“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have been a lyric poet.”
He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street.
“No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but she always thrashes him.”
“How dreadful!”
“Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things found not altogether worshipful—egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other.
The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person then.
Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.
Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges.
“Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked.