The Day of His Youth

by Alice Brown

From Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Certainly I meant every word I said. The moment I saw what you had written for that stupid game, I knew you had a marvelous facility of expression. No doubt your father has nourished it by making you write so many reams of criticism; but it is evident that you had a gift in the beginning, the golden gift in the hand. And so, as I am one who thinks no fortune happier than that of the artisan trained to hammer out a phrase, what is more natural than that I should long for you to ascend from prentice to workman? Therefore write me,—"every day i' the hour," if you will,—and by all means drop the letters in the hollow tree. Here in this forest is the happy reverse of the world-shield; let conventions also be turned topsy-turvy, and letter-carriers be eschewed for a box of living oak and a cushion of crumbling mould. I will be your playmate, your comrade; not your friend. I hate the word between men and women. It is a mantle for mawkish sentiment, the kind that stalks about solemnly like a Puritan at a play, seeing all and affecting his own superiority. But, an you will, be my comrade only; let the Forest of Arden spring up again greenly, and let us play at simplicity and outspoken joy; all for the sake of developing your style! But, first of all, I do not like your reason for asking me to write to you; you cannot see me alone, forsooth! and you have a thousand questions which the others give us no time to ask and answer. Nonsense, doubled and trebled! You know enough of me. Be content to take me as I seem, and not as I am in the world's eyes and in my own; then you will the longer think me worthy to walk your Arden Forest. Not that I have anything to conceal. I am no more very bad than very good; but it is the tragic consequence of living in this world that (especially if we be men! you, sir, I mean you!) we idealize and then weigh—admire, laud to the skies, and then shove under the lens—only to find that all flesh is dust, and differeth not, except so much as sea-sand and mountain-loam. So be content to know this only about me: that I am five years your senior (a quarter-century, ye gods!), that I am poor and once was ambitious; that I earned my bread, as governess and intermittent literary hack, until a year ago, when a tiny fortune was left me by a relative whom the immortals loved not, since he lived so long; that I have written three novels, moderately successful, and am burning to find out whether I can write a play; and, last of all, that my aunt invited me down here to spend this summer in what she calls communion with nature. There! the chapter is closed. Be egotistical, you; but suffer me to talk about things seen and heard, not of those pertaining to the particle Me. Tell me everything you will, and without restraint. I may not criticise your style, though I shall watch to see it develop into something fine.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

Your letter! no, mine, as nothing has ever been mine since I was born, for it was conceived for me and moulded for my eyes only. The words you have said to me, even in those long hours on the lake, under the rose of sunset, are tantalizingly lost, though I try to recall them as I lie at night looking at the sky from my bed; I know their sense, their sound, yet something sweetly personal is gone, like a fragrance escaped. This is mine: transcript of your beautiful soul upon a page less white. But though we talk all day on the lake and half the night by camp-fires under the moon, what can I say to you on this cold paper and with this dull pen? Ah, but the thoughts I send you! The winged invisible messengers that go speeding between us in those silent hours when my father sleeps, and I lie in my tent watching the solemn top of the great pine, and over it the stars! Those messages will never be told; earth has no speech for them. They are beyond the scope of music. Yet there must be speech for them somewhere. They are like the overtones we cannot hear unless our ears are delicately attuned; and if you, in your tent, were lying in an ecstasy of waiting for them as I in a rapture of sending, then would you not hear? But the thought is too great, too terrible. That would be as if we were gods, to taste no more of earthly chills and languors. Do you know what has happened to me since I saw you first? I have grown blind to the rest of this little world. My father's voice sounds far-off and hollow; even his face is strange, as if half hidden by a mist. I do not see the others at your camp, even though they and all their ways ought to be deliciously new to me, like another language. Only when some one touches your hand, or gives you a flower, or treats you familiarly! Then a sudden passion of hatred for the whole world shakes me to the centre, and I long to seize you in my arms, and speed away with you, along the lake and over the hills. I am, in my own eyes, what I have always supposed savages to be; perhaps I am a savage. But there is one agony you might spare me: the story of your life before you came here. Twenty wasted years, and I did not know you! Spring after spring and snow upon snow, when, like an earth-born beast, I was living here in content, rowing, skating, talking with the birds, and you, not fifty miles away, had risen like a star and were gleaming there in that inaccessible heaven. That this should be so, that I must accept it, is terrible to me; but to hear the story of it is like a foretaste of death. It fascinates, it draws me, and yet it kills. That you should say "we" over and over again, when you talk of the music you have heard, the books you have read, is more than I can bear. But I would not have you cease. I must know all, all; and yet it tortures.

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

Frankly, I don't at all like the tone of your letter. I like it as little as I approve your fashion of treating me "before folks." You glower upon me; half as if I were daughter of the sun and you his priest, and half Circassian slave. I don't like it! I came here to these solitudes for rest and mental peace. My mind is lying fallow. Should it waken to any immediate fertility, I don't want to expend it on you, either in antiphonal sentiment or in staving off heroics. To speak brutally, I want it for the publisher and mine own after-glory. If this plain statement of the case doesn't blight the peach-blossoms of your fancy, I don't know what will. Write me about your life here, the life of the woods and lake. You know enough bird-lore never learned from books to write a thousand St. Francis sermons. Even the fish have told you secrets. I fancy they think you some strange, fresh-water whale not to be accounted for. Tell me about them; and drop this mawkish sentiment caught from books.

Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose

I have read your last letter, but I only half understand you, and I must wholly disobey. For I have learned the meaning of all things created, the sky and the earth, the stars that are the habitations of loving angels, and the worm who seeks his mate. I love you! It is that for which I have lived my twenty years. At last, without warning, my life has flowered, and the fragrance of the blossom intoxicates me, its color blinds. At first I only knew the earth was changed, and that I could never be the same; but I did not translate the knowledge. All the poets had not told me enough; Shakespeare had not prepared me. But last night—do I ever sleep now?—when I lay thinking, thinking, and always of you, my soul spoke and said to me, "So great a thing must be eternal. This longing is like a Beethoven Sonata; it will live and live, growing in glory and color, through the ages, even if it live in your soul alone." And I woke to the sense of it all, and spoke aloud: "It is love!" It is like having a treasure given me to be all my own; for now I have a word for happy use, and I can say over and over, "I love you," and so tell you all. I can whisper "Beloved" in the brief pauses when the others are with us and I have only the chance of a word in your ear. But let me see you next alone. Let me look into your eyes, and demand whether your soul also has had revelation of the truth.

Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume

I ask myself whether this had to come to you so soon, and whether I could have prevented it. I am afraid not. You were bound to fancy the first woman you met, and that woman chanced to be Zoe Montrose. I know exactly how it was. I have yellow hair, and the sun shone on it. There is always a reason, if one could follow it far enough. It might have been Clara. She was with me in the boat, if you remember; only the sun struck her hair at a different angle, and you never discovered how red it is in the hollows, how like leaf mould without. Bismillah! the gods have selected me for your enlightenment, and their will be done. I am glad for you in one particular only. I am a worldly woman, filled from the crown to the toe topful of earthly wisdom; but I am not of those sentimental sirens who, in the strictest good-breeding, turn men into beasts by dallying with their worship, and then leaving them high and dry on the rock of disillusionment. I am honest, and I will sweep away your cobwebs in the beginning. My dear, there is no such thing as love as you conceive it. What you and the other poets have seen is a will-o'-the-wisp, created, heaven knows why, save that we may learn hard lessons and that the world may be peopled. You feel for me an ecstasy of devotion. You think it will be eternal; that you were made for me and I for you, and that our two souls will sail forever on in each other's company, chanting pretty trifles by the way. God bless and save you! this is the very hyperbole of the poets, and of poets under forty at that. What dominates you is a fever of the blood, an attendant delirium or the mind solely depending on your youth and my passable prettiness. I wish you might have been saved; but it had to happen. I wish, too, that the attack might leave you lightly; but that, also, owing to your unfortunate temperament, is impossible. I can only show my real liking for you by acting sedately, and sitting by your bedside until you rise up sane again and put your hand to the world's work. Do you want this emotion you call love translated to you by a woman who has studied her kind as you study the birds? You say it is, it must be (O, most pitiful cry of the finite after infinity!) eternal. It is nothing of the sort. It is prosaically and sordidly of this earth, especially in the case of men. I grant you that many women do subordinate their lives to what they call a great passion (poor Amelia crying over George's picture! O sad, true travesty of the worship we so exalt!), but it is because they have fewer interests, and because tradition has glorified feminine faithfulness and society built its temples on woman's chastity. But men! I know them. Do not expect me to own, for a moment, that any man is going to worship any woman all his life long with the fervor he shows in pursuing the game. Many are kind, some are tender, even to gray hairs and the grave; but that particular form of idolatry which you offer me like a jewel in a case,—it turns to paste in less than ten years, and I will have none of it. But why, you ask, set myself outside the pale of human kind? It is a joy, though fleeting, and if others prize it, even briefly, why not I? I know myself too well. I am, in many ways, a hard woman. My heart is bedded in a crust of flint, and no daw shall peck at it. But if that armor were worn away, if I did sink my traditions to become all-womanly, if I pinned life and soul and faith and breath to a man—O, I shudder to think of seeing that morning-glow fade into the light of common day. It is such women as I who break their hearts; not your sentimental miss who goes puling about, prating love and religion, and confiding in her pastor. I have laughed long at what I call sentiment, but I am more sentimental than the sentimentalist. I own the awful power of one soul over its opposite; but it is a power to which I will not give way. Now, in plain words, what should be the outcome of love? Marriage. And marriage; what of that? It is a welding of two souls, say you, before an altar where a sacred fire is ever after to be kept burning. According to my idea, gathered from observation, it is a business partnership gilded by certain pretty fictions which no one pretends to observe. For six months, a year, five years, the husband worships his wife with an ideality which ought to turn beggar-maids to queens and queens to angels. Then, plainly, he gets used to her. She is a very good woman, but her like has been seen before, and may be again. His nature has a dozen sides to be satisfied; he is ambitious, he loves art, or money, or his dirty fellow-men. All very well, you say; without such bent, souls would be cramped and torpid. Ah, but meantime the altar-fire dies down! If she loves him truly,—