Last night, I dreamed myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,—but you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but I wore green leaves in my hair and a red Southern rose on my breast to remind you of a brown forest maid and summer-time far away—and you would not see me! I faced you in gay mockery and swept a bow, but the blue silence in your eyes terrified me. I held out my hands beseechingly, touched my cheek to yours, and you did not feel the pressure. Then I slipped down upon the snow and wept, and you did not hear me.
We were both “in the spirit,” I think. Only, dear Love, when I am in the spirit, all my thoughts are of you; but though I looked far and near, I could not find in all your regions one little thought of poor Jessica. All was misty and dim within your portals. Your thoughts were vague ancient shapes that wandered past me like Brahmin ghosts. And not one gallant memory of Jessica legended upon those inner walls of yours!
Dear, I cannot escape now, my heart will not come back to me; and since it is too late I will not complain. But for a little while I must tell you these things and pray for your kind comfort, till I shall have become accustomed to your attic moods and exaltations.
Do you recall the woman I told you of last summer, whose sorrow-smitten face in the church terrified me so? Grief became credible to me as I gazed at her. And could it have been, do you think, a message foretold to me of this magic future, full of intangible fears, wherein I am to live with you?
XXXI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Love is a mystic worker of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that I reached out my hand to touch you—but grasped only the impalpable air. All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, seeking in the ways of thought some word of comfort for the human heart, until at last my consciousness became confused. It often happens thus. So real is this search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul were a thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim and perilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me out into that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead. And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth was vaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomable darkness as a clear night might look wherein no moon or stars appeared, and so lonely “that God himself scarce seemed to be there.”
Then, as often when this mood comes upon me, I went out to walk under the hard flaring lights and amid the streaming crowds of Broadway, in order to bring back the sense of mortal illusion and unite myself once more to human existence. The people were pouring from the theatres, and I sought the densest throng. But still I could not awaken in myself the illusion of life. And then suddenly, without warning, there in the noisy brawl of the street, I beheld you standing before me, looking into my face and smiling. You wore a burning Southern rose upon your breast and were more wondrously and delicately fair than the dream of poets. And there was a smile upon your lips as if to say: “Dear Philip, thou hast put away the pleasures and loveliness of this world as they had been a snaring web of illusion; yet I do but look upon thee, and forthwith thou art pierced with love and know that in this scorned desire of beauty dwells the great reality.” I reached out my hand to touch the rose against your heart, but the vision was gone, and all about me was only the tumultuous mockery of the street. Sweetheart, you have smitten me with remorse. Shall I take from you only happiness, and give in return only this spectral dread? Ah, you shall learn that I am very real, very earthly, capable of love and tenderness and daily duties and quiet human sympathies! I told you of the dualism into which my life, into which, indeed, every man’s life, is cast; why will you persist in clinging to that part which is cold and inhuman instead of seizing upon that which is warm and very near by? I would not take you with me into those bleak ways where always there is fear lest our personality be swallowed up in the dark impersonal abyss. I would love you as a man loves a woman and cleaves to her. Nay, more, I perceive dimly in that love a strange reconcilement wherein the dual forces of my nature shall be made one, wherein truth and beauty shall blend together in a kiss, and there shall be no more seeking in obscurity, but only peace.
When the vision faded from me on Broadway, I turned back to my home, and there, before the dawn came, tried to write out in words one thought of the many that thronged upon me. I have almost forgotten the art of making rhymes if ever I knew it.