Charred Wood | Page 3

He tried
Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted. Now,
still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about, sick of
things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped into Sihasset
through sheer curiosity--just to see a typical New England summer
resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely disappeared. Now
that the season was over he simply did not care to pull out for New
York and continue his trip to--nowhere. He was "seeing" America. It
might take months and it might take years. He did not care. Then
England again by way of Japan and Siberia--perhaps. He never wanted
to lose sight of that "perhaps," which was, after all, his only guarantee

of independence.
Siberia suited Mark Griffin's present mood, which was to be alone. He
had never married, never even been in love, at least, not since boyhood.
Of course, that had been mere puppy love. Still, it was something to
look back to and sigh over. He liked to think that he could still feel a
sort of consoling sadness at the thought of it. He, a timid, dreaming boy,
had loved a timid, dreaming girl. Her brother broke up the romance by
taunting Mark who, with boyish bashfulness, avoided her after that.
Then her parents moved to London and Mark was sent to school. After
school he had traveled. For the last ten years England had been merely
a place to think of as home. He had been in India, and South America,
and Canada--up on the Yukon. He would have stayed there, but
somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man. Ye gods! a
remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year! And who could have
had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen. His
imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame. Every day
he wrote, but burned the product next morning. What was the use? He
had plenty to live on. Why write another man out of a job? And who
could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year? But,
just the same, it added to Mark Griffin's self-hatred to think that it was
the income that made him useless. Yet he had only one real failure
checked against him--the one at Oxford. But he knew--and he did not
deceive himself--why there had been no others. He had never tried.
But there was one thing in Mark's favor, too. In spite of his wandering,
in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he was clean.
There was a something in the memory of his mother--and in the
memory, too, of that puppy love of his--that had made him a fighter
against himself.
"The great courage that is worth while before God," his mother used to
say, "is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean. It is
the only time you have the right to be a coward. That sort of cowardice
is true courage."
Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great shining memory he
had of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations,

he found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her.
True, he had missed her religion--had lost what little he had had of
it--but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.
His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known
much about his family's form of it. For that his mother's death, early
boarding school, and his father's worse than indifference, were
responsible. But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed
something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one
admonition of his mother that he had treasured. His nature was full of
reverence. His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but something
rebelled. He had read everything, and was humble enough to
acknowledge that he knew little. He had given up the struggle to
believe. Nothing seemed satisfactory. It worried him to think that he
had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that
many men had been of his way of thinking. He hoped this would prove
excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him. Here he
was, rich, noble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing
nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a
saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to
whom he spoke.
Now something else, yet something not so very different, had suddenly
stepped into his life, and he knew it. The something was dressed in
white and had stepped out of a