"I can quite understand," the good-natured Victor hastened to say. "Quite natural—quite so. I have often worked myself into such a state of excitement, thinking of things—not poetry, of course, but colonial affairs, and such dry stuff—that I have to go out at night, perhaps, and walk in the cool air, and recover myself. Don't you feel so sometimes, Miss Grey?"
"Oh, no; I am neither poet nor politician, and I have nothing to think about." At the moment she thought Blanchet a sham, and Heron rather a weak and foolish person for encouraging him. What would you have of men?
"I have felt so often," Mary Blanchet said with a gentle sigh.
Miss Grey did not doubt that people felt so; that everybody might feel so under appropriate conditions. It was the deliberate arranging of preliminaries by Mr. Blanchet that vexed her; it seemed so like affectation and play-acting. She was prepared to think his poetry rubbish.
It was not rubbish, however; not mere rubbish, by any means. Mr. Blanchet had a considerable mastery of the art of arranging together melodious and penetrating words, and he caught up cleverly and adopted the prevailing idea and purpose of the small new group of yet hardly known artists in verse and color, to whom it was his pride to belong. His poems belonged to what might be called the literature of disease. In principle, they said to corruption, "Thou art my father," and to the worm, "Thou art my mother and my sister." They dealt largely in graves and corpses, and the loves of skeletons, and the sweet virtues of sin, and the joys of despair and dyspepsia. They taught that there is no truth but paradox. Mr. Blanchet read his contributions with great effect: in a voice now wailing, now threatening, now storming fiercely, now creeping along in tones of the lowest hoarseness. What amazed Minola was, to find that any man could have so little sense of the ridiculous as to be able to go through such a performance in a small room before three people. In a crowd there might be courage; but before three! It was wonderful. She felt horribly inclined to laugh; but the gleaming eyes of the poet alighted on hers and fastened them every now and then; and poor Mary too, she knew, was watching her.
It was very trying to her. She endeavored to fill her mind with serious and sad thoughts; and she could not keep herself from thinking of the scene in Richter's "Flegeljahre" where the kin of the eccentric testator are trying in fierce rivalry who shall be the first to shed a tear for his loss, in presence of the notary and the witnesses, and thereby earn the legacy to which that exasperating condition was attached. After all it is probably easier to restrain a laugh than to pump up a tear, especially when the coming of the tear must bring the drying glow of a glad success with it. Minola's condition was bearable; and indeed, when she saw the genuine earnestness of the poet, her inclination to laugh all died away, and she became filled with pity and pain. Then she tried hard to admire the verses, and could not. At first the conceits and paradoxes were a little startling, and even shocking, and they made one listen. But the mind soon became attuned to them and settled down, and was stirred no more. Once you knew that Mr. Blanchet liked corpses, his peculiarity became of no greater interest than if his liking had been for babies. When it was made clear that what other people called hideousness he called beauty, it did not seem to matter much more than honest Faulconbridge's determination, if a man's name be John, to call him Peter.
The poet sometimes closed his eyes for a minute together, and pressed his hand upon his brow, while drops of perspiration stood distinctly on his livid forehead. But he took breath again, and went on. He evidently thought his audience could not have enough of it. The poem was, in fact, a chaplet of short poem-beads. Many of its passages had the peculiarity that they came to a sudden end exactly when the listeners supposed that the interest of the thing was only going to begin. When a page was ended the poet lifted it, so to speak, with the sudden effort of one hand and arm, as though it were something heavy like a shield, and then flung it from him, looking fixedly into the eyes of some one of the three listeners the while. This formality impressed Mary Blanchet immediately. It seemed the very passion and wrestling of poetic inspiration; the prophetic fury rushing into action through the prophet.
Minola once or twice glanced at the face of Victor Heron. At first it was full of respectful and anxious attention, animated now and then by a sudden flicker of surprise. Of late these feelings and moods had gradually changed, and after a while the settling-down condition had clearly arrived. At length Miss Grey could see that while Mr. Heron still maintained an attitude of the most courteous attention, his ears were decidedly with his heart, and that was far away—with his own grievance and the St. Xavier's Settlements.
At last it was over. The close, for all their previous preparation, took the small audience by surprise. It came thus:
I asked of my soul—What is death?