III
That opportunity, however, did not come to me. The same train of circumstances which forced me to leave Marshbury sooner than I expected kept me away from it for the next seven or eight years. But even though the impression which I have been recording had lost a little of its early piquancy in becoming more human, there was something about that quiet corner of New England which always stayed with me. In crowded streets I thought of its open valley. Through the chatter of drawing rooms I heard its running water. Among people sophisticated to the vanishing point I remembered Mrs. Bennett and Mary.
So, when the propitious moment arrived, I went back to them. There was, I fear, a touch of the practical even in my sentiment. I had started to scribble a New England novel and I wanted to be quiet. I therefore thought to kill the most birds with one stone by returning to Marshbury. Be that as it may, when I drove in toward the town it was with an unaffected thrill that I suddenly recognised the old feeling of the river road. I scarcely know how to express it. There are indefinable states of emotion, as distinct in their quality as odours or colours. And only the surroundings which awakened them first can, if ever, awaken them again. This, I suppose, is the ground of that principle of conservatism in man which can never reconcile itself with the flux of the world.
My last visit ought to have prepared me for changes. The drive, however, upset the inner counsels with which I had fortified myself—and Mrs. Bennett. She, immortal woman, was identically the same being whom I had known eleven years earlier. Even Mary had not changed so much between twenty and twenty-eight as she had between seventeen and twenty—although it was curious to me that the effect of time should be so much more visible in the one better able to resist it! The strong colour of her girlhood had softened into that delicate bloom which few but nuns can wear. And there was something about her eyes that intrigued me. But I did not wonder long. I had other sensations to take account of. For in my ointment of happiness at getting back I suddenly discovered a very large and buzzing fly.
Not that the Reverend James Wentworth could precisely be compared to that humble creature. I had come, though, to look upon the Bennetts as my private property, upon their paradise as open to myself alone. And to find it invaded by the new minister put my nose distinctly out of joint. Particularly as I perceived that my hostess fancied herself and me greatly honoured by such fellowship. Of course I could not be nasty about it. In other circumstances, in fact, I might have appreciated it as much as anybody. For I have an odd sympathy for young clergymen. Without knowing very well how much they deserve it, I always look upon them as among the few really romantic people of the world—the people who follow an inner light, regardless of rival luminaries. But the Reverend James, alas, was of those who carry the theory to its logical conclusion. He was inalienably assured that his own inner light was the sole reflection of Truth, and that all men else—with whom he happened to differ—pursued false fires.
It was a tremendous disillusionment, this unexpected change of milieu. I had two ideas of leaving on the spot. The new atmosphere, charged with latent argument, was the medium in which I breathe least easily. Being, however, more or less of a Jesuit, as I have intimated, I merely fumed within—and took copious notes. I promised myself that the Reverend James should one day affront a wider audience in the panoply of fiction. It was doubtless a lame enough compromise. I have always envied those single temperaments that can identify themselves with one side of a cause. For myself, I am unable to do it. I suppose I do not take things seriously enough, or people. They come to me as cases rather than as questions. I have no sense of responsibility about them. At any rate, the case of the Reverend James I proceeded to accept as an element of my Marshbury impression. Little did I foresee how sharply it was to throw into relief the other case with which I had so long been occupied!
That had evidently grown more crucial with the years—Marvin’s case. For Daphne was dead. She had been dead almost four years, it seemed. And in circumstances—One could not expect anything but scandal where such people were concerned, Mrs. Bennett told me. The only decent thing about it was that she and the child had died together. Anybody might have known that she would go wrong. It was what she was born to. She had done it before one could turn around, and just for a good-for-nothing young scamp she hardly had time to get acquainted with. Old Marvin, however, had refused to turn his face from her. He had only kept her the more carefully, and had been inconsolable since. Mary had never known him so queer. But—
Yes, it was evident that there was a “but.” There were things of another, a darker, kind: things which were not so easy to put into words. Between Mary’s eyes and her mother’s mysterious shrugs it was much as ever that I succeeded in getting at what the business was about. If it had not been for the plain-spoken Mr. Wentworth—! There was a strangeness to the thing, though, when I got it. There was a strangeness which I never dreamed eleven years before. It was only the stranger for the apparently conventional touches which my impression had in the meantime received. But as I write of it I realise Mrs. Bennett’s difficulty in speaking to me. It was not a thing that you could say in so many words and then go out of the room. You had to know the place, the people, the circumstances. It was so largely an effect of relativities, and of relativities different for each person whom they touched.
It all began with Daphne’s death. Then Marvin, who for seven years had been as much like other people as he could be, said Mrs. Bennett, suddenly turned more eccentric than ever. He refused to let the girl be buried like a Christian, in the cemetery. Of course she wasn’t one; but it was queer that he should be the first to say so. He said the place for her was between him and the water, and he made them dig a grave in his own orchard—on a sort of little mound there was beside the brook. If it had been anybody else, the Selectmen would have stopped him. But seeing it was that girl—! And instead of getting her a proper tombstone, which he could well afford and which everybody supposed he would do, considering the store he set by her, he just planted on her grave a sprig of lambkill.
That was natural enough in a way, opined Mrs. Bennett. People like to put flowers on graves. But lambkill! Laurel, he called it. He said that was Daphne’s tree. It was all a part of some heathenish business they had had between them. Mary thought he got it out of his books. Anyway, he spent all his time taking care of it. Of course it’s right to keep graves looking tidy. But you don’t build little green-houses over the flowers in winter. Neither do you get up in thunder-storms, in the middle of the night, to go out and attend to them. If the Lord intends things to be taken care of, he takes care of them, in spite of thunder-storms.
The strangest part of it, though, was something more unnatural still—something almost supernatural. The laurel sprig had followed for a time the ordinary course of cuttings; had by sheer force of tenderness been kept alive, and had at last developed into a healthy little plant that could live alone. But then of a sudden it received a new and secret impulse. It began to grow as no laurel had ever grown before. There was nothing like it in the whole country. It outdistanced at a bound the humble shrubs from which it sprang, and bade fair to rival even the great mountain laurel of the woods. And such flowers as it bore—such deep and burning clusters as never would have passed for cousins, even, to the faint-flushed wax of the lambkill!
The thing was unnatural enough in itself, Heaven knew. But Marvin made it a scandal. It hardly needed Mrs. Bennett to make it plain. He insisted that Daphne had turned into a laurel, after all. He called the bush by her name. He spent all his time listening to the growing whisper of its leaves. He said the strangest things to Mary about it—things stranger than any he had told her in the days when he used to say that there was a girl singing to him in the brook. A cult so extraordinary was not one to pass unnoticed. Even if Mr. Wentworth had not been in the village to formulate the moral issues of the case, the miraculous laurel waved there on its mound, more indecently conspicuous every day to those who passed on the road. An uneasiness spread among them. It was a reproach to Church and State alike that such things should go on in their midst. It corrupted youth and was an offence to age. Something should be done.
Mr. Wentworth, accordingly, did it. He, like Mrs. Lovejoy of old, went straight to Marvin. And again I could not help admiring the simplicity of that attack. I almost wished, too, that I might have been present at the encounter. It must have been such a contrast of types as one does not often witness in this half-way world. But it was not difficult to gather what happened. It was wonderful how little Mary said, and how much she expressed! Almost as wonderful were the volubility, the excitement, with which Wentworth came back from his interview.
“He is an enemy of God!” cried the minister. “He professes to believe in God; but ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ He has faith neither in heaven nor hell. He denies the sacredness of Scripture. He says a soul is nothing but a word—that there is as much soul in a ruby or a rose as there is in himself! And the kind of immortality he looks forward to is worse than none. He is a perfect pagan!”
The table rang with it for days. Of course it was Mary who supplied the necessary additions to the story. Incidentally, albeit unconsciously, she likewise supplied additions to her own story of which I had begun to feel a certain lack. Marvin had received his caller courteously, it seemed; had even consented, with a new quietness that had come upon him, to listen to Wentworth’s exhortations. But the poor zealous young man finally lost his head and allowed himself to say that they both knew where Daphne had gone, and it wasn’t heaven either. Well, the minister departed rather suddenly, and Marvin went out to his laurel tree.
With all this going on at the table, I found it hard to keep up my Jesuitism. I was more than ever caught by the case of this pagan who was the legitimate child of a New England village. It was such a strange example of the protean perversity of things to melt into one another. Then the poetry of it simply undid me. I sat there smugly writing New England novels, but I could never have imagined anything like this. And the trains it started off—! Had that little tree indeed despoiled the secrets of the grave? Had some taproot, blindly groping through the dark soil, become a channel whereby was made manifest the alchemy of the earth? Was the laurel literally a transfiguration? Might it be proof of the infinite resource of life that that unhappy heart which life had broken should at once forget its pain and dishonour and be transmuted into beauty?
To me more than ever the wind and the waters spoke mysteriously. For me more than ever was there a kinship between crystal and plant and creature transcending the jealous immortality of man. There was neither superiority nor inferiority. It was all part of the unceasing life of the earth—of that deathless ebb and flow which draws the ancient elements again and again into new combinations, which always has wrought with the same ones and always must, in changing forms of beauty and wonder.
And I came the nearest ever to seeking Marvin’s acquaintance. He made me think of what Pater says of Leonardo, who “seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” I was interested to the verge of indiscretion. I even went so far, I must confess, as to walk oftener than elsewhere on the Poorhouse road—whence could be seen the sacred laurel above its little stream. It was indeed a prodigy. Such blossoms I never saw in my life. It turned one’s head to see them there, aflame among their glossy green, with the brook skirling below. Mary told me that Marvin would never pick them. Indeed he never picked any flowers now, she said. It began the spring after Daphne died, when the trailing arbutus came out. She had brought him some, one day, thinking to please him. But he asked her not to do it again. It hurt them, he said. And they were Daphne’s cousins, the arbutus....
I do not know how far I might have gone. But there came a day when all hope of acquaintance was suddenly cut off. There came a day! I shall never forget it. I had been on a long walk in the country. My book was stuck, and I knew of old that the only way to unstick a book is to let it alone. So I walked miles and miles in one of those delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road.
As I rounded the turn by the orchard I looked as usual toward the laurel tree. To my surprise, I saw figures moving on the mound; and there was a cart tied at the gate. It was so out of the ordinary that I stopped in spite of myself. Then I suddenly discovered that the laurel was gone! I could not believe my eyes. The thing was too inconceivable. It was to me as if I had stumbled upon a scene of murder. In the first horror of it, in the certainty that something terrible had happened, I forgot my habit of taking no personal part in that village drama. My unuttered feeling for Marvin caught me like a hand and led me, choking, toward the mound.
All I had eyes for at first was the laurel. It lay inert on the ground, that a few hours before had waved so royally aloft; and already the magic flowers looked a little wilted in their green. Beside it crouched Marvin. He said nothing; but the inarticulate sounds that came from him were the most piteous I ever heard. And the way he caressed his stricken beauty was more than one could bear to see. No lover could more tenderly, more passionately, address the limbs of his dead. He straightened out contorted twigs. He lifted petals from their contact with the ground. Now and again he put his hand to the poor sawn trunk, whence a little pale moisture was oozing, as if to stanch a mortal flow. And all the while he kept by him the severed knot of the root, with its one thick stem that had been broken off deep in the ground.
After the first instant the indecency of looking at such a spectacle overwhelmed me. I turned away. I noticed Mary then for the first time. Two men whom I recognised as farm-hands of the Bennetts were also there, and another whom I did not know. And Wentworth. Wentworth! All the shock of the moment suddenly flared into my long latent dislike of the man.
“Are you responsible for this?” I almost shouted at him.
I could have killed him, and he knew it. Yet that certainty of right and wrong which is the power of his type did not desert him. I had a sub-conscious appreciation of it, so keen is my accursed sense of such things, even in my fury.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I am!” Oh, he was not afraid or ashamed! He was of the stuff that has kindled fires and fed them since the world began. And he went on as if he had been in his pulpit—or at the stake: “I have wished that this parish should administer both rebuke and reparation. I have long regretted that heathen rites should be tolerated in a Christian community—as also that a proper charity should not be shown to all, irrespective of creed. I therefore took steps, after asking counsel of God, to attain both ends. I cut down this tree because it was a public scandal, an occasion of stumbling to Christians and sinners alike. The very children of our village were beginning to be infected by its heresy. And I shall adorn the house of God with these spoils, thus to expiate a sin and to consecrate anew a work of God which has been devoted to unholy uses. But I have not wished to be hasty in the matter, to be needlessly harsh and wounding. Furthermore, it has been my desire to make good a neglect which has rested too long on the Christian conscience of this community. I have accordingly taken steps to mark with fitness the last resting-place of an unfortunate young woman who apparently from her birth was more sinned against than sinning.”
He pointed behind him. Where the laurel had been I saw now a slab of grey granite. And cut into it I read these words:
DAPHNE MARVIN
1894-1911
“He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her.”