The Seeker by Harry Leon Wilson

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The tale of the princely Saint was now authenticated delightfully. That
which had made him seem unreal in moments of spiritual laxity--the
impenetrable secrecy of his private life--was now seen to enhance manyfold
his wondrous givings. Here was a charm which could never have sat the
display before them had it been dryly bought in their presence from one of
the millionaire toy-shop keepers. For a wondering moment they looked from
their beds, sputtering, gibbering, gasping, with cautious calls one to
the other. Then having proved speech to be no disenchantment they shouted
and laughed crazily. There followed a scramble from the beds and a swift
return from the cold, each bearing such of the priceless bits as had
lain nearest. And while these were fondled or shot or blown upon or
tasted or wound up, each according to its wonderful nature, they looked
farther afield seeing other and ever new packages bulk mysteriously into
the growing light; bundles quickening before their eyes with every delight
to be imagined of a Saint with epicurean tastes and prodigal
habits--bundles that looked as if a mere twitch at the cord would expose
their hidden charms.

The littler boy now wore a unique fur cap that let down to cover the neck
and face, with openings wonderfully contrived for the eyes, nose and
mouth--an easy triumph, surely, over the deadliest cold known to man. In
one hand he flourished a brass-handled knife with both of its blades open;
with the other he clasped a striped trumpet, into the china mouthpiece of
which he had blown the shreds of a caramel, not meaning to; and here he
was made to forget these trifles by discovering at the farther side of the
room a veritable rocking-horse, a creature that looked not only
magnificently willing, but superbly untamable, with a white mane and tail
of celestial flow, with alert, pointed ears of maroon leather nailed
nicely to the right spot. At this marvel he stared in that silence which
is the highest power of joy: a presentiment had been his that such a
horse, curveting on blue rockers, would be found on this very morning. Two
days before had he in an absent moment beheld a vision of this horse
poised near the door of the attic; but when he ran to make report of it
below, thinking to astound people by his power of insight, Clytemnestra,
bidding him wait in the kitchen where she was baking, had hurried to the
spot and found only some rolls of blue cambric. She had rather shamed him
for giving her such a start. A few rolls of shiny blue cambric against a
white wall did not, she assured him, make a rocking-horse; and, what was
more, they never would. Now the vision came back with a significance that
set him all a-thrill. Next time Clytie would pay attention to him. He
laughed to think of her confusion now.

But here again, at the very zenith of a shout, was he frozen to silence by
a vision--this time one too obviously of no ponderable fabric. There in
the corner, almost at his hand, seemed to be a thing that he had dreamed
of possessing only after he entered Heaven--a candy cane: one of fearful
length, thick of girth, vast of crook, and wide in the spiral stripe that
seemed to run a living flame before his ravished eyes, beginning at the
bottom and winding around and around the whole dizzy height. Fearfully in
nerve-braced silence he leaned far out of his bed to bring against this
amazing apparition one cool, impartial forefinger of skeptic research. It
did not vanish; it resisted his touch. Then his heart fainted with
rapture, for he knew the unimagined had become history.

Standing before the windows of the great, he had gazed long at these
creations. They were suspended on a wire across the window in various
lengths, from little ones to sizes too awesome to compute. On one
occasion so long had he stood motionless, so deep the trance of his
contemplation, that the winter cold had cruelly bitten his ears and toes.
He had not supposed that these things were for mere vulgar ownership. He
had known of boys who had guns and building-blocks and rocking-horses as
well as candy in the lesser degrees; but never had he known, never had he
been able to hear of one who had owned a thing like this. Indeed, among
the boys he knew, it was believed that they were not even to be seen save
on their wire at Christmas time in the windows of the rich. One boy had
hinted that the "set" would not be broken even if a person should appear
with money enough to buy a single one. And here before him was the finest
of them all, receding neither from his gaze or his touch, one as long as
the longest of which Heaven had hitherto vouchsafed him a chilling vision
through glass; here was the same fascinating union of transcendent merit
with a playful suggestion of downright utility. And he had blurted out to
Clytie that the news of there being no Santa Claus was all over town! He
was ashamed, and the moment became for him one of chastening in which he
humbled his unbelieving spirit before this symbol of a more than earthly
goodness--a symbol in whose presence, while as yet no accident had
rendered it less than perfect, he would never cease to feel the spiritual
uplift of one who has weighed the fruits of faith and found them not
wanting.

He issued from some bottomless stupor of ecstacy to hear the door open to
Allan's shouts; then to see the opening nicely filled again by the figure
of Clytemnestra, who looked over at them with eager, shining eyes. He was
at first powerless to do more than say "Oh, Clytie!" with little impotent
pointings toward the candy cane. But the action now in order served to
restore him to a state of working sanity. There was washing and dressing
after Clytie had the fire crackling; the forgetting of some treasures to
remember others; and the conveyance of them all down stairs to the big
sitting-room where the sun came in over the geraniums in the bay-window,
and where the Franklin heater made the air tropic. The rocking-horse was
led and pushed by both boys; but to Clytie's responsible hand alone was
intrusted the more than earthly candy cane.

Downstairs there was the grandfather to greet--erect, fresh-shaven,
flashing kind eyes from under stern brows. He seemed to be awkwardly
pleased with their pleasure, yet scarce able to be one with them; as if
that inner white spirit of his fluttered more than its wont to be free,
yet found only tiny exits for its furtive flashes of light.

Breakfast was a chattering and explosive meal, a severe trial, indeed, to
the patience of the littler boy, who decided that he wished never to eat
breakfast again. During the ten days that he had been a member of the
household a certain formality observed at the beginning of each meal had
held him in abject fascination, so that he looked forward to it with
pleased terror. This was that, when they were all seated, there ensued a
pause of precisely two seconds--no more and no less--a pause that became
awful by reason of the fact that every one grew instantly solemn and
expectant--even apprehensive. His tingling nerves had defined his spine
for him before this pause ended, and then, when the roots of his hair
began to crinkle, his grandfather would suddenly bow low over his plate
and rumble in his head. It was very curious and weirdly pleasurable, and
it lasted one minute. When it ceased the tension relaxed instantly, and
every one was friendly and cordial and safe again.

This morning the little boy was actually impatient during the rumble, so
eager was he to talk. And not until he had been assured by both his
grandfather and Clytie that Santa Claus meant everything he left to be
truly kept; that he came back for nothing--not even for a cane--_of any
kind_--that he might have left at a certain house by mistake--not until
then would he heave the sigh of immediate security and consent to eat his
egg and muffins, of which latter Clytie had to bring hot ones from the
kitchen because both boys had let the first plate go cold. For Clytie,
like Grandfather Delcher, was also one of the last of a race of American
giants--in her case a race preceding servants, that called itself "hired
girls"--who not only ate with the family, but joyed and sorrowed with it
and for long terms of years was a part of it in devotion, responsibility
and self-respect. She had, it is true, dreaded the coming of these
children, but from the moment that the two cold, subdued little figures
had looked in doubting amazement at the four kinds of preserves and three
kinds of cake set out for their first collation in the new home, she had
rejoiced unceasingly in a vicarious motherhood.

Within an hour after breakfast the morning's find had been examined,
appraised, and accorded perpetual rank by merit. Grandfather Delcher made
but one timid effort to influence decisions.

"Now, Bernal, which do you like best of all your presents?" he asked. With
a heart too full for words the littler boy had pointed promptly but shyly
at his candy cane. Not once, indeed, had he been able to say the words
"candy cane." It was a creation which mere words were inadequate to name.
It was a presence to be pointed at. He pointed again firmly when the old
man asked, "Are you quite certain, now, you like it best of
all?"--suggestively--"better than this fine book with this beautiful
picture of Joseph being sold away by his wicked brothers?"

The questioner had turned then to the older boy, who tactfully divined
that a different answer would have pleased the old man better.

"And what do you like best, Allan?"

"Oh, I like this fine and splendid book best of all!"--and he read from
the title-page, in the clear, confident tones of the pupil who knows that
the teacher's favour rests upon him--"'From Eden to Calvary; or through
the Bible in a year with our boys and girls; a book of pleasure and profit
for young persons on Sabbath Afternoon. By Grandpa Silas Atterbury, the
well-known author and writer for young people."

His glance toward his brother at the close was meant to betray the
consciousness of his own superiority to one who dallied sensuously with
created objects.

But the unspiritual one was riding the new horse at a furious gallop, and
the glance of reproof was unnoted save by the old man--who wondered if it
might be by any absurd twist that the boy most like the godless father
were more godly than the one so like his mother that every note of his
little voice and every full glance of his big blue eyes made the old heart
flutter.

In the afternoon came callers from the next house; Dr. Crealock, rubicund
and portly, leaning on his cane, to pass the word of seasonable cheer with
his old friend and pastor; and with him his tiny niece to greet the
grandchildren of his friend. The Doctor went with his host to the study on
the second floor, where, as a Christmas custom, they would drink some
Madeira, ancient of days, from a cask prescribed and furnished long since
by the doctor.

The little boy was for the moment left alone with the tiny niece; to stare
curiously, now that she was close, at one of whom he had caught glimpses
in a window of the big house next door. She was clad in a black velvet
cloak and hood, with pink satin next her face inside the hood, and she
carried a large closely-wrapped doll which she affected to think might
have taken cold. With great self-possession she doffed her cloak and
overshoes; then slowly and tenderly unwound the wrappings of the doll,
talking meanwhile in low mothering tones, and going with it to the fire
when she had it uncloaked. Of the boy who stared at her she seemed
unconscious, and he could do no more than stand timidly at a little
distance. An eye-flash from the maid may have perceived his abjectness,
for she said haughtily at length, "I'm astonished no one in this house
knows where Clytie is!"

He drew nearer by as far as he could slowly spread his feet twice.

"_I_ know--now--she went to get two glasses from the dresser to take to my
grandfather and that gentleman." He felt voluble from the mere ease of
the answer. But she affected to have heard nothing, and he was obliged to
speak again.

"Now--why, _I_ know a doll that shuts up her eyes every time she lies
down."

The doll at hand was promptly extended on the little lap and with a click
went into sudden sleep while the mother rocked it. He could have ventured
nothing more after this pricking of his inflated little speech. A moment
he stood, suffering moderately, and then would have edged cautiously away
with the air of wishing to go, only at this point, without seeming to see
him, she chirped to him quite winningly in a soft, warm little voice, and
there was free talk at once. He manfully let her tell of all her silly
little presents before talking of his own. He even listened about the
doll, whose name Santa Claus had thoughtfully painted on the box in which
she came; it was a French name, "Fragile."

Then, being come to names, they told their own. Hers, she said, was
Lillian May.

"But your uncle, now--that gentleman--he called you _Nancy_ when you came
in." He waited for her solving of this.

"Oh, Uncle Doctor doesn't know it yet, what my _real_ name is. They call
me Nancy, but that's a very disagreeable name, so I took Lillian May for
my real name. But I tell _very_ few persons," she added, importantly. Here
he was at home; he knew about choosing a good name.

"Did you give up the gold-piece you found?" he asked. But this puzzled
her.

"'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,'" he reminded her.
"Didn't you find a gold-piece like Ben Holt did?"

But it seemed she had never found anything. Indeed, once she had lost a
dime, even on the way to spending it for five candy bananas and five
jaw-breakers. Plainly she had chosen her good name without knowing of the
case of Ben Holt. Then he promised to show her something the most
wonderful in all the world, which she would never believe without seeing
it, and led her to where the candy cane towered to their shoulders in its
corner. He saw at once that it meant less to her than it did to him.

"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, _calling_ it a candy cane commonly,
with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold
watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her
coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never
be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and
incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating
the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in
her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the
term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent
by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the
end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it
would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her,
except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now
ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and
even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile,
which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that
manner. But any boy could see that the thing went to sleep by turning its
eyes inside out, _and its garters were painted on its fat legs_. These
things he was, of course, too much the gentleman to point out.

When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon, the
little boy and girl were fairly friendly. Only there was talk of kissing
at the door, started by the little girl's uncle, and this the little boy
of course could not consider, even though he suddenly wished it of all
things--for he had never kissed any one but his father and mother. He had
told Clytie it made him sick to be kissed. Now, when the little girl
called to him as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he could not
go. And then she stabbed him by falsely kissing the complacent Allan
standing by, who thereupon smirked in sickening deprecation and promptly
rubbed his cheek.

Not until the pair were out in the street did his man-strength come back
to him, and then he could only burn with indignation at her and at Allan.
He wondered that no one was shocked at him for feeling as he did. But, as
they seemed not to notice him, he rode his horse again. No mad gallop now,
but a slow, moody jog--a pace ripe for any pessimism.

"Clytie!" he called imperiously, after a little. "Do you think there's a
real bone in this horse--like a _regular_ horse?"

Clytie responded from the dining-room with a placid "I guess so."

"If I sawed into its neck, would the saw go right into a real _bone_?"

"My suz! what talk! Well?"

"I know there _ain't_ any bone in there, like a regular horse. It's just a
_wooden_ bone."

Nor was this his last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and
there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as
he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a
moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted
the sitting-room; there was sacrilege in her very grasp of it; and his
grandfather seemed hardly to know of its existence. The little girl who
had chosen the good name of Lillian May might have been excused; but not
these others. If his grandfather was without understanding in such a
matter, in what, then, could he be trusted?

He descended to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even
if he had _one_ of them, he would probably never have a whole row,
graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front
window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into
envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now
did, that on last Christmas he had received only one pretentious candy
rooster, falsely hollow, and a very uninteresting linen handkerchief
embroidered with some initials not his own. He fell asleep on a brutal
reflection that the cane could be broken accidentally and eaten.

CHAPTER IV

THE BIG HOUSE OF PORTENTS

In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that
was all strange. Novel was the outer house with its high portico and
fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of
relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window;
its big front door with the polished brass knocker and the fan-light
above. Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new
life to its very center.

For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless
for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought
daily to their notice. In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily,
informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the
lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine
wrath impressed upon them "when the memory is wax to receive and marble
to retain."

Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who
was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child,
and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder. But Clytie, who had said
"I'll make my own of them," was tireless and not without ingenuity in
opening the way of life to their little feet.

Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught
many instructive bits chosen from the scrap-book in which her literary
treasures were preserved. His rendition of a passage from one of Mr.
Spurgeon's sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma
of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he
listened.

"There is a place," the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting
gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, "where the
only music is the symphony of damned souls. Where howling, groaning,
moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert. There is a
place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire,
torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of
mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water--that water all denied. When
thou diest, O Sinner--"

But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have
to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Always he became thirsty here.
And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire
his brother in the closing periods.

--"but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then
thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each
brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood,
thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the
fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a
string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell's
unutterable torment."

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse
rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of
being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who
spelled God with a little g.

As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great
difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a
lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed
him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but
invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going
"down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became
pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he
would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say,
at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy
did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was
associating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a
body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell
what a sot he'd been!"

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more
tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical
conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy
couplets such as:

"Xerxes the Great did die
And so must you and I."

"As runs the glass
Man's life must pass."

"Thy life to mend
God's book attend."

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of
her favourites being:

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

"I in the burying-place may see
Graves shorter there than I.
From Death's arrest no age is free,
Young children, too, may die.

"My God, may such an awful sight
Awakening be to me;
Oh, that by early grace, I might
For death prepared be!"

She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to
Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza
somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.

Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.

Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how God ordered the congregation to
stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched
the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the
Lord "made a breach" upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark
to save it when the oxen stumbled. The little boys were much impressed by
this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to
Uzza to have "a breach" made upon him. The unwisdom of touching an Ark of
the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly
brought home to them. They liked also to hear of the instruments played
upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps,
psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of
fir-wood.

Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession "girded
with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed,
it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David's
wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him
"leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably
inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of
David's years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."

So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it
behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy,
prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the
big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the
Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in
which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for
a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold
of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys--a place where they had
gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not
see God there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak
melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table
with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep
chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately
set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat
frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from
the ceiling--yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding
spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb--an all-pervading
thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and
part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or
spirit he conceived to be God--the more as it came to him in a flash of
divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark
of the Covenant.

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