It required an hour or two of outward rhythmic movement and confused inward feeling to get him ready for his next mental step. He had jumped off the tower; true; but he was alive and well, with no bones broken. What should he do now? Should he try to tear the tower down? The attempt would not be so very ludicrous, seeing he should only have to join those—socialists, anarchists, faddists—already at the work. But he admired the tower, and preferred to see is stand. If he did anything at all, it would be to try to creep back into it.
The reflection gave still another turn to his thoughts. He was passing Burlington by this time—the electric lamps throwing broad bands of light along the deserted, up-hill streets, between the sleeping houses. It was the first city he had seen since leaving New York to begin his useless career in the mountains. The sight moved him with an odd curiosity, not free from a homesick longing for normal, simple ways of life. He kept the canoe at a standstill, looking hungrily up the empty thoroughfares, as a poor ghost may gaze at familiar scenes while those it has loved are dreaming. By-and-by the city seemed to stir in its sleep. Along the waterside he could hear the clatter of some belated or too early wayfarer; a weird, intermittent creaking told him that the milk-cart of provincial towns was on its beat; from a distant freight-train came the long, melancholy wail that locomotives give at night; and then drowsily, but with the promptness of one conscientious in his duty, a cock crew. Ford knew that somewhere, unseen as yet by him, the dawn was coming, and—again like a wandering ghost—sped on.
But he had been looking on the tower which the children of men had builded, and had recognized his desire to clamber up into it again. He was not without the perception that a more fiery temperament than his own—perhaps a nobler one—would have cursed the race that had done him wrong, and sought to injure it or shun it. Misty recollections of proud-hearted men who had taken this stand came back to him.
"I suppose I ought to do the same," he muttered to himself humbly; "but what would be the use when I couldn't keep it up?"
Understanding himself thus well, his purpose became clearer. Like the ant or the beaver that has seen its fabric destroyed, he must set patiently to work to reconstruct it. He suspected a poor-spirited element in this sort of courage; but his instinct forced him within his limitations. By dint of keeping there and toiling there he felt sure of his ability to get back to the top of the tower in such a way that no one would think he lacked the right to be on it.
But he himself would know it. He shrank from that fact with the repugnance of an honest nature for what is not straightforward; but the matter was past helping. He should be obliged to play the impostor everywhere and with every one. He would mingle with men, shake their hands, share their friendships, eat their bread, and accept their favors—and deceive them under their very noses. Life would become one long trick, one daily feat of skill. Any possible success he could win would lack stability, would lack reality, because there would be neither truth nor fact behind it.
From the argument that he was innocent he got little comfort. He had forfeited his right to make use of that fact any longer. Had he stayed where he was he could have shouted it out till they gagged him in the death-chair. Now he must be dumb on the subject forevermore. In his disappearance there was an acceptation of guilt which he must remain powerless to explain away.
Many minutes of dull pain passed in dwelling on that point. He could work neither back from it nor forward. His mind could only dwell on it with an aching admission of its justice, while he searched the sky for the dawn.
In spite of the crowing of the cock he saw no sign of it—unless it was that the mountains on the New York shore detached themselves more distinctly from the sky of which they had seemed to form a part. On the Vermont side there was nothing but a heaped-up darkness, night piled on night, till the eye reached the upper heavens and the stars.
He paddled on, steadily, rhythmically, having no sense of hunger or fatigue, while he groped for the clew that was to guide him when he stepped on land. He felt the need of a moral programme, of some pillar of cloud and fire that would show him a way he should be justified in taking. He expressed it to himself by a kind of aspiration which he kept repeating, sometimes half aloud:
"O Lord, O Holy One! I want to be a man!"
Suddenly he struck the water with so violent a dash that the canoe swerved and headed landward.
"By God!" he muttered, under his breath, "I've got it. … It isn't my fault. … It's theirs. … They've put me in this fix. … They've brought this dodging, and shifting, and squirming upon me. … The subterfuge isn't mine; it's theirs. … They've taken the responsibility from me. … When they strip me of rights they strip me of duties. … They've forced me where right and wrong don't exist for me any more. … They've pitched me out of their Organized Society, and I've had to go. … Now I'm free … and I shall profit by my freedom."
In the excitement of these discoveries he smote the waters again. He remembered having said something of the sort on the night of his interview with Wayne; but he had not till now grasped its significance. It was the emancipation of his conscience. Whatever difficulties he might encounter from outside, he should be hampered by no scruples from within. He had been relieved of them; they had been taken from him. Since none had a duty toward him, he had no duty toward any. If it suited his purposes to juggle with men, the blame must rest upon themselves. He could but do his best with the maimed existence they had left to him. Self-respect would entail observance of the common laws of truth and honesty, but beyond this he need never allow consideration for another to come before consideration for himself. He was absolved from the necessity in advance. In the region in which he should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should make use of such advantages as his lot allowed him.
There was exaltation in the way in which he grasped this creed as his rule of life; and looking up suddenly, he saw the dawn. It had taken him unawares, stealing like a gray mist of light over the tops of the Vermont hills, lifting their ridges faintly out of night, like the ghosts of so many Titans. Among the Adirondacks one high peak caught the first glimmer of advancing day, while all the lower range remained a gigantic silhouette beneath the perceptibly paling stars. Over Canada the veil was still down, but he fancied he could detect a thinner texture to the darkness.
Then, as he passed a wooded headland, came a sleepy twitter, from some little pink and yellow bill barely withdrawn from its enfolding wing—to be followed by another, and another, and another, till both shores were aquiver with that plaintive chirrup, half threnody for the flying darkness, half welcome to the sun, like the praise of a choir of children roused to sing midnight matins, but still dreaming. Ford's dip was softer now, as though he feared to disturb that vibrant drowsiness; but when, later, capes and coves began to define themselves through the gray gloaming, and, later still, a shimmer of saffron appeared above the eastern summits, he knew it was time to think of a refuge from the daylight.
The saffron became fire; the fire lit up a heaven of chrysoprase and rose. Where the lake had been as a metal mirror for the stars, it rippled and dimpled and gleamed with the tints of mother-of-pearl. He knew the sun must be on the farther slope of the Green Mountains, because the face they turned toward him was dense in shadow, like the unilluminated portion of the moon. On the western shore the Adirondacks were rising out of the bath of night as dewy fresh as if they had been just created.
But the sun was actually in the sky when he perceived that he no longer had the lake to himself. From a village nestling in some hidden cove a rowboat pulled out into the open—a fisherman after the morning's catch. It was easy enough for Ford to keep at a prudent distance; but