The Way of the Strong

FOR the five days of big wind at the end of the March blowing of 1901 the boom across the ploughed land on the bluff farms of Morning County beat time to the shrill whistling in the timber like the drone bass in pifferari music. It was a grand world out of doors, the sort of world that is always unrolling with the whirl of the wind in Missouri, wild and gray and free. In the swales the tough grass dipped and rose in shaking circles ; on the hills the gaunt trees went like flails; overhead resounded that whistling, roaring diapason. The sting of the air, mica-laden, was like a whip. On the bluffs few people braved it. In the hillside pastures the horses battled against it with wide-nostriled whinny; the cattle ran from it to the shelter of the hayricks, heads down, lowing uneasily.

At Hogback Hill, — the foreland tract in the chain of great tracts in the holding of Lowry Penryn of Penangton, — Penryn’s tenant, a tireless farmer, looked out on the resistless weather in the mid-afternoon of the final day, took the horn from the kitchen porch, and sent a reluctant winding call to his hands in the furrows. The hands turned back to shelter gladly, and for the rest of that day the fields were left in the clutch of the storm, while the men sat in the barn, tinkering, mending harness, recalling other storms,

“They ’ll be lightning to come, ” said one, who stood by the barn door watching. “Huccome me to know is f’m that yellowness yonder. Scampish-lookin’ clouds over tha’.”

“ ’T is n’t to say cyclone time though, is it? ” inquired another, who had come from the Northeast, and feared the ways of Missouri.

“Naw, but they ’ll be devil’s own lightning,” replied the old-timer comfortingly, and added that it was well to be indoors on such a day. “Takes town-fool boarders to resk it outside! ” He breathed the words in a whistling cadence, his lips tightening condemningly, his eyes fixed upon the two who were running down the steps of the weatherbeaten front porch of the tenant’s house.

The high-trunked walnut trees, the black-jack oaks, and the silver Sycamores tossed and strained sonorously as the two who had oome down from the porch went across the damp mastweighted grass of the yard at Hogback Hill, scurrying like children, — the skirts of the woman blown out in front of her, her slender body careening with the grace of a ship at sea, her eyes bright, her cheeks red with the whip of the air, — the man’s hand on the woman’s arm, the wind raising his thick black hair, his chest lifting and expanding. A strain, as of watching and waiting, that sharpened the faces of both, slackened. Whatever cares oppressed them blew away, for the moment, on the wings of the wind. The youth and vigor in both were keenly triumphant. As they pitted themselves against the stress of the elements, there was in their consciousness only a glee in their own valiance, their own well-matched vigor. A recognition that they were splendidly complementary flashed from one to the other as he seized her hand and they were swept on to the yard fence, where they leaned, laughing a little and panting hard,

“Oh yes,” he said in a tone whose self-indorsement seemed to have a direct reference to some antecedent advice. “You do look better already. You needed fresh air. You can’t stay in the house all day much better than I can.” He had not released her hand, and she drew it from him.

“I can stand alone,” she said. “Yes, it’s true that I need lots of outdoors. Is n’t it satisfying?” She threw her head back and watched the storm, the high up-rolling of the clouds, the blown grass, the hills where the great trees lashed in travail. “That’s what it does for me, —satisfies — by expressing. ” There was a leaping joy in her voice, as though some deep antiphonal note responded, true and strong, to the storm.

When she had taken her hand from his he had folded his arms, and he stood now, unshaken in the teeth of the wind, looking down at her, his great love of her hardly restrained. “ Does it do that for you, too?” he asked, understanding in his voice. His eyes sought hers and held them. Then, as though to make daringly sure that he understood, he added, — “ By expressing what? Satisfies by expressing what ? ”

“ One hardly knows what, ” she murmured, — “the things that fight toward expression in one’s soul, the blown weakness of tears, — the keen strength of joy.” Though some shadow of waiting self-reproach lay like a veil across the light in her eyes, the light was there, and the words swelled and quivered up the gamut of memory from grief to gladness.

Watching her, he drew his breath in with a trembling inspiration, made a little start toward her, and turned away. The moments of torturing intimacy that came into their days were too life-laden. “Don’t! ” he said pitifully. “Don’t! ”

“Don’t? Don’t what?”

“Don’t let me know your soul! ” he cried in a strange agony of entreaty. “Keep me out! Keep me out! ” The cry was the cry of one on the threshold of his own, fighting himself back.

Her eyes, frightened and storm-driven, sought the flying clouds again, and a little silence fell between them, impenetrable for a time.

“Talk to me of Hardin,” she said at last, in a low reticent voice. “How are we to reconcile him to the loss of that arm ? ” Her eyes met his steadily now, all that young leaping strength of hers, body and soul, securely in leash.

“Yes, talk to me of Hardin,” —he caught at the name as at a thing to pull up by and stand by. “Though I ’ve met with a lot of discouragement with him, I ’m bound to admit that the worst thing in the whole history of his case is this final apathy of resentment at having to get at the future disabled. All his hold on life seems to have lain in the grip of the hand that had to go.”

“Ah, Hard was so big and whole! He has reveled so in his strength and wholeness, been so ingenuously vain in the thought of it, — his poor old pride is so hurt, don’t you see?” she explained, her face showing her own sympathetic hurt.

“Yes, I see. He is getting restless again; have you noticed ? We have had him down here nearly a week. That ’s doing pretty well. What next ? Shall you take him back to Kansas City?”

“No, to Penangton, I expect. He likes to be near you. You can stand it, can’t you? Now, as always, his chance seems to lie with you.”

“His chance is good. Don’t forget that. He is still strong. We shall save him yet, ”

She looked off toward the house, where she could see a man who waited for them at a window. He had one arm through the sleeve of a velvet jacket, and the other sleeve of the jacket hung empty from the shoulder, but he sat up stocltily and looked out upon the storm. When he saw that the woman’s eyes sought his, he raised his arm in salutation and smiled a halting absent smile. She lifted her hand and waved to him, then clasped both arms about her own body, “Oh, if I were not so much alive! It ’s a crime with Hardin like that, — let’s go back to him, let ’s go back! ” she cried, with a rush of tumultuous sorrow, a fine young maternalism possessing her face entirely; and the two started again across the yard together.

The man at the window lay back on his chair and watched them come up the trough of the wind, his thoughts surging toward the woman stormily, in wild leaps: “Ah, yes, you! You re something to keep a man, —but you are whole, — and I — lying here in these bandages — dying limb by limb, like a sickly tree, — God! It’s hardly the way of the strong.” He looked down upon the bandaged rigidity of his trunk and groaned. The strong! That was what he had been all his vigorous, successful life,powerful, intact. He had come up out of the strength of a sturdy, barefooted childhood, on into the strength of a muscle-hardened, povertyurged boyhood, on into the strength of a seasoned manhood, that had overcome the circumstances of birth, wrested wealth, wife, and happiness from Fate, — conquered, after the fashion of the strong. And here, at the end of it all, he was back in the home of his childhood, whither he had crept to hide from his conquered world, while he sought the strength to accustom himself to himself as a partly stripped trunk, as maimed, as incomplete. He was seeking that new strength still, braced against his wife and his physician; seeking, but not finding it. The marks of his awful inability to find it had seared his face deep these past few weeks. As he waited for the woman to come on to him, his defeat, his admission that his was battle strength, the strength to act, not to stand and endure, lay blightingly upon him.

On the weather-beaten porch again, the man and the woman stopped for a moment. The glow was dying from her face. She looked anxious, burdened, as she turned toward him. “It’s very good, ” — she hesitated as though the wailing wind swept the words from her lips, and she swayed a little toward him. If he had willed it, he could have touched her hair with his lips.

“Yes? ” he asked.

— “good to have you stand by us, — it ’s a hard place to stand in, I know that. ” Her tone was full of a divine sympathy.

“A hard place, but a high place. Am I failing you ? ”

A flash of glad light came over her face. “Oh no, you are not failing me, — being you, you could not fail me! ” she cried softly, her very confidence in him beating like mighty, unsettling waves about him.

He opened the outer door for her quickly, and she went by him to the door of her own room.

“Stay with Hardin a minute, will you ? ” she asked, as she disappeared, and he, passing on into the sick man’s room, was greeted listlessly: —

“Well, Henderson, couldn’t stand the storm ? ”

“Yes, —oh yes, we stood it.”

“We can blow in Missouri, when the notion takes us, huh? ” went on the sick man, his voice blank, his little effort at friendly conversation like a futile chipping at the shell of despondency about him.

“It ’s a monster wind. ” Henderson manifested a compelling, magnetic interest in the barren topic, so different from the other’s lifelessness as to suggest that the one was determinedly opposed to the other. “The farm here gets the full force of it, Hard. Wonder how your pioneer ancestors ever happened to select this bleak foreland to pitch crops on ? ”

“Lord !” — intermingled with an invalid’s querulousness was a little of that interest for which the physician was playing, — “pitched here because they could reap here, — black land this. ”

“You spent nearly all your boyhood here, did n’t you, Hard?”

“Mighty near it, — good times those, Henderson, ” — he sat up and looked out over the distant hills where the wind tore like a harried wraith. “ Very good times. And it ’s queer, is n’t it, how old times, old places call and call to a fellow. From the very minute that I heard that Lynn’s father had added this farm to his holdings, though I ’d forgotten the place for years, why, nothing for it, but what I must get back here and remember my beginning. I was born in that room there, ” — he twisted his head over his shoulder, with a jerk toward the tenant’s dining-room. “And look here,” he waved his hand toward the window, “see the road over the hill from the river? Many’s the time I’ve tramped it to school with my dinner-pail on my arm and mighty precious little in the pail.” He kept his eyes on the yellow road winding up hill in the distance till the fugitive interest passed from his face and was replaced by the old settled melancholy. “But somehow, Henderson, when I indulge in sympathy for myself, ’t is n’t that hungry youngster I ’m sorry for, — it ’s this one-armed lumpkin ” — his voice choked with the thought of the significance of his disaster, and he stopped. Henderson moved up a little nearer silently, and the bitter, tense words began again. “That hungry boy had everything ahead of him, Henderson, and the gnawing sting in his stomach was to him, with his kind of strength, nothing worse than another urge onward. He had everything to do and every reason to do, and he was fully equipped for the doing. I suppose, Henderson, I ’d get along better now if there was n’t so much behind me, if there was anything left ahead of me that needed doing.” That battle strength within him, that impulse toward activity, roused and growled and beat against the bars of his invalidism, but Henderson, welcoming any change from inappetency, let him continue. “I could fight with one hand, Henderson, if there was anything to fight for — anything left ” —

“Hard! Hardin Shore! There’s a big thing left! ”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Henderson, but I don’t have to fight for that, do I? She’s mine already, is n’t she? I want something to fight for. I don’t have to fight for her, I have her, if ever a man had anything on this earth. What do you expect then? Can a fellow like I am rock back on his wife’s love and his love of her, and end his days watching himself go to pieces? You expect that of me? You needn’t. I have to do things. I don’t know how to stand things any better than a baby. You don’t know what you are talking about when you ask it, Henderson. When did you ever endure? You could n’t any better than I can, —and I can’t at all! ” He got up from his chair and flung about the room. “God! I’m a crying failure at it. If I had n’t been a strong man, Henderson,—but I’ve lived the life of the strong. Why, with that old arm that ’s gone I’ve lifted and carried what two men could n’t budge, ” —his face lit with a little momentary gleam of satisfaction. “Why, Henderson, in the old days, in log-rolling time, I used to make big Jim Bard’s eyes stick out an inch by what I could do, and before me Jim was the strong man in these parts. Why, I could roll all day. And I was the stoutest man at a handspike you ever saw. Why, just feel that muscle even yet, huh? — is n’t that a lump! ” There was something infinitely pathetic in this tremulous braggadocio about his past that was stopping for a moment the thought of his future. “Musclewrapped giant that I was, — and now maimed, not all here. No, I shan’t stop, Henderson. Question with me has come to be whether you have had the right ever to stop me; a doctor may take too much upon himself, — patching a patient together when he would better be allowed to go to pieces, — a strong man does n’t want to live beyond the day of his strength. What’s life to mean to me now, — going leg by leg, arm by arm, — aw, don’t talk, — you’ve missed your prognosis before. I know that ’s the way I ’ll go. What have you done this thing for anyway? I’m not so essential to you, am I, that you should have held on to me and fought death away from me all these years? I’d have been finished and good riddance, long ago, if it hadn’t been for you!

Face to face with the physician’s tragedy of a patient’s reproach, Henderson was conscious only of a grand sense of vindication. It was that which made his voice rock and sing as he answered: “It was for her, Hardin, for her. She wanted you saved — maimed or halt, or blind — she wanted you saved.”

The words came on to the sick man like an arrow to the mark. He bowed his head against the window, and his fearful rage lulled. “Whatever I’ve done for you, I’ve done for her, ” insisted Henderson, and then, seeing that Shore’s wife stood questioningly at the door, her face, with its sharp lines of suffering and strain, turned toward him, he beckoned her to his place, and stole from the room.

She came up to Shore and laid her hand upon his arm. “Ah, yes, you! ” he murmured, putting his arm about her. “ You promised to stay away and exercise and rest for a full half hour. ” He tried hard to maintain his control of the harsh discord within him, holding her a little way from him and looking down upon her yearningly and lovingly, for all the strife on his face.

“ Yes, but you see, I get restless away from you.”

“Awful baby about me, are n’t you, are n’t you now, for a woman who has been married to me for years ? ” The old egoistic raillery slipped from his lips, as she drew him to a chair, where she knelt beside him, her young arms about him. He laughed, a little pleased growl, as she held him to her.

“Well, I like it better with you than out in the storm,” she said. “It was wild out there. This is safer.”

“You had Henderson with you. Did n’t Henderson take good care of you? ”

“Yes, I had him. Yes, he took good care.” He could feel the soft acquiescent motion of her cheek against his face.

“Guess you are safe enough with Henderson. ”

“ Yes. ” She rocked back on the firm support his big, muscle-corded arm gave her. “I ’m glad we have this arm,” she said, nesting her head against it comfortably. “Yes, I ’m safe enough with Henderson.” She smiled into his eyes as she added, “Henderson can hold the storm in hand, of course, ” and he missed her deeper meaning, but met her banter with a chuckle that had in it something of his natural spontaneity.

“We think Henderson can do a plenty, don’t we? ” he assented.

“He has done so much.” She pressed more closely to him, and the answering clasp of the arm about her made the bandages across his chest strain for a moment. “He has saved you for me over and over. He has done so much, — say it. ”

“Yes, yes, —if just being alive is much.” His tone was flat and dull again, and his eyes slanted remorselessly from the head on his breast to his armless shoulder. “But, Lynn, what I am having to meet and down now is whether or no being alive is anything at all. You know I’ve been a man for effort on the outside. What am I to do for the rest of my days besides fight disease? Develop my character? I ’m a sweet creature to start in to calcimine my inside life with ethical enameline, ain’t I? I can’t live inside. You know that. What am I to do, honey? ” All his nerve-racked, black defeat, his pride in his old life, his blank inability to get hold of another life, beat into the question and tolled up to her like a knell.

“But I have to have you, Hardin! That’s something. It might easily be a purpose ” —

“Ah, but do you? ” he cried, on a sudden vehement impulse to get at the bare truth of everything. “You are young, sound, whole. Do you really want me ? — There! there! I know, I know ! ” — He veered swiftly because of the fright, the appeal on her face. “You could n’t go on without me. I guess there would n’t be anything ahead for you. There would n’t be anything ahead for me without you, no matter how many arms were left me. I could n’t live without you. And you can’t live without me. That’s it, is it? ”

“Yes, that’s it,” she cried chokingly. “I couldn’t face the future. I should feel that somehow it was all my fault, that if I had been everything I might have been, you would not have gone. Anybody who is left must feel like that, I think. Ah, Hardin, stay with me, — want to stay ! ” She threw her arms about him and clung to him. Her abandon, her forgetfulness of his crippled shoulder made him wince with a pain that was, all the while, a stinging joy. She had triumphed over him again; she had brought life on to him again; her presence had softened and enlivened his thought again, and, conquered, he let his head rest upon hers, while he peered out timidly upon the new life.

Henderson came back presently and found them like that, and Shore greeted him with a note of the old boyish pleasantness of temper; a forced note, but welcome, for all that, to the two who had been for so long trying to make him put out that kind of effort.

“Well, Henderson, here goes for a fresh start.” Shore let his arm slip from his wife, and got to his feet as though he would grasp his standard anew with that uncompanioned hand. “ You two keep at a fellow so eternally, there ’s nothing to do but do as you say. Live, you say. All right, I ’ll live. I ’ll fight to live. I don’t want to, but I ’ll do it, I ’ll work for it, just for you two.” He began a nervous pacing to and fro, the strength that was in him urging him into some kind of activity, however unsatisfying.

“Sit down, old man, sit down! ”

“Oh, my God, Henderson, I can’t sit down. I ’m reconstructing myself. I need some room. Look at the power of that wind in the trees, —it ’s the kind of thing that ’s shaking me. Here, I ’m going out on the porch a minute to watch that wind, to feel it. It helps. Yes, I am. You’ve both been. Did n’t hurt you. Now, I’m going.”

In rousing him at all they had taken the risk of over-keying him, and, at high tension, a paroxysm of unbearable nervousness upon him, he passed out on the porch, the other two behind him, powerless to oppose the half-frenzied strength of his mood. “Ah, this is better, better! ” he cried, sending his senses out into the sweep and roar of the storm. The wind had increased in violence, and tore over the hills now with the howl of wolves. The air was shot with electricity, and streaks of gold and blue played out of the slateblack sky.

At the barn door the farm hands clustered anxiously. “Look at that! Look at that!” shouted one suddenly, and stretched out a long hairy forearm, whose crooked forefinger pointed down the yard.

“The sick man! Gord, he’s gone crazy! ”

Hardin Shore, that unbearable nervousness still upon him, had gone down into the yard, overcoming warning and remonstrance, after the ruthless manner of convalescence. Uncloaked, bareheaded, he forged into the storm, his eyes eager with the stimulus of the air, a fine free mood triumphing over his despondency. “Oh, I ’m all right now,” he insisted to the two who followed him,and he threw off Henderson’s hold impatiently. “I ’m no sick man, Henderson. Don’t hold me back. I’m well again. No, I won’t go in. No, I won’t take care ! I won’t do one damn weak thing for at least five minutes. Whew, that wind! No Missourian ever forgets the thrash of it! ” The up-welling, exultant strength within him communicated its inspiration to the two beside him, and they stopped trying to restrain him, smiling at him, letting him have his way. “This is the right sort of thing,” he cried; “this is living. You want to put life into me? This does it. Give me something on the outside to stand up against.”

He pushed up a high knoll, crowned by one giant-trunked, lean walnut, storm-tossed but invincible, and they came on after him. At the feet of the beetling bluff the Missouri, swollen and blackly tumultuous, tore through her bar-locked channels. The distant upturned fields, the timber patches, the feeble young corn were being raked and flattened by the teeth of the wind, that now swooped low and bit and crunched at the ground, now rose, screaming, and sent the very clouds driving before it. On the top of the knoll, Shore stopped triumphantly, and the other two stopped with him.

As they stood watching the gray wild weather, — Shore jubilant, his temporary exhilaration over-riding the memory of his affliction, the whole man again by the might of his renewed physical joy in living, — a blue-gold gleam shot out of the sky, spiking the air with blinding needles. Henderson, benumbed, helpless, tingling, heard somewhere above them the popping and straining of tough fibres, and knew that the big walnut was falling toward them, but could move neither hand nor foot in the voltaic shock upon him. With his wide-open, staring eyes he could see, however. See the woman standing as he stood, dazed, helpless ; see Hardin Shore’s one mighty arm upheld, the corded muscles standing out like cables under the velvet sleeve, his face lit with a proud, gleaming confidence ; see the tree deflected and go crashing to the ground beyond them; see Shore’s foot slip, and Shore go down under the trunk, while they two stood on in that magic, electric sphere of helplessness, and the farm hands came running from the barn.

The wind went higher yet by night, but the sun set red and glorious. In a bedroom in the foreland farmhouse a strong man lay dying, and his passing was no small thing, but translucent and glorious like the setting of the sun.

“How much better, how much better,” he murmured to two who knelt beside him, “to lay down this maimed body for you both, — to pay you back supremely for your fight for my life.” A shining consciousness of their salvation through him lay on his face; he looked as though he were breathing light. “It was a grand chance,” —he turned to the woman beside him pleadingly, as though he must reconcile her to his choice, “I would have tried to live just because you wanted it so; I had made up my mind to it, ” he said ; “but it would have been hard to live as I must have lived, —and I can’t help being glad that the matter got beyond us, — and you must try to see that this sort of dying is grandly better — than any sort of living.” He held to her hand, the warm strength of his love surging toward her mightily, as the strength of his body ebbed; then his eyes closed softly for a moment. When they opened again they fell upon the man beside him.

“Henderson? ”

“I am here, Hard. But, oh, God! if I were not here! If I could have died for you! ”

“Ah, you show that this is a great fate, — by envying me, old man, — but don’t begrudge me my destiny,” —his voice weakened and stopped, his eyes roaming beyond the window, where the yellow road rose out of his childhood to the top of the hill and lost itself on the other side.

In the swales the tough grass dipped and rose; on the hills the trees went like flails; overhead was the roar of an unseen surf. The sun went down trailing glory as Hardin Shore turned his illumined face toward it.

“How much better”—they heard him say again, a final Praise-God in his tone— “that a man lay down his life for his friends, — it ’s the way of the strong. ”

R. E. Young.