NOW SPRING HAS COME.
A CONFIDENCE.
"When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the flowers are blossoming on the plain!
Lal, lal, la, la, la, lallallalla, lal, lal, lal, la, la, la, la, la.
When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the mockin'-bird is singing on the tree!"
"I don't believe that mocking-bird line belongs to the song at all, Lizzie; you never do get a thing right!"
The words have a partly irritated, partly contemptuous tone, that seems oddly at variance with the size of the child who utters them. She is lying flat on her stomach on the floor, resting her elbows at each side of a book she is reading, holding her sharp chin in the palms of her hands, waving her skinny legs in unconscious time to the half tired, half feverish lilt of the nurse as she jogs the baby in time to the tune. She gazes, as she speaks, at the girl with a pair of unusually bright, penetrating eyes. This mocking-bird line never fails to annoy her.
"Troth, an if I cud get the young limb to slape I wouldn't care if 'twas mockin'-birds or tom cats!" is the indifferent answer.
Strange how some trivial thing will jog a link in a chain of association, and set it vibrating until it brings one face to face with scenes and people long forgotten in some prison cell in one's brain; calling to new life a red-haired girl, with sherry-brown eyes, and a flat back, pacing a nursery floor in impatient endeavor to get a fractious child to sleep,—ay, her very voice and her persistent mixing of mocking-birds and spring-time. So muses the child twenty years after, as, past her first youth, with only the eyes and the smile unchanged, she lies on a bear-skin before the fire on a chilly evening in late spring, and goes over a recent experience. A half humorous smile, with a tinge of mockery in it, plays round her lips as she says,—
"Twenty years ago. Queer how it should fit in after all that time!
"Tell you how it was? That is not very easy; pathos may become bathos in the telling. Let me see. Of course it was chance,—or is there any such thing as chance? Say fate, instead. The three old ladies who spin our destinies were in want of amusement, so they pitched on me. They sent their messenger to me in the guise of a paper-backed novel with a taking name. I was waiting in a shop for some papers I had ordered, when it struck me. I took it up. The author was unknown to me. I opened it at haphazard, and a line caught me. I read on. I was roused by the bookseller's suave voice,—
"'That is a very bad book, Madam. One of the modern realistic school, a tendenz roman. I would not advise Madam to read it.'
"'A-ah, indeed!'
"I laid it down and left the shop. But the words I had read kept dancing before me; I saw them written across the blue of the sky, in the sun streaks on the pavement, and the luminous delicacy of the Norwegian summer nights; they were impressed on my brain in vivid color, glowing, blushing with ardor as they were. Weeks passed; one afternoon, time hung heavily on my hands, and I sent for the book. I read all that afternoon; let the telling words, the passionate pain, the hungry yearning, all the tragedy of a man's soul-strife with evil and destiny, sorrow and sin, bite into my sentient being. When the book was finished, I was consumed with a desire to see and know the author. I never reasoned that the whole struggle might be only an extraordinarily clever intuitive analysis of a possible experience. I accepted it as real, and I wanted to help this man. I longed to tell him in his loneliness that one human being, and that one a woman, had courage to help him. The abstract ego of the novel haunted me. I have a will of my own, so I set to work to find him. It was not so easy. None of my acquaintances knew him, or of him; he was a strange meteor; and as the book was condemned by the orthodox, I had to feel my way cautiously.
"Isn't it dreadful to think what slaves we are to custom? I wonder shall we ever be able to tell the truth, ever be able to live fearlessly according to our own light, to believe that what is right for us must be right! It seems as if all the religions, all the advancement, all the culture of the past, has only been a forging of chains to cripple posterity, a laborious building up of moral and legal prisons based on false conceptions of sin and shame, to cramp men's minds and hearts and souls, not to speak of women's. What half creatures we are, we women!—hermaphrodite by force of circumstances, deformed results of a fight of centuries between physical suppression and natural impulse to fulfil our destiny. Every social revolution has told hardest on us: when a sacrifice was demanded, let woman make it. And yet there are men, and the best of them, who see all this, and would effect a change if they knew how. Why it came about? Because men manufactured an artificial morality; made sins of things that were as clean in themselves as the pairing of birds on the wing; crushed nature, robbed it of its beauty and meaning, and established a system that means war, and always war, because it is a struggle between instinctive truths and cultivated lies. Yes, I know I speak hotly; but my heart burns in me sometimes, and I hate myself. It's a bad thing when a man or woman has a contempt for himself. There's nothing like a good dose of love-fever (in other words, a waking to the fact that one is a higher animal, with a destiny to fulfil) to teach one self-knowledge, to give one a glimpse into the contradictory issues of one's individual nature. Study yourself, and what will you find? Just what I did,—the weak, the inconsequent, the irresponsible. In one word, the untrue feminine is of man's making; while the strong, the natural, the true womanly is of God's making. It is easy to read as a primer; but how change it? Go back to any poet!
"Well, at length an old bookseller I knew gave me surer information. My intuition was not at fault: the experiences were wrung from the man's soul. As the old superstition has it, a dagger dipped in a man's heart-blood will always strike home; so no wonder they pierced me with their passion, despair, and brave endurance. What the old fellow wrote to him I know not, but I got an unconventional pretty letter from him, and it ended in our writing to each other. As my time to leave drew near, the desire to see him became overpowering. I could afford it; he could not. It ended in our arranging to meet at a little town on the coast.
"It is strange how the idea of a person one has never seen can possess one as completely as this did me. I, whom, as you know, think as little of starting alone for, say, Mexico, as another woman of going to afternoon tea; who have trotted the globe without male assistance,—felt as tremulously stirred as at confirmation day. There are days that stand out in the gallery of one's remembrances clean-painted as a Van Hooge, with a sharp clearness.
"I slept on board, and early the next morning, it was Sunday, I stood on deck watching the coast as we glided through the water that danced in delicious September sunshine. I was happily expectant. At dinner hour we passed a fjord, a lovely deep-blue fjord, winding to our right as we passed, with the spire of a church just visible among the fir-trees round the bend. Boats of all kinds, from a smart cutter to a pram were coming out after the service. The white sails swelled as they caught the breeze, flapped as they tacked, hung listlessly a second, and then dashed with a swerve, like swift snowy-winged birds, through the water. I had not troubled with church-going of late years. Why? Oh, speculation, weariness of soul that found no drop of consolation in religious observance,—maybe that might be the reason. But all those honest, simple folk in their Sunday bravery, fair-haired girls with their psalm-books wrapped up in their only silk kerchief, the ring of laughter echoing across the water, the magic of sun and sky, mountain and fjord, made me feel that I too was church-going, and I felt strangely happy. It is the off moments that we do not count as playing any part in our lives that are, after all, the best we have. I am afraid it would be impossible to make you see things as I felt, them.
"I went up to the hotel when I landed. I had the reputation of riches; the hotel was at my service. I inquire for him, go down to my sitting-room, send him my card, and wait. I wait with an odd feeling that I am outside myself, watching myself as it were. I can see the very childishness of my figure, the too slight hips and bust, the flash of rings on my fingers,—they are pressed against my heart, for it is beating hatefully,—ay, the very expectant side-poise of head is visible to me some way. It flashes across me as I stand that so might a slave wait for the coming of a new master, and I laugh at myself for my want-wit agitation. A knock.
"'Come in!'
"The door opens, and I am satisfied. In the space of a second's gaze I meet what my soul has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think always. Have I lived before in some other life that no surprise touches me?—that it is just as if I am only meeting the embodiment of a disintegrated floating image that has often flashed before my consciousness, and flown before I could fix it? Has this man, or some psychical part of this man, been in touch with me before, or how is it? I stand still and stretch out my hand; I check an impulse to put out both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know before he speaks how his voice will sound, what his touch will be like before he clasps my hand. It is odd how the most important crisis of our lives often comes upon us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; yet the vehemence of the denials, the keenness of the weapons of satire and scepticism that are turned against it only prove its existence. As long as man is man and woman is woman, it will be to them at some time the sweetest and possibly the most fatal interest in life to them. Thrust it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as you will, sooner or later it will have its revenge. I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy thing, jessed by my will. Sometimes, by way of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an hour, but always to call it back again to my own safe keeping. Now it left me.
"We sat and talked,—rather I talked, I think, and he listened. He said my going to see him even on literary grounds was eccentric; but then it seemed I had a way of doing as I pleased without exciting much comment. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it! Was I really going away? How tiresome it was, really awfully tiresome! What was he like? Well, an American bison or a lion. You might put his head among the rarest and handsomest heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? No, not a bit. His hands, for instance, are great laborer's hands, freckled too; I don't like his gait either,—indeed, a dozen things. What we talked about? Well, as I said, he listened mostly; laughed with a great joyous boyish laugh, with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential manner and a very caressing smile; a trick, too, of throwing back his head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, I suppose I made him. I told him all about myself; turned myself inside out, good and bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old gown; laughed at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it? I suppose it was; but the whole thing was rather unusual. He got up and walked about, sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets and exclaimed, 'The Deuce!' etc. I fancy he learned a good deal about me in a few hours. You see it was not as if one were talking to a stranger; it was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time, and was filling up the gaps made during the absence. You can't understand. I think we were both very happy. He admired—no, that is not the word; he was taken with me, that is better. He said my hands were 'as small as a child's;' the tablecloth was dark-red plush that made a good background. He pointed timidly, as a great shy boy might, to one of my rings; you see they don't as a rule wear many rings up there; I suppose they gave an impression of wealth. 'That one is very beautiful!' I laughed; I was so glad my hands were pretty,—pretty hands last so much longer than a pretty face. I laughed too at his finger, it had such a deferential expression about it; and I called him a great child. I think we were both like two great children; we had found a common interest to rejoice in,—we had found ourselves. Every moment was delightful; we were making discoveries, finding we had had like experiences,—had both hungered, both known want, were both of an age; we were both unconventional, and were shaking hands mentally all the time. I don't remember now what it was he said; but I remember I was obliged to drop my head, and I felt I was smiling from sheer, delicious pleasure. He cried laughingly: 'You say I am a great child, you are a child yourself when you smile!'
"He was to have supper with me, and he went away for an hour. After he left I walked over to a long mirror and looked at myself. Tried to fancy how he saw me,—that might be different, you know. I had color, life, eyes like stars, trembling, smiling lips. There was something quivering, alert about me; I scarce knew myself. Of course the same hips, figure, features were reflected there,—it was something shining through that struck me as foreign. Do you know what I did? I danced all round the room. Shows what an idiot an old woman can be. By the way, he denied that I was old; I was like a little girl, but a remarkable little girl; no wonder people always noticed me, as if I were a somebody. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it, for that matter seen it too, at the pier. He knew the moment I stepped off the boat that it was I. Yes, people always stared at me, but how could he know? Ah! presentiment perhaps. So he was on the pier? Why did he not come and meet me? No legible answer, but a slow reddening up to the roots of his fair hair. I do not know quite how he conveyed it, but I had the sensation, a charming one, of being treated as a queen.
"But to go back. I sat or rather lay in an arm-chair at the window, and watched the water and the ships. It was getting dusk, the luminous dusk of the north, as if a soft transparent purple veil is being dropped gently over the world. The fjord was full of lights from the different crafts at anchor, and the heaven full of stars; and the longer one looked up there, the more one saw myriads of flimmering eyes of light, until one's brain seemed full of their brightness, and one forgot one's body in gazing. Long silvery streaks glistened through the heaving water like the flash of feeding trout, and lads and lassies in boats rowed to and fro, and human vibration seemed to thrill from them, filling the atmosphere with man and woman. And the silken air caressed my face as the touch of cool, soft fingers. I had a feeling of perfect well-being; one does not get many such moments in one's life, does one? I think I just was happy, rehearsing the hours that flew too quickly, recalling every look, tone, gesture, and smile. The jomfru came in to lay the table; she knew me from a previous visit and began to talk; but I wanted to be alone with my thoughts; so I went upstairs, washed my hands and puffed them with sweet smelling powder, and then when I went down again and sat and waited I clasped them up over my head to make them white. He came back, flung his hat on the sofa out of sheer boyish delight at being back, came over and stood and looked down at me, and I laughed up to him. If I were to talk until Doomsday, I could not make you understand what I cannot yet understand myself.
"After supper, at which I sipped my tea and watched him, we sat at the window and looked out at the purple world. I had told him he might smoke. Well? Well, we talked, and we talked when we were both silent; and he, I mean his thinking self, came to me; and I—well, I believe from the moment he came into the room, all the best of me went straight to him. The lights out in the harbor twinkled, a star fell, and I wished—well, wishes are foolish. I think he must have been watching my face, for when our eyes met, he smiled as if he understood. Sometimes he jumped up and stood rocking a chair backward and forward. He was sorry I was going away! Yes? Oh, we might meet again! That might be difficult! Indeed? I should have thought he would be the last person in the world to say it was difficult to meet. He laughed at that, with a quick sidelong look he has, like a Finn dog, and said I was sharp, awfully sharp, as if he liked being caught. By the way, he occasionally used strong language; said I must forgive him, he wasn't very used to ladies' society.
"At ten I said I would say good-night for conventionality's sake. He begged, humbly it struck me, for a little longer. I was to leave by the steamer at eight in the morning, would be down at seven; he might come to me. Would I give him a portrait of myself? Yes, I would get one specially done. As much in profile as possible, he thought that would be happier. Yes. He came to the top of the stairs with me, and when we bade good-night he took my hand and held it curiously as if it were something fearfully fragile, and stood and watched me down the corridor. And will you credit it? I felt inclined to run like an awkward little school-girl. I said prayers that night; thanked God, I don't quite know what for,—I suppose I did then,—perhaps for being happy. I looked at my foreign self in the glass too, and when the light was out—Yes?—I did what you and every other woman might do, I cuddled my face to an imaginary face, rubbed my cheek to an imaginary cheek, whispered a God bless you! and fell asleep.
"I was down before seven, paid my bill, and sat waiting, with the little tray, with its thick white cups and lumpy yellow cream, before me. He came,—such a glad man, with glad eyes, glad smile, and outstretched hands. And I,—I was so glad, too, that I could have shouted out for very joy of living. I might have been drinking some magic elixir instead of coffee.
"'It is tiresome!' he said impatiently.
"'What is tiresome? You have said that so often.'
"'It is tiresome when a person one wants so badly to keep in the country is going out of it.'
"'Supposing I were to stay in it, you would probably be in one place and I in another. It is only a question of a little dearer postage!'
"We both laughed at that. It takes such a little thing to make one laugh when one is happy. Then the steamer came in sight, and we walked down through the bright morning to the pier, and went on board. He stood silently; we only looked at each other. It did not then strike me as odd—it does now. The first bell rang! I felt a chill steal over me. 'It is tiresome, it is hateful!' His smile had flown; and old deep lines and traces of past suffering I had not noticed before showed plainly.
"'I will come back,' I said, 'when the winter is over!'
"'Ay, but winter is long, or it used to be!'
"'No matter, I will come with the spring!'
"The second bell rang! Ah, why can't we do as our hearts bid us? We have one short life, and it is spoiled by chains of our own forging in deference to narrow custom. I shivered. There was after all an autumn chill in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell now.... The third bell! We turn, and I tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and I say good-by and God bless you! Not from a purely religious conception of God, unless it be that God (and I think it does) means all that is good and beautiful, tender and best. I might have said, 'The best I can think of befall you!' A second later, and the streamer rail separates us! I look into his soul through his eyes, and see it is sorry, regretful,—as sorry as I am glad it is so: he is sorry I am going from him, and in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes to me as I would have it come to me.
"'When spring comes' I whisper as I lean over to him, while the steamer glides out. He follows it to the end of the pier, and stands there as long as we are in sight. If he had held out his arms and said, 'Woman, stay with me!' I would, I fear, have jumped down and stayed. Didn't know anything about him? No, that is true, only that I had been waiting for something ever since I was old enough to have a want, and that he was that something; that I was nearly thirty when I found him, and—life is short!
"I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I believe I thought the sun shone differently. I almost asked some people on deck if they did not think that the day was quite the loveliest day ever dawned since the world was a world; if there was not something peculiarly and singularly delicious in the very air? I found a quiet sofa, and lay with closed eyes, and lived it over again.
"The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was insanely happy, then I was intensely miserable. I sent him my portrait and a letter, and counted the days and the hours to a reply. It came. I stole away to read all the warm meaning ill concealed under the words of it; slept with it under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and answered it straight from my heart. Why try and tell you of the aftertime? I would not go through that winter again for anything in the world. Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency,—all the strongest feelings that can torture or wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be up on a high mountain alone with my dream. I wonder does a man ever realize the beauty there is in a woman's thought of him! What kind were the letters? Warm, passionate, yet with a reservatio mentalis that hurt me, but always with a 'When spring comes!' in them. It is amazing to what depths of folly a human being can descend! I had his photograph on my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant his household saint. It would be hard to find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, and waited with strained ears and fever-racked nerves for the postman's knock. Do you know there is something touchingly pitiful in the way one finds out all the tender bits in a letter and re-reads them? I have kissed a thumb-mark on the paper! Heavens, how the days dragged! I was ill with yearning thought; night brought no rest but the comfort of being alone; all the years of my life were not as long as that weary winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its place. It was foolish, exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a thin, waxen, yellow face with dark-ringed eyes, and I was certainly older looking. Thinking of it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think I was hysterical. How many of the follies and frailties of women are really due to hysterical rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. You see there is no time of sowing wild oats for women; we repress and repress, and then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our sexual and emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of some sort. When we shall live larger and freer lives we shall be better balanced than we are now. If what I suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask a better sample of conventional hell's pain. Hu-s-sh! Very well, I won't say those things!
"It is bad enough to be a fool and not to know it; but to be a fool and feel with every fibre of your being, every shred of your understanding, that you are one, and that there is no help for it; that all your philosophy won't aid you; that you are one great want, stilled a little by a letter, only to be haunted afresh by the personality of another creature, tortured with doubts and hurt by your loss of self-respect,—ah! it was a long winter! Then the New Year came and went, and time dragged slowly but surely, and at length the Almanacs said it was spring-time, and the girls at the street corners called, 'Vilets, sweet vilets!' and the milliners marked down guinea bonnets to 12s. 11d., and I watched each token of its coming with a fearsome, joyous expectation—Go on? Ah, yes, I'll go on,—where was I? Oh, spring was coming, wasn't it? I do not laugh as I used to, eh? How used I to laugh? I forget. Well, I won't laugh if it hurts you, dear, not even at myself.
"Well, once again, I was standing at a table in a hotel room, waiting. It is the simple things that are so hard to describe, and that are most complicated in their effects. I said again, 'Come in!' held fast to the table with my left hand and smiled,—to be accurate, began a smile. Spring is later up there; perhaps some of the winter's frost was still in the atmosphere, for something froze it on my lips. I felt a curious stiffening in my face, and the touch of his hand did not thaw me. Feel happy? No; I was numb in one way, and yet keenly alive to impressions. I felt as if my nerve net was outside my skin, not under it, and that the exposure to the air and surrounding influences made it intensely, acutely sensitive. I seemed to see with my sense of feeling as well as my sight. You know how in great cold you seem to burn your hand with an icy heat if you suddenly grasp a piece of iron? Well, I felt some way I was touched by glowing shivers: that sounds nonsense, but it expresses the feeling. Why? I don't know why: I was analyzing, being analyzed; criticising, being criticised. It was all so different, you see. Supposing you had just sipped a beaker of exhilarating, life-giving, rich wine with an exquisite bouquet, and a glow that steals through you and witches and warms you; and suddenly, without your knowing how it happens, the draught is transformed into luke-warm water, or 'Polly' without the 'dash' in it! What did he say? Let me think. Oh, yes: I was wretchedly thin. Odd how things strike one. I once saw a representation of Holberg's Stundeslöse in Copenhagen. One of the characters is an ancient housekeeper, with a long money-bag, who is, as they term it, 'marriage-sick.' A match is arranged between her and a young spark in the village. The scene is this: while the monetary part of the affair is being arranged by the notary, etc., he says to her,—'Permit me to pass my hand over your bosom, mistress?' She simpers; and I shall never forget the comical expression of dismay with which the suitor rolls his eyes and drops his jaw as he turns aside. I felt rather than saw the comprehensive look which accompanied his comment on my thinness, and that scene flashed across my inner vision. Odd, was it not? A sort of sympathetic after-comprehension. It was as if I, too, were having a hand passed across the flatness of my figure.
"'Yes, I have got thin.' Silence. Had I been very ill? Yes, very! Was that why I was so pale? It was fearful,—not a tinge of warm color in my face; one would be afraid to touch me. I felt as if I were being toted up: item, so much color; item, so much flesh. Had I been worried? I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive. Ah, yes, I had dwelt too much on a trouble I had. Did I sleep? Not much. That was foolish. I ought to eat plenty, too. I looked as if I didn't eat enough; my eyes and cheeks were hollowed out. Ah, yes, no doubt I did look older than in autumn! I was not contradicted. I would have told a little lie to spare a man's feelings. Men are perhaps more conscientious.
"What else? I am rehearsing it all as best I can. Oh, my hands were altered; he thought they were not so small, eh? Might be my wrists were less round, that made a difference. Did it? They certainly were larger, and not so white. Did he kiss me? Oh, yes. You see I wanted to sift this thing thoroughly, to get clear into my head what ground I was standing on. So I let him. They were merely lip-kisses; his spirit did not come to mine, and I was simply analyzing them all the time. Did I not feel anything? Yes, I did,—deeply hurt; ah, I can't say how they hurt me! They lacked everything a kiss, as the expression of the strongest, best feeling of a man and woman, can hold. How do I know? My dear woman, have you never dreamt, felt, had intuitive experiences? I have. I am not sure that I had not a keen sense of the ludicrous side of the whole affair; that one portion of my soul was not having a laugh at the other's expense. I do not quite know what I had been expecting. 'Tis true he had written me beautiful letters. You see he is too much of a word-artist to write anything else.
"Treated me badly? No, I am not prepared to say that he did. I am glad he was too honest to hide his startled realization of the fact that autumn and spring are different seasons, and that one's feelings may undergo a change in a winter. I do not see why I should resent that. Why, it would be punishing him for having cared for me. To put it in his words: 'I came as a strangely lovely dream into his life.' Probably the whole mistake lay in that. He thought of me as a dream lady, with dainty hands; idealized me, and wrote to the dream creature. When I came back in the flesh, he realized that I was a prosaic fact, with less charming hands, a tendency to leanness, and coming crow's feet. His look of dismayed awakening was simply delicious.
"I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting images that flit across my memory; you would grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst of all my pain,—I was sitting next him, and he was stroking my hand mechanically,—I noticed a glass case on the wall containing an Italian landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink lakes; pasteboard figures of Dutch-peasant build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and bandaged legs, figured in the foreground; you wound it up, and the figures danced to a varso-viana. I was listening to him, and yet at the same time I caught myself imagining how he and I would look dressed like that, bobbing about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly keep from shrieking with laughter. He had a turn-down collar on: he ought always to wear unstarched linen,—it and his throat didn't fit. You cannot understand me? Dearest woman, I do not pretend to understand the thing myself.
"Did we not talk about anything? Of course we did,—Tolstoi and his doctrine of celibacy; Ibsen's Hedda; Strindberg's view of the female animal,—and agreed that Friedrich Nietszche appealed to us immensely. You must make allowances. Here was a man passionately attached to his art,—his art, that he had been treating churlishly for months for the sake of a dream. The dream was out, and he feared her revenge. That is the one potent element of consolation for me. If one has made an idiot of one's self, it is at least self-consoling to have done so for a genius. He chose the better part, if you come to think of it. The man or woman who jeopardizes a great talent—be it of writing, painting, or acting—for marriage sake is bartering a precious birthright for a mess of pottage, mostly indifferent pottage. And even if it were excellent, it is bound to pall when one has it every day. There never was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally the more gifted half who has to pay the heaviest toll.
"I believe he was intensely sorry for me. I asked him once, you know, half playfully, half maliciously, if he had meant something, something deliciously tender,—I quoted it out of one of his letters. He paled to his lips, closed his eyes for a second, and I saw drops of sweat break out on his forehead. I sprang up and turned aside his answer. I remember when I was a little child I never would pick flowers; I always fancied they felt it, and bled to death. I used to sneak behind, and gather up all those my playmates threw down on the road or fields, and put them, stalks down, into the water in the ditch or brook; even now I can't wear them. I did not wish to hurt him either; he could not help his passion-flower withering. I suppose it was written that my love should turn, like fairy gold, into withered leaves in my grasp.
"What, dear,—a white hair? Oh, I saw several lately. How did it end? Oh, he said that he was going away to glean material for a new book; that he would burn my letters,—it was safer and wiser to burn letters. No, I did not ask him; he volunteered it. He asked me, did I not think so? I said yes. But is it not marvellous how dazzlingly swift our thoughts can travel, like light? While I was saying, 'Yes, one often regretted not having burned letters; receipts, receipts for bills, were really the only things of importance to keep,' I was thinking and crying inwardly over my letters. Such letters!—one only writes once like that, I think. All the perfume of the flowers I ever smelt, all the sun-glints on hill and sea, all the strains of music and light and love I had garnered from the glad, fresh, young years when I tossed cowslip balls in the meadows, were crystallized into love-words in those letters of mine. It seemed to me often that the words burnt with a white flame as I wrote them, and I was shy when I saw them written; and he said, 'I shall burn them!' much as you might say, 'I shall take the trimming off that last summer hat of mine.' I did not like to think of his burning them, perhaps with his old washing-bills. Do you know, if I had a finger or toe cut off, I wouldn't like them to take it away; I'd like to bury it. A sort of feel, I suppose.
"Well, we said good-by! I felt as if I had a sponge with a lot of holes in it, instead of a heart, and that all the feeling had oozed away through them. He was glad to go, I think; he felt himself a brute I dare say, yet how could he help it?
"Were you ever at the Scandinavian church in the Docks? I went one Sunday after I came back. I like those blue-eyed, sea-faring folk; and the priest wears a black gown and stiff ruff, like Luther of mixed renown. An apple-tree outside the open door was struggling to open its delicate pink blossoms; each petal had a tinge of soot,—it reminded me of the pretty cheeks of a grimy maid-of-all-work. I sat still; a sunbeam came in and pierced Judas's heart, as he sat at his section of the Last Supper table, and it wrapped me up in a sun haze, so that all was misty around me. The sermon only struck my ear with a soothing, drowsy roll, something like the wave-note of the incurling sea in the Mediterranean,—a legato accompaniment to my thoughts; and I had a grand burial all by myself. I dug a deep grave, and laid all my dreams and foolish wishes and sweet hopes in it. A puff of wind rustled through the rigging of the ships, and set the flags with their yellow cross fluttering, and scattered a few of the tender blooms over it, and—ah, well! it seems hard to realize now. Spring has gone!
"Do you really think that crinolines will be worn?"