A Cathedral Singer

It was Sunday. All round St. Luke's Hospital quiet reigned. The day was very still up there on the heights under the blue curtain of the sky.

When he had been hurled against the curb on the dark street, had been rolled over and tossed there and left there with no outcry, no movement, as limp and senseless as a mangled weed, the careless crowd which somewhere in the city every day gathers about such scenes quickly gathered about him. In this throng was the physician whose car stood near by; and he, used to sights of suffering but touched by that tragedy of unconscious child and half-crazed mother, had hurried them in his own car to St. Luke's—to St. Luke's, which is always open, always ready, and always free to those who lack means.

Just before they stopped at the entrance she had pleaded in the doctor's ear for a luxury.

"To the private ward," he said to those who lifted the lad to the stretcher, speaking as though in response to her entreaty.

"One of the best rooms," he said before the operation, speaking as though he shouldered the responsibility of the further expense. "And a room for her near by," he added. "Everything for them! Everything!"

So there he was now, the lad, or what there was left of him, this quiet Sunday, in a pleasant room opposite the cathedral. The air was like early summer. The windows were open. He lay on his back, not seeing anything. The skin of his forehead had been torn off; there was a bandage over his eyes. And there were bruises on his body and bruises on his face, which was horribly disfigured. The lips were swollen two or three thicknesses; it was agony for him to speak. When he realized what had happened, after the operation, his first mumbled words to her were:

"They will never have me now."

About the middle of the forenoon of this still Sunday morning, when the doctor left, she followed him into the hall as usual, and questioned him as usual with her eyes. He encouraged her and encouraged himself:

"I believe he is going to get well. He has the will to get well, he has the bravery to get well. He is brave about it; he is as brave as he can be."

"Of course he is brave," she said scornfully. "Of course he is brave."

"The love of such a mother would call him back to life," he added, and he laid one of his hands on her head for a moment.

"Don't do that," she said, as though the least tenderness toward herself at such a moment would unnerve her, melt away all her fortitude.

Everybody had said he was brave, the head nurse, the day nurse, the night nurse, the woman who brought in the meals, the woman who scrubbed the floor. All this had kept her up. If anybody paid any kind of tribute to him, realized in any way what he was, this was life to her.

After the doctor left, as the nurse was with him, she walked up and down the halls, too restless to be quiet.

At the end of one hall she could look down on the fragrant leafy park. Yes, summer was nigh. Where a little while before had been only white blossoms, there were fewer white now, more pink, some red, many to match the yellow of the sun. The whole hillside of swaying; boughs seemed to quiver with happiness. Her eyes wandered farther down to the row of houses at the foot of the park. She could see the dreadful spot on the street, the horrible spot. She could see her shattered window-panes up above. The points of broken glass still seemed to slit the flesh of her hands within their bandages.

She shrank back and walked to the end of the transverse hall. Across the road was the cathedral. The morning service was just over. People were pouring out through the temporary side doors and the temporary front doors so placidly, so contentedly! Some were evidently strangers; as they reached the outside they turned and studied the cathedral curiously as those who had never before seen it. Others turned and looked at it familiarly, with pride in its unfolding form. Some stopped and looked down at the young grass, stroking it with the toes of their fine shoes; they were saying how fresh and green it was. Some looked up at the sky; they were saying how blue it was. Some looked at one another keenly; they were discussing some agreeable matter, being happy to get back to it now after the service. Not one of them looked across at the hospital. Not a soul of them seemed to be even aware of its existence. Not a soul of them!

Particularly her eyes became riveted upon two middle-aged ladies in black who came out through a side door of the cathedral—slow-paced women, bereft, full of pity. As they crossed the yard, a gray squirrel came jumping along in front of them on its way to the park. One stooped and coaxed it and tried to pet it: it became a vital matter with both of them to pour out upon the little creature which had no need of it their pent-up, ungratified affection. With not a glance to the window where she stood, with her mortal need of them, her need of all mothers, of everybody—her mortal need of everybody! Why were they not there at his bedside? Why had they not heard? Why had not all of them heard? Why had anything else been talked of that day? Why were they not all massed around the hospital doors, tearful with their sympathies? How could they hold services in the cathedral—the usual services? Why was it not crowded to the doors with the clergy of all faiths and the lay men of every land, lifting one outcry against such destruction? Why did they not stop building temples to God, to the God of life, to the God who gave little children, until they had stopped the massacre of children, His children in the streets!

Yes; everybody had been kind. Even his little rivals who had fought with him over the sale of papers had given up some of their pennies and had bought flowers for him, and one of them had brought their gift to the main hospital entrance. Every day a shy group of them had gathered on the street while one came to inquire how he was. Kindness had rained on her; there was that in the sight of her that unsealed kindness in every heart.

She had been too nearly crazed to think of this. Her bitterness and anguish broke through the near cordon of sympathy and went out against the whole brutal and careless world that did not care—to legislatures that did not care, to magistrates that did not care, to juries that did not care, to officials that did not care, to drivers that did not care, to the whole city that did not care about the massacre in the streets.

Through the doors of the cathedral the people streamed out unconcerned. Beneath her, along the street, young couples passed, flushed with their climb of the park hillside, and flushed with young love, young health. Sometimes they held each other's hands; they innocently mocked her agony with their careless joy.

One last figure issued from the side door of the cathedral hurriedly and looked eagerly across at the hospital—looked straight at her, at the window, and came straight toward the entrance below—the choir-master. She had not sent word to him or to any one about the accident; but he, when his new pupil had failed to report as promised, had come down to find out why. And he, like all the others, had been kind; and he was coming now to inquire what he could do in a case where nothing could be done. She knew only too well that nothing could be done.

The bright serene hours of the day passed one by one with nature's carelessness about the human tragedy. It was afternoon and near the hour for the choral even-song across the way at the cathedral, the temporary windows of which were open.

She had relieved the nurse, and was alone with him. Often during these days he had put out one of his hands and groped about with it to touch her, turning his head a little toward her under his bandaged eyes, and apparently feeling much mystified about her, but saying nothing. She kept her bandaged hands out of his reach but leaned over him in response and talked ever to him, barely stroking him with the tips of her stiffened fingers.

The afternoon was so quiet that by and by through the opened windows a deep note sent a thrill into the room—the awakened soul of the organ. And as the two listened to it in silence, soon there floated over to them the voices of the choir as the line moved slowly down the aisle, the blended voices of the chosen band, his school-fellows of the altar. By the bedside she suddenly rocked to and fro, and then she bent over and said with a smile in her tone:

"Do you hear? Do you hear them?"

He made a motion with his lips to speak but they hurt him too much. So he nodded: that he heard them.

A moment later he tugged at the bandage over his eyes.

She sprang toward him:

"O my precious one, you must not tear the bandage off your eyes!"

"I want to see you!" he mumbled. "It has been so long since I saw you! What's the matter with you? Where are your hands? Why don't you put your arms around me?"

VI

The class had been engaged with another model. Their work was forced and listless. As days passed without the mother's return, their thought and their talk concerned itself more and more with her disappearance. Why had she not come back? What had befallen her? What did it all mean? Would they ever know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work, the teacher of the class entered. He looked shocked; his look shocked them; instant sympathy ran through them. He spoke with difficulty:

"She has come back. She is down-stairs. Something had befallen her in deed. She told me as briefly as possible and I tell you all I know. Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral choir school was run over in the street. A mention of it—the usual story—was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers? They bore us; they are not even news. He was taken to St. Luke's, and she has been at St. Luke's, and the end came at St. Luke's, and all the time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it. Such is New York! It was to help pay for his education in music that she first came to us, she said. And it was the news that he had been chosen for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw brighten her day by day. Now she comes again for the same small wage, but with other need, no doubt: the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for his breast. She told me this calmly as though it caused her no grief. It was not my privilege, it is not our privilege, to share her unutterable bereavement.

"She has asked to go on with the sittings. I have told her to come to-morrow. But she does not realize all that this involves with the portrait. You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new work. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, she has hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light which was in her face and which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The old look is gone. It is gone, and will never come back—the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee—that great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past. It was brutally put out but it did not leave blankness behind it. There has come in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old—the look of faith in immortal things. She is not now the mother with the tenderness of this earth but the mother with the expectation of eternity. Her eyes have followed him who has left her arms and gone into a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance. Your portrait, if you can paint it, will be the mother with the look of immortal things in her face."

When she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning and so changed in every way, with one impulse they all rose to her. She took no notice,—perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice,—but she stepped forward as usual, and climbed to the platform without faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders. Then, to study the effect from different angles, he went behind the easels, passing from one to another. As he returned, with the thought of giving her pleasure, he brought along with him one of the sketches of herself and held it out before her.

"Do you recognize it?" he asked.

She refused to look at first. Then arousing herself from her indifference she glanced at it. But when she beheld there what she had never seen—how great had been her love of him; when she beheld there the light now gone out and realized that it meant the end of happy days with him, she shut her eyes quickly and jerked her head to one side with a motion for him to take the picture away. But she had been brought too close to her sorrow and suddenly she bent over her hands like a snapped reed and the storm of her grief came upon her.

They started up to get to her. They fought one another to get to her. They crowded around the platform, and tried to hide her from one another's eyes, and knelt down, and wound their arms about her, and sobbed with her; and then they lifted her and guided her behind the screens.

"Now, if you will allow them," he said, when she came out with them, one of them having lent her a veil, "some of these young friends will go home with you. And whenever you wish, whenever you feel like it, come back to us. We shall be ready. We shall be waiting. We shall all be glad."

On the heights the cathedral rises—slowly, as the great houses of man's Christian faith have always risen.

Years have drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have drifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted the snows away. Well nigh a generation of human lives has already measured its brief span about the cornerstones. Far-brought, many-tongued toilers, toiling on the rising walls, have dropped their work and stretched themselves in their last sleep; others have climbed to their places; the work goes on. Upon the shoulders of the images of the Apostles, which stand about the chancel, generations of pigeons—the doves of the temple whose nests are in the niches—upon the shoulders of the Apostles generations of pigeons born in the niches have descended out of the azure as with the benediction of shimmering wings. Generations of the wind-borne seeds of wild flowers have lodged in low crevices and have sprouted and blossomed, and as seeds again have been blown further on—harbingers of vines and mosses already on their venerable way.

A mighty shape begins to answer back to the cathedrals of other lands and ages, bespeaking for itself admittance into the league of the world's august sanctuaries. It begins to send its annunciation onward into ages yet to be, so remote, so strange, that we know not in what sense the men of it will even be our human brothers save as they are children of the same Father.

Between this past and this future, the one of which cannot answer because it is too late and the other of which can not answer because it is too soon—between this past and this future the cathedral stands in a present that answers back to it more and more. For a world of living-men and women see kindled there the same ancient flame that has been the light of all earlier stations on that solitary road of faith which runs for a little space between the two eternities—a road strewn with the dust of countless wayfarers bearing each a different cross of burden but with eyes turned toward the same Cross of hope.

As on some mountain-top a tall pine-tree casts its lengthened shadow upon the valleys far below, round and round with the circuit of the sun, so the cathedral flings hither and thither across the whole land its spiritual shaft of light. A vast, unnumbered throng begin to hear of it, begin to look toward it, begin to grow familiar with its emerging form. In imagination they see its chapels bathed in the glories of the morning sun; they remember its unfinished dome gilded at the hush of sunsets. Between the roar of the eastern and of the western ocean its organ speaks of a Divine peace above mortal storm. Pilgrims from afar, known only to themselves as pilgrims, being pilgrim-hearted but not pilgrim-clad, reach at its gates the borders of their Gethsemane. Bowed as penitents, they hail its lily of forgiveness and the resurrection.

Slowly the cathedral rises, in what unknown years to stand finished! Crowning a city of new people, let it be hoped, of better laws. Finished and standing on its rock for the order of the streets, for order in the land and order throughout the world, for order in the secret places of the soul. Majestical rebuker of the waste of lives, rebuker of a country which invites all lives into it and wastes lives most ruthlessly—lives which it stands there to shelter and to foster and to save.

So it speaks to the distant through space and time; but it speaks also to the near.

Although not half risen out of the earth, encumbering it rough and shapeless, already it draws into its service many who dwell around. These seek to cast their weaknesses on its strength, to join their brief day to its innumerable years, to fall into the spiritual splendor of it as out in space small darkened wanderers drop into the orbit of a sun. Anguished memories begin to bequeath their jewels to its shrine; dimmed eyes will their tears to its eyes, its windows. Old age with one foot in the grave drags the other resignedly about its crypt. In its choir sound the voices of children herded in from the green hillside of life's April.

Rachel Truesdale! Her life became one of these near-by lives which it blesses, a darkened wanderer caught into the splendor of a spiritual sun. It gathered her into its service; it found useful work for her to do; and in this new life of hers it drew out of her nature the last thing that is ever born of the mother—faith that she is separated a little while from her children only because they have received the gift of eternal youth.

Many a proud happy thought became hers as time went on. She had had her share in its glory, for it had needed him whom she had brought into the world. It had called upon him to help give song to its message and to build that ever-falling rainbow of music over which human Hope walks into the eternal.