THE POTTER AND THE CLAY

The POTTER and The CLAY

A ROMANCE of TODAY

By MAUD HOWARD PETERSON

ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE HARDING

LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY BOSTON

COPYRIGHT, 1901, By LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL

Published May 7, 1901. 6th Thousand, June 11, 1901. 10th Thousand, July 19, 1901. 13th Thousand, Aug. 16, 1901.

Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To M. C. P. and M. T. C.

WHOSE LIVES REVEAL THE POTTER'S TOUCH

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The comparatively unknown rendering of the verse from the Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám, quoted on the succeeding page, is to be found in the first edition of Fitzgerald's translation of the Persian poem.

"For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day, I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet clay: And with its all-obliterated Tongue It murmur'd—'Gently, Brother, gently, pray!'" From the Rubáiyát.

PERMISSION to use the poem, "The Potter's Wheel," which appears on the next page, was granted by the owners of the English copyright of Browning's works through Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., London, and by the American publishers of Browning, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

The Potter's Wheel

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— Thou, to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change; the past gone, seize to-day!" Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. What though the earlier grooves, Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips aglow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! Robert Browning.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE

The clay takes shape

BOOK TWO

The break in the clay

BOOK THREE

The Potter's touch

LIST of ILLUSTRATIONS

"It's a storm!" he cried. (Frontispiece.)

"You—saw—me—then?"

"What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?"

"Trevelyan lay on the floor."

PROLOGUE

The POTTER and the CLAY

PROLOGUE

The Lieutenant's small daughter was swinging on the railing of the drawbridge that spanned the moat.

Her companions, two boys, questioned each other with their eyes.

"She says she won't come," said the elder in what he fondly believed to be an undertone. "She says she won't play—"

"I never did! So there!"

The small girl wheeled about suddenly and descended from her perch and stamped her foot; her long, straight hair of an indefinite brown, shaken by the tempest the boy's words had awakened.

"No; but you won't," said Rob, promptly.

There was an ominous silence; but instead of the tirade the anxious watchers expected, a tear appeared on Cary's little nose and quietly dropped into the waters of the moat. Cary was nothing if she was not a bundle of contradictions. Johnny shuffled nervously from one foot to the other, but Rob grew impatient.

"Well, are you coming?" he asked after the pause in which he had vainly waited for Cary to smile again.

"No, I'm tired. I hate walking, too," said Cary peevishly.

"'Course not—to walk," said Rob, scornfully. "We can steal Lieutenant Burden's boat."

"You wouldn't dare," said Cary, but her voice was tremulous with eagerness, and the tears she had forgotten to wipe away were still shining on her cheeks.

"Wouldn't I, though! Come along and see!"

Cary balanced herself carefully on one foot and considered. It wasn't well to let Rob think she didn't have to be persuaded. He had been so cross too.

"I haven't got my sunbonnet," she began. "And I've forgotten the gun I put it in."

"I'd just as lieve hunt for it," said Johnny, politely.

"That's just like a girl! You don't need the old thing—anyway I thought you hated it," retorted Rob, who did not fill the role of pleader.

"'Course Mammy Amy is 'way—gone for a week to see her grandbaby. I don't s'pose I really need my pinafore either—if I go!" The Lieutenant's small daughter hesitated to watch the effect of the words. Rob apparently was not to be moved, so she buried her pride and backed up to Johnny.

"Please undo me," she said, calmly, and the older boy struggled manfully with the holes and buttons.

"I'll be right back—quick as a wink," and she flew over the drawbridge back to the fort, her long hair and short dress blowing in the wind. She hid the pinafore under her arm, and when she reached the circle of the parade ground, she sidled up to one of the great guns captured in the war, and surreptitiously poked the gingham roll down its mouth. Clothes were a necessary evil, but sunbonnets and pinafores were the worst and most evil things of all—and not to be endured when Mammy Amy was not around, and the big show guns offered such a safe and charming hiding place. It only needed coolness and care to accomplish the feat without detection. Of course, a thing once buried in the heart of one of the big guns was lost forever—which was just as well, thought Cary, being one less to bother her—since it was one thing to force the articles down into the big black mouths and another to extract the sunbonnets and pinafores, even if she could have remembered which particular gun held which particular thing—which she could never do.

She hurried back to the drawbridge, and the sentry, who adored every inch of the "Post Baby," stood at "attention" and saluted her with a twinkle in his eye as she passed him. Cary slowed her walk and inclined her head graciously in greeting.

"Good evenin', Jones," she said, innocently.

Then she rejoined the boys.

"Well, are you really ready?" said Rob, a bit crossly.

The Lieutenant's small daughter did not deign to notice him.

"I think," she said, condescendingly, "if I go, I'll go 'round by the road way—it's shorter."

The "road way" was a good deal longer, but it was out of the reach of Cary's father and the fort.

She wiped her dry eyes on one of Johnny's handkerchiefs—Johnny always had more than one, while Rob and herself frequently went "shares" on a stolen or a borrowed one—and then she raced Rob to the end of the drawbridge.

Cary's conscience was troubling her. She told herself it was her stomach and the lemon pie she had appropriated from the pantry shelf, but it was undoubtedly her conscience, mingled with a fear that papa-lieutenant or some of the other officers might loom in sight and inquiring into the project, carry her off.

Ahead, thirteen-year old Johnny was moralizing.

"Perhaps we oughtn't to take her—she's so little."

"She's seven," said Rob, "and what's going to hurt her?" He kept his eyes away from the over-clouding sky.

"I don't know—" said the cautious Johnny, "but—"

"I guess we can take care of a small girl like her. You're thirteen and I'm eleven."

At the water edge, conscience spoke once more but was overruled when at Johnny's question as to the judiciousness of her going, Rob declared she was afraid.

"I ain't afraid, so there! Robby Trevelyan! My papa never said I couldn't go!"

Cary majestically slipped into the stolen boat, and seated herself in the bow. Johnny took the rudder and Rob the oars.

The boy was as much at home on the sea as he was in his bed at night. Indeed, more so, since he hated the one and loved the other with all the passionate strength of a coast-child's heart. He had been born in inland England, but had lived most of his life in western Scotland where the great rocks rise boldly along the coast—that coast intersected by numerous sea-lochs, bounded by hills and separated from each other by mountainous peninsulas.

The burden of the deep sea's song of eternal restlessness had become the controlling passion of the boy's life. The wild freedom of wild living things appealed to him and fear was a word unknown. Not a nearby cliff he had not climbed; not a nearby, darkened cave, formed by the overhanging rocks, he had not explored. The Scottish folk forgot he was an English lad as his skiff became a familiar feature of the western sea-bound landscape. There was scarcely a Scottish boy of double his age who could outstrip him in swimming, and when the hated books had been laid to one side and the tutor had gone away for the summer months, old Mactier, a retainer of his father's, had taken the child in charge, carrying him over to the moorland country and teaching him the meaning and the use of firearms. His mother had at first protested, but Trevelyan had only laughed. "Let the boy alone," he said, and he gloried with old Mactier at the lad's stocky build, firm muscles and enduring fearlessness, knowing that in her secret heart his wife remembered the traditions of her Scottish clan, and was glad.

Then Trevelyan's wife had died. The home on western, rock-bound Scotland had been closed, until the boy should grow to man's estate and enter on his mother's heritage. Trevelyan sent the boy to his sister—Johnny's mother—living in east Scotland, and then returned to England. The sudden loss, the still more sudden change from the wild free life lived on the western coast to the quietness of the life lived by the Stewarts, told upon the child. Mercifully, his healthy training was stronger than the inroads made by childish grief, but his mind was ill at ease and homesick. He hated the flatness of this new eastern country—the low and shelving coast. This was not Scotland to him. It was not the Scotland he had known. It was not Mactier's Scotland—and his.

His aunt was kind—overkind, her own children sometimes thought when she sat out all their bedtime hour on the foot of Robert's bed, instead of theirs—but "auntie" couldn't understand. All the three children were kind but they couldn't quite understand either. Johnny was undoubtedly the best, but Johnny loved books as passionately as Rob hated them, and would listen to his father discuss politics by the hour, if he only had the chance. Robert loathed politics.

Then one day Johnny's mother had a talk with her husband. It ended in her giving up a London season and starting with Johnny and Trevelyan's boy, for America. A long promised visit to a life friend, who had married a United States officer, was the excuse. It was not until years after, when Trevelyan's little son had grown to manhood that he knew the real reason for that sudden ocean voyage.

The change had the desired effect. He met new people. He saw new things. He watched new customs. He knew Cary.

But the wistfulness for Mactier was in the boy's eyes now as he looked over Johnny's head in front of him, to the long stretch of low sand country he was leaving. He pulled with long, even strokes.

Cary was talkative.

"Is this—" she waved her arms intending to designate the new sweep of coast line and of water, "all this I mean—is it like England or Scotland?"

"Something," said Johnny slowly. "It's really quite like home—my home," he added quickly, seeing that his younger cousin had stopped rowing and was leaning forward with hurt eyes.

Suddenly, the boy drew in his oars, resting on them and allowing the boat to drift. "It isn't like my home," he cried passionately; a wild thrill of homesickness surging over him, "It isn't like my Scotland—one little bit! We have great big rocks rising out of the water—not long beaches like this! And the sea beats and beats and beats against them—it doesn't just lap the sand as it does here—" the boy drew in his breath quickly, hurrying on, "And you haven't got our heather and our bracken, and our country isn't flat—except the moorlands where Mactier used to take me to hunt, and even our moors are not like this!"

He stopped suddenly; and he buttoned and unbuttoned his pea-jacket. He wouldn't for the world have let Johnny see his eyes, but Johnny was looking at Cary. The child was leaning forward with angry face.

"You're a horrid, horrid boy!" she cried, "You haven't a single nice thing to say about us or our flag or—or me! You're impolite and you're dreadfully rude and I'll never play with you again!"

Trevelyan's boy continued to button and unbutton his pea-jacket. He didn't care now if Johnny did see his eyes. Johnny saw them, too, and he was frightened. One day, Rob's eyes had had that look when their tutor had threatened to strike him. He spoke hastily.

"Rob didn't mean to be rude, Cary," he said; "but Rob's home was beautiful—a great deal more beautiful than mine, and—and even more beautiful than your home, and so you mustn't—"

Cary's anger melted like a mist before the sun. She slid to the bottom of the boat and then crept along to Rob on the rower's seat. She pulled at his sleeve.

"Rob—I'm sorry—I didn't mean—really truly mean—"

Trevelyan's boy shook away the child's clinging fingers.

Cary drew back; her lips quivering.

"I'm cold," she said, for Cary never would have admitted that a boy could hurt her so, "I'm cold, and—and tired. Can't we go home, Johnny?"

"Yes," he said.

"No, we won't," said Rob, moodily, "the oars are gone."

The oars were gone—slipped from the locks when he had drawn them in, and in the excitement of the quarrel they had floated away. The two boys knew that the oars were not the only things on the surface of the deep, drifting out to sea.

Behind them a bank of storm clouds was gathering and a sudden stone-color fell upon the face of the waters.

The clouds increased in size and swept toward them, seemingly poised directly overhead. Then they parted and the rain fell in a great straight sheet of water. The oarless boat tossed dangerously, and the rain gathered in the bottom.

Cary, half rose, beside herself with terror. The storm had drenched her to the skin, and her long, straight hair lay, matted with the wet, close to her small head. Her wide gray eyes looked out dark against the pallor of her skin.

"Sit down!"

It was Johnny's voice. Mechanically, the child obeyed.

Once, years later, he so commanded her, and she yielded then as now.

She cowered in the bow and was silent. In the stern the elder boy grasped the rudder, forcing the boat for a time in the direction of the far-off Point. The rough ropes slipped through his hands, in spite of effort, and tore them cruelly.

Trevelyan's boy had crept to the bottom of the boat, the better to balance it. The wind swept across his hair, forcing it back from his forehead, as with a mighty hand. The joy of an unknown danger was in his blood and the color was in his cheeks. The wild spirit of the storm found a challenge in his eyes.

He was a being apart from the other two, and yet sharing their danger. The freedom and the peril were as elixir to his soul, and yet he never lost consciousness of the wind cloud in the distance; and he knew it to be as merciless as it was strong.

"Steer for the Point," he shouted. Johnny nodded.

They neared the shore. Then the wind came upon them and churned the bay into a white foam. It turned the frail boat around as on a pivot, heading it for the open sea, and with the effort the ropes that held the rudder broke.

The boys looked at each other. It was characteristic of both; it was characteristic of their training and their birth, that the sense of personal danger did not touch them and that it was solely for the small girl they thought.

In the face of the older boy was a strong courage that soothed and sustained the frightened child; but in the face of Trevelyan's son was defiance against the might of the storm, and the sea, and death.

He ripped open his pea-jacket; he unlaced his water-soaked boots; he stripped to his shirt.

"Keep the boat steady," cried Trevelyan's son, "I'm going to swim to the Point and get help!"

The older boy caught him by the wrist.

"You'll be drowned. I'll go!"

Trevelyan's son shook him off. He threw back his head.

"I've swum double the distance," he shouted, "Anyhow, we'll all die here."

He balanced himself on the rower's seat. Then he raised his arms above his head before he sprang. The joy of the coming struggle was in the boy's eyes—the joy of testing his strength against the sea's forces.

He dived. The boat, lightened of his weight, rocked, sprang higher in the water and then righted. From the bow came the sob of a girl-child's terror.

Trevelyan's son rose, striking out for shore.

Cary and the elder boy watched him—even as they drifted seaward.

* * * * *

Trevelyan's son was gaining. The fight had been a long one and a hard one. The rain had lessened, but the wind and tide had carried him a quarter of a mile below the landing he had intended to make. His thoughts were growing disconnected. At first, he had only gloried in his own skill; then he thought of Scotland—he could scarcely have told why—and of old Mactier. Then he remembered Cary—and after awhile, he wondered if he had ever drank as much salt water before.

Then the wind changed. That was a help. Once he trod water, looking out over the face of the sea for a sign of the boat. He saw it. It was far away and still drifting seaward, but it was upright and the coast boy knew that unless the storm began again, it could live in spite of the long swells that bore it outward.

His arms began to get numb, and a mist—he supposed it was the rain—got between him and his vision. The low banks of clouds on the horizon, too, assumed strange shapes. They looked like the gray crags at home.

Once his breath seemed to leave him and his arms grew suddenly powerless and he sank. The emersion gave him new energy. The love of life, the wild thrill of fearless conquest, swept right over him anew, and he pulled for shore. After a little he raised his right arm and sounded. The waters were up to his eyes, but he touched land. He rose and struck out again, and again, and—again.

Then he waded in and stood upon the beach, his face turned seaward.

Trevelyan's boy threw back his head and laughed at the waters and the storm.

"I beat you," he shouted passionately, "I beat you!"

* * * * *

The Lieutenant was in his office. It had been a busy day of petty annoyances and he was tired.

He leaned back in his chair and filled his pipe, packing it carefully. Then he lighted a match.

Some one fumbled at the door knob in an uncertain way; hesitated, and tried again.

"Come in!" shouted the Lieutenant. The noise hurt his nerves.

The door opened and Rob entered. His eyes looked shadowy by contrast to the pinched paleness of his face. He walked with difficulty. His short legs got tangled up in the long coat he had gotten from one of the men of the rescuing party, and he stumbled over it.

The Lieutenant rose. The match burned down to his fingers and he mechanically tossed it into the fire. Then he laid down his pipe.

The short odd figure in the long overcoat advanced to the middle of the room, facing Cary's father.

"Cary—" he began, and then stopped a moment and cleared his throat. It seemed still full of salt water. "I stole Lieutenant Burden's boat and I took Cary and Johnny out. The storm came. I knew it was coming, but I didn't care, and I went. And I lost the oars and—" The salt water feeling came back.

"Cary?" asked Cary's father.