You came so fast upon the heels of your other letter that I did not have time to put on my shield and buckler before you were here in the flesh, formidable, real, cloven hoof and all! I was frightened and militant,—frightened lest you should win from me the freedom of my heart, militant for the freedom of my will. Well, at least I kept the latter, but I can tell you, it is making a poor bagpipe tune of the victory. When I went down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy, dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage 1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you will bear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. In any case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and as you stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my hands clasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candles suddenly lighted in an open grave. You had not come merely to make peace with me, you had my capitulation ready, but I knew then I should never sign. Let the dead bury their dead; as for me, I am too much alive to die long and amicably with any ghost of a philosopher in the “upper chamber.” I do not even belong in the “lower rooms,” but outside under the skies of our ever green world. I have already determined that if there is nothing going on in heaven when I am translated thither, I will ask to be changed into a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring round and round the earth.

And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that I do not really know you, only your mind. The time I saw you in New York does not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicap just to try each other’s intellectual paces, did we not? But when you ventured boldly down here upon my own heath—oh! that was a different matter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should not ride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew you. Well, you know the dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by asking his opinions or by classifying his face and expression according to biological records. Now, a man’s features are only his great-grand somebody’s modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover’s wreath on the Morningtown road beyond my father’s church. And behold! it was as if we had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs in friendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for a difference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did not reach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity was the ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the first time I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty of your spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimation of Nature’s indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth of trees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassion anywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact.

But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thought pierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to the life of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in the cold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with the trees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then I asked myself this question: “What is the good, where is the wisdom in loving a tree man, who may shelter you, but never can be like you in life or love?” Always his arms are stretched upward to the heavens in a prayer to be nearer to the light. He is a sort of divine savage who cannot remember the earth heart that may love and die beneath him like the leaves upon the ground. Thus we came out of the wood, you who are made so that you can never really understand what you have lost, and I, with all my will in my wings, and stronger for the loss of my heart. Some day, perhaps, if I keep the wings, it will return, a little withered, but sound as a brownie’s. Then, dear man of the trees, I shall bury it here in the forest like a precious seed. Who knows what it may come to be, my poor heart that was dead and shall live again,—a tall lady-tree as heartless as any man-oak, or only a poor vine!

XIX

JESSICA TO PHILIP

My Dear Mr. Towers:

Imagine if you can the moral perversity of a young woman who never regrets a witty deception or a graceful subterfuge, but repents sometimes in sackcloth and ashes for her truth-telling. I’d give half my forest now to have back the letter I sent you yesterday. But since I cannot recall it, I wish you to bear in mind that what was true of a woman’s heart yesterday, to-day may be only a little breach of sentiment with which to reproach her prudence. We are never lastingly true. The best you can expect is that we be generally true to the mood we are in.

When you were here, I could not beguile you into a discussion of the subject upon which we differ so widely. Pardon the malicious reference, but it seemed to me that you had closed the door of your “upper chamber” and hastened down here to confess your own reality. And no challenge, however ingenious, could provoke you into displaying the cloven hoof of your “higher nature.” When my father, for instance, who has long suspected the soundness of your doctrines, laid down one of his lurid hell-fire premises as an active reason for seeking salvation, I observed that you showed the agility of a spiritual acrobat in avoiding the conflict.

Nevertheless, I return to the point of divergence between us. You are angry with the humanitarians for their materialism. But you forget who the Hull-House classes are,—people so poor and starved and cold that their very souls have perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you have fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imagination across the fair fields of youth’s summer years. Believe me, the humanitarian’s calling seems stupid from your point of view because you are born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-House principles have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted the whole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth, then will be time enough for the spiritual luxury of such teachings as yours.

The last batch of books has come, Creelman’s novel, Eagle Blood, among them. Evidently it is a story written to prove the intellectual and commercial ascendency of Americans over mere Anglo-Saxons. The heroine and a few romantic details are thrown in as a bait to the “average reader.” Alas for the “average reader”! How many crimes of this sort are committed in his name! We can never hope to have a worthy literature until he has been eliminated from the consciousness of those who make it. In the days when he was not to be reckoned with, and men wrote for a very few appreciative admirers and some desperately cruel critics, then Carlyle began to swear at his “forty-million fool,” and so attracted their attention, and ever since we have had them with us, forty-million average readers, calling for excitement and amusement. It is this same “forty-million fool” who has made historical romances an inexhaustible source of revenue to the writers of them. For he is naïve, and has never suspected the real dime-novel character of such fiction. Can you not get some one to write an article outlining a plan by which the “average reader” may be abolished?