A little child

He stood with bare feet planted well apart in the sand, working his toes down comfortably into its moist warmth and regarding Graham as though he were a poor riddle. His cotton blouse, open at the throat, showed a strong, shapely little neck. One brown hand grasped a battered tin pail, the other a wooden spade.

Gilbert Graham drew out pad and pencil and made a rapid sketch. The child’s clear gaze remained fixed on his face while he worked. When the drawing was finished, the artist thrust it carelessly into his coat pocket and resumed his gloomy inspection of the ocean.

“Earned another slice of bread and butter; though why I should earn it, or eat it when it is earned, is more than I know.”

The boy seemed to ponder on this for a while and then, evidently finding it beyond him, gave it up.

“What I drew with this pencil?” Gilbert parried, for the sake of hearing him talk.

The child drew nearer and stood leaning against his knee as he sat on a low slab of rock. They looked steadily into each other’s eyes. There was something irresistibly winning in the little fellow’s fearlessness and sociable intent. Graham lifted his hand and brushed the close-cropped head with gentle touch.

“Oh, because some day you’ll grow up and—well, I hope you won’t make a mess of it, as I have!”

“Glad to make your acquaintance, Gerald Hammond Fitzgerald.” If Graham smiled inwardly, no shade of amusement crossed his face.

The artist drew the sketch from his pocket. He liked this small boy who leaned so confidently against his knee. Gerald glanced at the outline of himself and his full, childish laugh of pleasure rang out.

“Draw me some more with that pencil,”[Pg 12] he pleaded, as though he thought the lead possessed some wonderful charm of its own.

“Tickles your vanity, does it? Well, here goes! Put down that pail. Now take your spade in both hands and stoop over as if you were digging.”

The boy obeyed at once, striking a perfectly natural attitude. Graham made a more elaborate drawing this time, throwing in a background of sea and sky with quick, masterful strokes. It occurred to him to put the suggestion of a storm-cloud rising in the distance, but he refrained. Somehow, he did not want to connect storm-clouds with the child.

“That will do for the front cover of Prescott’s Weekly,” he thought as he finished it.

“I didn’t mean—that kind of thing,” the man said. He looked more intently at the boy. “How do you know, at your age, what God would or would not forbid?”

The child seemed to turn this question over in his mind for a moment and, evidently finding it too much for his comprehension, fell back on something of which he felt quite sure.

“‘God is love’—‘unfailing, quick,’” he said, looking off over the sea, and unconsciously mixing up two things which he had learned at different times.

He inspected Gilbert Graham gravely, as though he were an entirely new type of being—as indeed he was to Gerald.

“If you don’t know about ‘a very present help,’” he began, “what would you do if—if—” he looked around, and finally took his illustration from the thing closest at hand—“if a big, oh, a big, big wave—” extending his arms to their utmost limit to express vastness—“was to come and sweep you away?”

“It saved my mamma, right here. And it saved my daddy, too. Only the[Pg 15] wave that swept my daddy out was on a diff’rent kind of sea from this sea.”

The man started and looked quickly away from the child. It was some moments before he spoke.

“Did the wave sweep your daddy very far out?” he asked then, in a low voice.

“Oh, yes! I know, for I heard my daddy telling a man about it just a few days ago—I think a big wave must have swept him out, too—and he said he was like a boat that had slipped its—its—”

“And drifted ’way out to sea,” he went on, “and ’twas black and cold and rough and daddy began to think of the shore and that gran’ma was there—’twas before he had mamma and me—and he cried out to the ‘very present help.’ I don’t think daddy knew, ‘God is love’—‘unfailing, quick’ then, or he’d have said it out loud like I do.”

Gilbert Graham sat silent, one hand shading his eyes. Gerald watched him for a few minutes, then, with a child’s curiosity, reached up and drew away one of the strong, supple fingers. He was surprised to find that it was wet.

“Little chap—” the man’s voice caught in his throat as he put one arm round the boy—“I don’t mind telling you that I’m out on that same sea—far out, farther out than your daddy ever was, and it’s dark and cold and rough and—” his forehead fell back upon his hand—“I think that I’m going to sink!”

“But you can’t sink!” he declared. “The ‘very present help’ won’t let you sink, if--if you catch hold of it.”

“It isn’t your grip,” the boy urged, “the water’d loosen that, anyhow. I[Pg 17] know, for I’ve tried holding on to a rock and when a wave comes it always makes you let go. But the ‘very present help’ never lets go. It’s God, you know. And if God let go the sun would fall down and the stars would fall down and we’d all fall down, mamma says. But He never does, and so there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Oh, the blessedness of childhood! Some words came back to the man as he sat there—“a great gulf fixed.” It seemed to him that there was, indeed, a great gulf fixed, a well-nigh impassable flood, between the fearless thought of this child and the dark clamor and confusion of his own consciousness.

“Mamma was telling me more about the sea last night,” Gerald went on. “She says there’s lots of diff’rent kinds of seas. Some of them have very big names. There’s one that begins with ‘Dif—’ but I don’t remember the rest.”

“Difficulty?” Graham suggested. In spite of himself the boy kept dragging him out of his slough of despair.

“And there’s one that ends in ‘row.’ I remember that because row made me think of a boat.”

“And then there’s the one daddy was nearly drowned in, the one you said you were far out on. But mamma says it doesn’t matter a bit what the name is, or how rough it is, or how far from shore you are, Love can walk over any sea and come and get you!”

Gilbert Graham was looking at the boy with an intent, earnest gaze. Was the gulf so fixed, so impassable, after all? Suppose there was a Power which could cross it and come to a man in his extremity?

“When I was out on the sick sea,” Gerald went on, “and my head was so wobbly that I didn’t know daddy or mamma, Love came and got me, right away. Oh, but ’twas fine when my head didn’t feel wobbly any more!”

“Supposing I wanted this ‘very present help’—wanted it now—wanted it badly—what would I have to do to get it started toward me?”

“Just know that you want it. My mamma says another word for ‘know,’ but ’tis a long one and I misremember it.”

“Realize that I need ‘a very present help,’” Gilbert Graham said slowly, as he gazed out to sea, “well, I do need it; and if ever a man realized his need I think I do at this moment!”

“Then it’s coming—it’s coming oh, so quick! First thing you know the ‘very present help’ will have hold of you, just like that!” and Gerald’s brown fingers closed firmly on the collar of Graham’s coat.

Gilbert Graham patted the small hand and then held it for some time between both his own. When he rose, something that had been in his face before he began to talk to the child—marring its beauty and manhood—was gone. He was not, as yet, aware that his declaration, “If ever a man realized his need I think I do at this moment,” was the opened door through which Love had entered, issuing as it came the wondrous command, “Loose him and let him go.”

“You going away?” Gerald looked up wistfully into the dark, clean-shaven face.

“No, I’ll come back. That is—I’ll come back if what you’ve been telling me is true and I reach shore.”

He had gone a little distance along the beach when a childish voice reached him.

The artist turned to nod assent. At sight of the small figure, so sturdy, such a living embodiment of the Love in which he so firmly trusted, his vision clouded.

“He’s near enough to—” Gilbert Graham hesitated before mentally pronouncing the next word—“God to reclaim even me!”

There was a low throb of pain in the younger woman’s voice. For answer the elder pressed her hand more closely.

“When I think of that summer two years ago,” the speaker went on, “and how Gilbert and the child and I used to romp on this very strip of sand, I marvel that I can be here, alone, and still live!”

“Oh, Mother Graham, forgive me!” she said, turning quickly. “I am selfish in my sorrow—I know it. And I keep forgetting that he was once your little boy, even as the baby was mine.”

“He is my little boy still—and always will be,” Gilbert Graham’s mother answered steadily.

“Do not think, Judith,” she added,[Pg 23] “that I condone the past, or make light of what you have suffered. I am sure you know, my dear, that my chief object in life, just now, is to help you.”

“I do know it. I could not have endured these past months if you had not let me come to you.”

“Our little man was just two years old the summer that we spent here at Snug Harbor Beach,” Judith Graham said, presently. “I remember how Gilbert used to carry him out on his shoulder and how he would shriek with delight when the water swept in round his father’s knees. It seems to me now that those weeks were my very last gleam of sunshine. To think that in less than two months from that time my baby was dead!”

The older woman made no attempt to stem this outburst of grief. Youth must make its plaint, she thought pitifully; and the girl—she was little more—at her side was one of those who are capable of[Pg 24] receiving death-wounds through the very completeness of their love.

“Of late,” she said, after a while, speaking in a low tone, “it has seemed to me that this cannot be the end, Judith, either for you or Gilbert. I have been thinking much of God’s all-loving, all-wise plan for each one of us, and how we seem to draw back from it, even to dread it; whereas, in reality, it can hold nothing but happiness for every creature. I wish—oh, I wish with all my heart that I had thought of these things earlier in life, while Gilbert was still a boy! But then I was so proud of his good looks, of his popularity, of his talent for drawing, that I unconsciously made the turning aside into easier paths his rule of living. It has been the old story—no restraining father’s hand, an over-fond mother and an impressionable boy.”

“Oh, Mother Graham, don’t,” Judith said quickly. “If you blame yourself, what about me? He never touched—it—”[Pg 25] she stopped, shuddering—“until after baby went. I shut myself up then, alone with my grief. I spent hours just looking at his little clothes. I accused Gilbert of not caring. It seemed to me that all the world should have stood still and mourned with me. I was mad, I think. Too late I realized that misery and loneliness are open doors through which temptation may freely enter. To me the indulgence of grief was a luxury. To Gilbert the sight of a small shoe or toy was agony. Men are so different! Little by little he began to drift away from the cold, empty, silent place that had once been home.”

The older woman did not reply. Hers was the blame, her heart cried out, hers alone! Had she ever taught her son that problems are not solved by shirking them? Had she fitted him to face the world’s woe unflinchingly and do a man’s share toward lifting it? Ah, that “line of least resistance” which she had made so natural for him! She realized now[Pg 26] that it is swimming against the current which develops moral muscle—the muscle which can resist temptation in after years. The mother bowed her head with an inarticulate cry, “Oh, God, I have failed, but Thy resources are infinite!”

She put her own sorrow, her own sense of failure, bravely aside in order to help her companion.

“It is hard, I know, to believe—when the sky is as dark as yours seems to be now, Judith, that it will ever be any brighter, but every day it becomes clearer to me that God’s law is a law of annihilation to every discordant condition. It does make the crooked straight and the rough places plain. It will, if we rely wholly upon it, bring harmony and order out of seeming chaos. God did not create us, His children, to be driven by every wind and wave of disaster. When we begin to discern this great truth it is, indeed, the coming of the kingdom of heaven to our consciousness. I have thought so often, of late, of those beautiful lines—

Tears had risen so full in Judith’s dark eyes as Mother Graham finished speaking that she was not at first aware of a small figure which had halted directly in front of her, or of a childish gaze fixed intently upon her face. Gerald, realizing that here was need of some kind, drew nearer.

Judith had taken one small, brown hand and drawn him closer to her. He was three years older than her own little son would have been, had he lived, but her heart yearned over him as it did over all children now.

Coming so closely upon what Mother Graham had said the child’s words were almost a shock.

They turned and looked at each other involuntarily. Each had a mental picture of a strong, supple hand and its quick, masterful work when anything appealed to the artistic sense controlling it.

“He looked sorry, until I told him about the ‘very present help’ and ‘God is love’—‘unfailing, quick.’”

“It couldn’t be—it couldn’t,” she whispered. “And, yet, he might have been drawn back to this place, even as I was!”

“I think that it was Gilbert,” Mother Graham answered steadily. “‘All things work together for good,’ Judith; remember that, dear, and take courage.”

“He said if what I told him about ‘a very present help’ was true he’d come back; and ’tis true. Was he”—turning to Mother Graham—“was he your little boy?”

“If he was your little boy you’d know about the big wave that swept him out.”

“I don’t think that he could have been my boy”—a shade of disappointment had crossed the elder woman’s sweet, patient face—“for I never knew of his being swept away by a wave.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that kind of sea”—motioning to the water behind him—“it was a sea called sin and he said the wave had carried him ’way, ’way out. He knew about ’most every kind of sea. But I told him my mamma said it didn’t matter a bit what the sea was called, Love could walk over it.”

Judith had covered her eyes with her hand. Gerald touched her cheek with one finger.

“Are you out on the sorry—sor-row”—correcting himself carefully—“are you out on that sea?”

“Well, if I was you, I’d just know ‘God is love’—‘unfailing, quick,’ right now.”

“Where did you learn all this?” Mother Graham asked, for the child was voicing thoughts which had been struggling for recognition in her own consciousness of late.

“My mamma told it to me. She tells me something more about ‘a very present help’ every day. And she says that the ‘very present help’ was always here,[Pg 31] but that a long, long time ago people forgot how much of a help it was; and then a good woman found out how much of a help it was and she put it in a book so that other people might know, and that’s how my mamma knows. Is this”—he touched Judith’s face again—“your little girl?”

“I am only beginning to learn about it myself, dear, in the same way that your mamma learned; but I thank God that I have even begun, and I think”—Mother Graham laid one hand on Judith’s shoulder—“that my little girl is ready to learn also.”

“Yes, and”—he nodded confidently—“you know Love can walk over the sor-row sea just as easy as any other!”

Instead of staying the few weeks upon which they had planned at Snug Harbor Beach, Judith Graham and her husband’s mother remained on for nearly two months. Neither spoke to the other of the secret hope which chained them to the place, but each morning their eyes swept the beach with eager expectancy and each evening they said, “Perhaps, to-morrow.”

Judith often sat for hours on the low slab of rock where her husband had made the sketch of Gerald. Whenever he saw her thus, Gerald would invariably leave his play for a few minutes and lean against her knee, just as he had leaned against Gilbert’s. Sometimes neither of them spoke and sometimes Judith would ask—without removing her eyes from the distant horizon—“Do you think he’ll come back?” to which Gerald’s unvarying response was, “Sure.”

The moments when she was thus alone with him soon became to Judith the part of the day that counted. It seemed to her that while she sat with one arm round the boy, leaning her tired head against the warmth of his small body, the wounds which life had given her were being silently healed. No matter which way her path might lie, existence was no longer the dreary thing that it had been when she came to Snug Harbor Beach. Was it possible that Love had, indeed, walked over the sea of sorrow, to that desolate waste of waters where her bark drifted, and was saying, even to her, “It is I, be not afraid”?

At the end of the seventh week a northeast storm of unusual violence swept the coast and Judith was compelled to remain indoors for several days. She sat much near the window, sometimes reading, with deep interest, a small, leather-covered book which Mother Graham had recently purchased, and sometimes gazing out at the storm-lashed ocean.[Pg 34] She thought how One had risen from sleep and said to such a sea, “Peace, be still.” That the Christ could speak those words to-day with the same authority—was speaking them, now, to her storm-racked consciousness—daily became a more assured and glorious fact.

When she again saw the strip of sandy beach, which had grown so dear because of its association with her own little son and with Gerald, the only trace of the recent storm was a heavy, sullen swell—called by sailors “the old sea”—which lifted and broke upon the shore, rushing in with tremendous force. Although the tide was out, Judith could not on this morning seek her usual seat, so far-reaching were the waves. She stood for some minutes on a path which wound through a maze of sweet fern and berry bushes, watching Gerald who, because of three days’ enforced absence from the sand, was bent on building a wonderful pyramid.

“The tide’s turned,” an old sailor said,[Pg 35] in passing, “she’s coming in and she’ll be pretty high.”

Judith, who liked these simple fisherfolk, turned aside to talk with him for a few minutes.

“Such a storm as we have had these last few days is unusual at this time of year, is it not?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled, easily. “When it’s bin thick o’ fog outside, as it has for a week past, it takes a considerable breeze o’ wind to clear it away.”

“And does the ‘breeze o’ wind’ always leave such a swell as that?” Judith asked, as a wave crashed shoreward.

“’Most always, after a no’theaster. There’ll be a heavy undertow to-day. Wouldn’t try any salt-water bathin’, if I was you.”

When Judith faced the sea again, she was surprised to see how the tide appeared to have risen in so short a time, and how much further in the waves were breaking. One came so near to where Gerald,[Pg 36] still intent on his pyramid, dug steadily, that she called out to him. Her voice, however, was completely drowned in the roar of the surf. With a slight stirring of alarm she left the path and hurried forward.

She had covered half the distance which separated them when her breath stopped, as though it had been blown back down her throat. To her terrified eyes the ocean seemed suddenly to lift and hurl itself landward. Such waves are not uncommon on the Massachusetts or Maine coasts after a northeast storm, with an incoming tide. Their force can seldom be calculated.

It lifted Gerald as though he had been a chip of wood, carrying him inland for several yards. Then came the relentless clutch of the undertow.

To Judith it was as though the very heart in her body was being battered and bruised as she watched those small hands vainly battling against that seething flood, while the wooden spade[Pg 37] he had so recently grasped floated almost to her feet. If the child were caught under into the next wave, it seemed as though all life must be crushed out of him when it crashed upon the shore. For a sickening moment everything turned black before her eyes, but she fought off the faintness, crying aloud,

And then, with a sob of thankfulness, she saw that a man, strong and supple, was beating his way through the water. He reached the boy, grasped him and held him high in his arms. When the wave broke, the man’s head was submerged, but the boy’s was not.

The mighty volume of water lifted Gilbert Graham even as its predecessor had lifted Gerald; but, as the force of the wave spent itself, he realized with a throb of thankfulness that his feet touched bottom, for, as he had once told the boy, he was not an expert swimmer. Then came the rush of the undertow.

It seemed as though his body must yield before it, burdened as he was with the child. As he braced his strong shoulders against the flood his whole being was a cry for strength. All at once, this thing became to him symbolic. It was not alone for the boy’s life that he fought, but for his own manhood. If he could stand firm now without relaxing his grip of the child, he felt that no wave of temptation, no subtle under-current of appeal could ever again sweep him off his feet or loosen his grasp on goodness and truth.

The old sailor, with whom Judith had talked a few minutes before, came stumbling down the beach toward her.

“He can’t make it—he can’t!” he muttered, with shaking lips. “The next wave’ll get ’em both!”

On it came—the proverbial “third wave” which sailors know and dread. Higher than either of its immediate predecessors the swell rose. Judith laid her hands upon her heaving breast.

She scarcely breathed during the moments which followed. Then a cry of joy escaped her. The wave broke ere it reached Gilbert. The white flood carried him with it as it rushed in and left him on firm foothold. He staggered slightly when he reached the dry sand and the old sailor put out an arm to steady him.

“If that wave hadn’t broke before it reached ’em, ’twould ’a’ bin day-day to ’em both—boy an’ man,” he muttered as he turned away.

Judith drew Gerald’s drenched little body close to the warmth of her own. The child’s eyes were wide open, but the shock seemed to have suspended his faculties.

“Little chap”—he said, between labored breaths—“you haven’t forgotten about ‘a very present help,’ have you?”

A light swept over the child’s face, as though something within him had waked up.

“I—said it!” he gasped. “When—the big wave—came—I said, ‘God is love’—‘unfailing, quick.’ And then—you got me!”

He drew a long, shuddering sigh and looked up at Gilbert while Judith wiped the water from his face.

“It isn’t very nice—when a big wave—sweeps you out—is it?” he asked confidentially.

He looked at his wife—a long look in which a man’s deep repentance was laid at her feet.

“Dear,” he said, “I have much to say to you, if you will let me say it. But we must get the boy home. That water was pretty cold.”

“And will you wait for me here? I want to speak to you on this strip of beach. But, first, I must see if I cannot get some dry clothing in the village.”

As he turned away, Gerald caught his hand. The natural life and color were returning to his small face.

“When I get—my dry clothes on—will you draw me—some more—with that pencil?” he pleaded.

Above his head the man and woman looked at each other again and there was a light on their faces like the dawning of a new day. But neither voiced the thought which was in both their minds—“And a little child shall lead them.”

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CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	The Artist	9
II.	The Sorrow Sea	22
III.	The Big Wave	32

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A little child

A
Little Child

INDEX

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Transcriber’s note

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