Soon the Square was quiet as before, and there was
naught but peace under the big stars of July.
That day the news had come that Harkless, after weeks
of alternate improvement and relapse, hazardously
lingering in the borderland of shadows, had passed
the crucial point and was convalescent. His recovery
was assured. But from their first word of him,
from the message that he was found and was alive,
none of the people of Carlow had really doubted it.
They are simple country people, and they know that
God is good.
NETTLES
Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the
Alma Mater of John Harkless and Tom Meredith; two
who have belonged to the same dub and roomed in the
same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money
in a common stock for either to draw on; who have
shared the fortunes of athletic war, triumphing together,
sometimes with an intense triumphancy; two men who
were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no
unkindly fashion in their turn, always helping each
other to stuff brains the night before an examination
and to blow away the suffocating statistics like foam
the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing,
succeeding together, through the four kindest years
of life; two such brave companions, meeting in the
after years, are touchingly tender and caressive of
each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United
States form of insulting epithets, and the caresses
are blows. If John Harkless had been in health,
uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more
have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called
him “old friend” than he could have danced
on the slack-wire.
One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse
fanned him softly, and Meredith had stolen in and
was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless’s
eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came
in, it was closed; but, by and by, Meredith became
aware that the unbandaged eye had opened and that
it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled
with a comprehending light, and John knew that it
was his old Tom Meredith who was sitting beside him,
with the air of having sat there very often before.
But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance,
yet a prosperous burgher for all that—was
this the slim, rollicking broth of a boy whose
thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame
as he spun around the bases on a home run? Without
doubt it was the stupendous fact, wrought by the alchemy
of seven years.
For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories
of the old, it is a long transfiguration to him whose
first youth is passing, and who finds unsolicited
additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange
deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization
begins to be borne in, that his is no particular case,
and that he of all the world is not to be spared,
but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in
the disguising crucible of time. And, though
men accept it with apparently patient humor, the first
realization that people do grow old, and that they
do it before they have had time to be young, is apt
to come like a shock.
