_ BOOK II. THE DAY OF THE BUFFALO
CHAPTER XV. ANOTHER DAY
The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon another world.
The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new significance. Really this was Magna Charta. All those who, tired and sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something had been done. Each might have told you in his way that a new web of human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom. Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.
There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured, to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.
Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was another day.
In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination. They told the boy that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the myriad stars. He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the Edge. No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the figures be conclusive. They told him of the positive and negative poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres of force. Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told him--men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told him--that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was Love. He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since ever time began. But it seemed to him that this union must never be that of mere chance. There could be but one way right and fit for the meeting of the two halves of life. He looked about him in the little village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the women who were there for them to marry. They had never sailed across seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?" Seeing that this was the way of human beings, he was ashamed. It aroused him to hear of this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry, and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who forthwith did marry her. To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found. With some men this delusion lasts very late. With some women it endures forever. For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.
With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands. Thus he found himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history. Franklin wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to achieve. And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself. To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when the image comes.
Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a chamber of the stars. The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles of joy and beauty. The curtains at the windows, cracked and seamed, made to him but a map of the many devious happinesses which life should thenceforth show. The noises of the street were but music, the voices from the rooms below were speech of another happy world. Before him, radiant, was that which he had vaguely sought. Not for him to marry merely the neighbour's daughter! This other half of himself, with feet running far to find the missing friend, had sought him out through all the years, through all the miles, through all the spheres! This was fate, and at this thought his heart glowed, his eyes shone, his very stature seemed to increase. He wist not of Nature and her ways of attraction. He only knew that here was that Other whose hand, pathetically sought, he had hitherto missed in the darkness of the foregone days. Now, thought he, it was all happily concluded. The quotient was no indefinite one; it had an end. It ended here, upon the edge of the infinite which he had sought; upon the pinnacle of that universe of which he had learned; here, in this brilliant chamber of delight, this irradiant abode, this noble hall bedecked with gems and silks and stars and all the warp and woof of his many, many days of dreams!
Mr. and Mrs. Buford had for the time excused themselves by reason of Mrs. Buford's weariness, and after the easy ways of that time and place the young people found themselves alone. Thus it was that Mary Ellen, with a temporary feeling of helplessness, found herself face to face with the very man whom she at that time cared least to see. _