"And if, ah woe! she loves alone,"
she tends it with her poor, weak hands; but no longer are the ministrants two. The little observances of love are forgotten, or they degenerate into a meaningless form more pitiful than silence. You grant, I suppose, that there is a higher life to be sought, one of aspiration, or holy companionship in great deeds and truer speech,—but as I live by bread, I doubt whether husbands and wives can keep that track together. You are a young Galahad with Lancelot's heart. I believe in you, I care mightily for you in a certain way; but you are a man, and none of the weaknesses of mankind are foreign to you. I am a woman, and, hard as my heart may be, it is made to be broken. Therefore say no more to me about this foolish fever of your youth. Believe me, it is a malady incident to the time. It will pass, in this present form, sometime to be renewed. You will love other women, and one day the unexpressive she will appear who has never once peeped into these worldly text-books. Hand in hand, she and you will learn the lesson together. It may be bitter, it may not. There are those, I believe, whom the gods forget; but I have no faith in myself escaping their thrusts.
Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose
Why would you not let me talk to you yesterday, without waiting to depend on this poverty-stricken expedient? I have not had an instant alone with you. But I love you! I love you! Who shall prevent me from saying that! You may refuse to hear it, you may leave my letters unread; yet all the trees of the forest shall whisper it with gossiping tongues. But no more of this now. Your letter has made me feel imperatively that a demand has been made upon me: the demand of proving myself a man, and worthy, if any man can be, of the inestimable treasure of your heart. So it becomes me to be calm, and reply to what you say, not with mad protest, but with just consideration. I am a man, and no weakness of mankind is foreign to me. I grant it. (Though my heart throbs within me to swear such fealty as you have never yet dreamed. But let that pass. My life shall show.) Well, and suppose the first glow of new acquaintanceship does fade. Let it go. Might not something finer usurp its place, as the flower is more than leaf or bud? If it be possible that this great rapture should vanish (O, I know better than you, with all your worldly lore! It is perennial, ever-returning like the spring, though snows may intervene), do you think my tenderness would allow one sweet observance to fade? What infinite loving must grow of a daily life together, what fine consideration, what pride in each other's achievement, what mutual joy! I have talked long enough on paper. Take me, and let me serve you all my life, guard you, cherish you, and prove the truth.
Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume
Tenderness and constancy! that, my child, is friendship—it is not love. And I can gather a very good article of friendship from many a wayside bush without going over hot ploughshares to seek it. Listen, and I will tell you exactly how I learned to interpret the later course of passion. I lived and breathed it side by side and heart to heart with a woman once. I will not tell you her name; she is living, and some time you may know her. I had a friend, and I loved her. She married a man who worshiped her, who was intoxicated by her as you are by me. He was her slave, if I may say that of one who took more than he bestowed; but though he absorbed her life and narrowed it in certain ways, he made her divinely happy. So it went on for years, until suddenly, through some new combination of circumstances, they were separated for a time, and he woke up. O telltale phrase in the life of a man! You don't know how much it means now, but you will know. She was dazed, confounded. Not that he was unkind to her; he was a gentleman, though a gentleman grown indifferent. About that time he drifted into friendship with another woman, led thereto, he would have said, by their kindred tastes. Nothing vicious here, nothing to distress the taste of law-abiding citizens; but a tragedy of the soul. I wonder if I can paint it for you. Here was a passionately devoted wife, taught by every act and word and look of years to depend for happiness on one living creature: to turn to him, as to the sun, for life and nourishment. Suddenly the sun was withdrawn, the light went out; she was expected to see by candle. Do not imagine that she betrayed him to me; we are not like that. I knew because she was so dear to me, and I had lived beside her and learned her thoughts. I felt the tragedy as it was enacted, day by day. I saw her poor face sodden with weeping. I suppose she reproached him at first, wildly, in woman's way. I suppose that because I knew him to be angry and bored. But when she saw little winning attentions which had once been hers given to another, I think it began to dawn upon her that they had never meant anything from the first. They were subjective, if I may put it so: a part of the man's nature, the trophy of any one who knew the password. Then the whole woman hardened. She reproached him no more. If he showered on her some of the unspent coin of his affection, she took it graciously, not treasuring it even in thought; because she dared not build again a house upon the sand. Her individuality grew mightily meantime. She became a creature of a wonderful strength and depth of thought; but her heart is dead within her. Sometimes I can see that she is even amused, in a pathetic way, at finding how lightly his indifference can pass over her. Now this was a good man, as men go. He would have scorned a sin larger than this romantic peccadillo,—but he was a man! He had waked up and found himself bored. And so would you! So far as I have been able to unravel it, what we call love is only a compound of selfishness and vanity. The lover gives so long as the return amuses him. He buys with his devotion a counter-devotion calculated to make him supremely happy; but when the story grows old, he yawns and goes elsewhere, either to smoke, run for office, write a book, or worship another woman. Never imagine that I decry men and exalt my own poor kind. Woman is the more constant only because she has been taught, through nature and inheritance, to give once and forever; and God made man to be gregarious.
I have told you my friend's secret. Now I will tell you mine. There is a man in the world—not you—who holds for me the fascination we are accustomed to call love. God knows, it is an earth-born attraction, for he is one who loves himself far more than he even professes to love me, and there is not one higher aspiration of my soul to which he would minister. He would tire of me, and he would break my heart. Therefore I will have none of him, though a mighty hand seems ever dragging me toward him, and though that part of me which is in love with the intoxications of life bids me make one throw for happiness and then die in despair. And neither will I have aught of you, though you seem to me a young St. Michael with lance of honor and shield of strength.
Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose
I do not know why, but for some reason your letter has not killed my hope. Perhaps it would have done so, but I took it into the woods, the deeper woods, where I have begun to go of late to be wholly alone. For now even the tents by day-light seem to me like multitudes of eyes, and my father, also, breaks in on my dream. So I carried it to the woods where the light flickered and the shadows of little leaves played upon their larger mates. They seemed to me like the phantasmagoria of being. I had not begun to think of such things till I saw you. Life has grown infinitely sad, as well as infinitely beautiful. It has a haze: the haze of twilight. Well, the letter! It jarred upon me; that is a matter of course. It removed you from me, immeasurably, with its hints of a knowledge which I may never attain. When shall I be your equal, even in the wisdom of this world? You have known so many people; I only one. That of itself makes me sad. And then when I came to the inexplicable fact that there was one you might love, I felt within me a savage pain, a rising of hot blood, such as I never knew. What was it? Has it a name? Does it mean a futile passion because life, destiny, have treated us so brutally, setting you there and me here, so that your loves grew away from me, and the tendrils of your nature twined another way? And thus I sat suffering. But soon the wood drew me into her arms. I have never thought much about beauty; it has always been about me. But of late it has spoken with a new voice. O the quivering of the blue sky-patches, the duskiness of shade! The tree-trunks were black from the morning rain, and everything set upon a stem waved and fluttered, though so slightly that it was rhythm and not motion. The faint shadow on the tiarella leaf seemed to me divine; the maiden-hair rustled greenly, and far off, in other arches, the thrush smote softly on his silver bells. And you were the soul of it. I should not have been surprised to see you there in some dim vista, with the sun upon your hair. But I shall never be surprised again at seeing you. You are in my world now; and my world cannot move without you. O, but I wish you were not so wise! I would you had never learned this strange and intricate game they call society. What profit is in it for you, but what infinite pain is there in it to me! These are the ironies of Those Who are above us. (That is my father's phrase; he talks of Them sometimes, in the night when he cannot sleep, and walks up and down the cabin as if he wished it were a world for width. The ironies of the immortal gods! I begin to understand my father a little now. I thought I understood him before.) We two, you and I, should have been born like twin birds in a nest, and gone singing away to the south. (Yet O my bird of the shining wing, O my bird! I would not have you other than you are.) We should have grown together, twin plants, from the sweet black earth, to twine and blossom and die. But it was not so to be; and therein I see what they call the hardships of life, and against such will I take my lance and shield, and ride forth. I will watch beside my arms, and draw down holiness from heaven, to be worthy to fight for you, and wear your favor. Not worthy of winning you—O, mistake me not in that! No heart was ever humbler than mine before its lady. Yet, as I am a man, my reward must come. I will win the world's delight, and I will wear her in the eye of the world: I, her plain and humble squire, whose only pride is to keep unsmirched for her fair sake. I have not your wisdom, but I begin to believe that I have a will to conquer; and it shall be bent upon my quest as if the world,—aye, and the sun!—were made for that. But tell me, you who know the lore of men, when we really begin to live, do we always ache so at the heart?
Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume