was standing at the open door of the right cage, gazing in with illumined eyes.
The spring was at its height, as warm and ripely blooming as early summer, and Sheila had slipped away to her favorite haunt of the back garden. She had taken a book with her, one of Peter"s recommendation, and as she lay on the soft, fresh gra.s.s, she idly turned the pages, not from any desire to read, but for the pleasure of touching the leaves and knowing that, if she liked, she had only to look within for words that would create a fairyland as easily as the fingers of the spring had done.
But presently, sated with mere earth-sweetness, she lifted herself on her elbow and opened the book widely where her hand had finally rested.
It was the choice of chance, that page; but, as happens every now and then, chance and the Shaping Power were at that moment one. For shining on the white leaf, as if written in silver, were the lines that have stirred every potential poet to rapture and self-knowledge:
--magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Sheila read them with no fore-warning of their moving music. They flashed, winged, into her tranquil world--and shook it to its foundations. For the first time the full sense of beauty rushed upon her, and she caught her breath with the keen, aching ecstasy of it:
--magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
She read the lines again, and now aloud, softly, with a beauty-broken breath. She had wanted something, and all the while this--_this_--had been waiting for her. Compared to the joy of it, what was the joy of looking into a mirror and finding oneself fair? What was any other beauty beside this beauty of words, of subtle harmony and exquisite imagery?
And then there came to her the thought that some one--some one just human like herself--yes, human and young--had written these lines, had drawn them from the treasure house of himself.
"Oh," she whispered, "how happy he must have been! How happy! To have written this! If I had done it----"
She paused and sat up straight and still, the book falling unheeded from her hand. Slowly her eyes widened, filled first with light and then with tears.
"If I had written this! If I could write _anything_!"
And suddenly, for that moment and for life, she knew!
"_That_ is what I want--to _write_!--to _make_ something beautiful!"
And then her guardian angel should have pushed her into the cage and fastened its door. For the sun was shining and the south wind was blowing--and it was the right cage!
CHAPTER V
One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his cla.s.s-room after his duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time in shaking the dust of academic toil from his feet--and from his mind--but to-day an unwonted longing for some steadying purpose, some _raison d"etre_, made him remain to dally with the tools of his occupation, perhaps in a wistful hope that he might discover a hitherto unsuspected charm in the teaching of rhetoric to reluctant young girls.
"If they only cared," he thought, "if they only cared a little for the English language, it wouldn"t be such a deadly grind to teach I them.
But _they"ll_ never "contend for the shade of a world." It"s just a dull necessity to them--this business of learning how to use their mother tongue--except, of course, to Sheila. And next year she won"t be here to help me endure it. Oh, how I wish I could get away--to something better, something bigger!"
But with the wish, there came to him also the certainty of its futility. He wouldn"t get away; the next year, and the year following, and the year after that would find him still at his uninspiring post in the Shadyville Seminary, teaching bored pupils the properties of speech, and inwardly cursing himself for doing it.
For Peter knew that he would always be the victim of his own laziness; that every impulse toward a broader life and its achievements would be checked and overcome by what he termed his "vast inertia." In spite of his mental capacity, his social gifts, his a.s.sets of birth and excellent appearance, he would go through all his years without attaining either honors or profits--merely because, in his unconquerable languor, he would not exert himself to the extent of reaching out his hand for them.
He taught in the seminary because he must; because, otherwise, his bread would go unb.u.t.tered, or rather, there would be no bread to b.u.t.ter. For he was the last of a family whose fortune had been their "blood" and their brains, and not their material possessions. Nothing had been left to him but the prestige of his birth and his inherited intellect, and the connections which they opened to him. And these connections were rosebuds for him to wear in his b.u.t.tonhole rather than beefsteak to swell his waistcoat. They ent.i.tled him to lead a cotillion, but not to direct a bank.
His natural parts, as he fully realized, would at any time have secured a career to him, if he had had the industry to use them a.s.siduously. A little enterprise, a little initiative would long since have despatched him to the opportunities and successes of a city. But, always defeated by the "inertia" which he regarded as a fatal malady of his temperament--and also, perhaps, by a native distaste for the vulgar scramble and unsavory methods of the modern business world--his fine intelligence wasted itself in small tasks and his ambitions dissolved like dream-stuff in the somnolent atmosphere of Shadyville.
The only success available to him under such conditions was an advantageous marriage. This he could more than once have accomplished, for it cost him no effort to practice the abilities of the lover, and he had, indeed, a reputation for gallantry that invested him with a dangerous glamour as a suitor. But here he was thwarted each time by a quality that dominated him as ruthlessly to his undoing as did his laziness--and this quality was fastidiousness. For him only the exquisite was good enough. He wanted a woman with a face like an angel or a flower, and a soul to match it. And this the eligible girl had never had. So, although he had several times reached the verge of a leap into matrimonial prosperity, he had always drawn back before the crucial moment. A laugh--just a note too broad and loud--had once restrained him from the easy capture of half a million. He could not live with a woman who laughed like that, he told himself!
And on the other hand, though marriage appealed to him, he could not accept the exquisite in poverty. A few years before, he had spent a summer in courting a girl whose profile had enchanted him. In imagination he saw it always against a background of dull gold--the pure, slender throat; the sweet, round chin; the delicate, proud lip and nostril; the dreaming eye. But in fact, there was no background of gold, dull or otherwise; and when Peter reflected on the size of his salary and the shifts to which poverty must needs resort--the shabby clothes, the domestic sordidness, the devastating finger-marks of weariness and anxiety upon even the fairest face--his courage failed him, and he surrendered the profile to one who could give her a Kentucky stock farm, a town house in New York and a box at the opera there.
After that episode, he resigned his hope of romance. Fate was perverse and offered him impossible combinations, and he had not the energy to seek and seize for himself. So love, like the other big prizes of life, eluded him, and at thirty-three he was a confirmed bachelor as well as a professional idler. He still pursued the graceful, aimless flirtations that are the small change of intercourse at dances and dinners--just as he still read Theocritus--but neither his heart nor his mind engaged in any more serious endeavor.
And yet, every now and then, he felt a faint desire for something more, for something that should not be a pastime, nor a mere bread-and-b.u.t.ter ch.o.r.e--something that would demand and exhaust the best of him and give him in return the pride of work worth the doing and doing well.
This afternoon the desire was more than usually persistent, and it had held him at his desk long after school hours were over, fingering his pen and ink bottle, glancing through the weekly essays which had that day been handed in for criticism, and turning the leaves of a history of English literature with which he had vainly striven to awake enthusiasm in the minds of his cla.s.s.
The school-room was a pleasant place, as school-rooms go. There were potted plants on the window sills and a few good engravings on the walls, and the afternoon sunshine was streaming gaily in. But to Peter the room was the disillusioning scene of unwilling labors--both on the part of his pupils and himself--and its chalky atmosphere was heavy and depressing.
"What"s the use of pretending that _this_ is a "life-work"--a "n.o.ble profession"?" he muttered, after his casual examination of a particularly discouraging essay. "They don"t _want_ to learn. They only want to get through and away. After Sheila graduates, I"ll he without a single responsive pupil. For I won"t get another like her--not in years, and probably never. Why don"t I chuck it all? Why _don"t_ I go away? There"s nothing to _stay_ for! But my confounded antipathy to a tussle in the hurly-burly of my fellow-men----"
At that moment a tap sounded upon the door panel.
"Come in," called Peter carelessly, supposing that a pupil had returned for some forgotten possession. And he did not even look around until an amused voice inquired: "So absorbed, Professor Peter?" Then he turned to see Mrs. Caldwell, an old-fashioned picture in silvery gray, smiling at him from the doorway.
"I"ve come for a serious talk," said she, when he had seated her beside the sunniest window and established himself close by.
"Well," he answered ruefully, "you"ve come to the right place and the right person. I was just considering--in these scholarly surroundings--how I am wasting my life!"
"Really?" And she beamed on him hopefully. "Because that"s the beginning of better things. You _could_ amount to so much, Peter!"
But he shook his head: "Not here. And I"m too lazy to leave Shadyville."
"Why not here? I don"t want you to leave Shadyville. I can"t do without you! But I want you to do something splendid here. Peter, why don"t you write a book?"
He laughed: "Dear Mrs. Caldwell, to write a book requires more than the determination or the wish to write one."
"Genius?"
"Not necessarily. But at least a special kind of ability. The divine fire has never burned on my hearth--not even a tiny spark of it!"
"Then you think it"s rather a great thing to be able to write?"
"I do indeed!" And the reverence of the book-lover thrilled through his tone.
"I"m glad you feel that way about writers, Peter," she remarked archly, "because--we have one up at our house." And she extended a note-book to him, a thin, paper-backed book such as his cla.s.s used for compositions.
"You mean--Sheila?" For he had expected this.
"Yes. It"s happened!--as I told you it would." And her voice was very grave now.
He opened the book--and discovered that Sheila"s efforts were poems.
"I"ll read them to-night," he said cautiously.
But Mrs. Caldwell would not let him escape so easily: "No, Peter, please. If you have the time, read them now. There are only a few, and I can"t go home without a message from you about them. Sheila"s waiting up there--and she"s simply tense!"
"Then she knows you"ve brought them to me?"