“You up?” he asks. He glances at the book and continues: “Reading that damn trash? Why don’t you read Browning or Thackeray or–if you want philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That’s rot.”
He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest, falsest, baby voice the woman answers:
“My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like I’ve been doing to-night.”
The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, 313and sneers a profane sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, “God is good and I am God,” many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a footnote to this picture may we not ask:
Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they made–or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly miserable when they began to “live happily ever after”? A symposium entitled “Is Love Really Worth It?” by such distinguished characters as Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading, if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of dissimulation and deceit.
But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we have the Morton family.
The Captain’s feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in the stove. It is May. But it is the Captain’s habit to warm his feet there when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper; then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this:
“Curious thing about spring.” The world of education, reading its examination papers, concurs in silence. The 314worlds of fashion and of the fine arts also assenting, the Captain goes on: “Down in South Harvey to-day; kind o’ dirty down there; looks kind of smoky and tin cannery, and woe-begone, like that class of people always looks, but ’y gory, girls, it’s just as much spring down there as it is up here, only more so! eh? I says to Laura, looking like a full bloom peach tree herself in her kindergarten, says I, ‘Laura, it’s terrible pretty down here when you get under the smoke and the dirt. Every one just a lovin’,’ says I, ‘and going galloping into life kind of regardless. There’s Nate and Anne, and there’s Violet and Hogan, and there’s a whole mess of fresh married couples in Little Italy, and the Huns and Belgians are all broke out with the blamedest dose of love y’ ever see! And they’s whole rafts of ’em to be married before June!’ Well, Laura, she laughed and if it wasn’t like pouring spring itself out of a jug. Spring,” he mused, “ain’t it curious about spring!”
Champing his apple the Captain gesticulates slowly with his open pocket knife, “Love”–he reflects; then backs away from his discussion and begins anew: “Less take–say Anne and Nate, a happy couple–him a lean, eagle-beaked New England kind of a man; her–a little quick-gaited, big-eyed woman and sping! out of the Providence of Goddlemighty comes a streak of some kind of creepy, fuzzy lightning and they’re struck dumb and blind and plumb crazy–eh?”
He champs for a time on the apple, “Eighteen sixty-one–May, sixty-one–me a tidy looking young buck–girl–beautiful girl with reddish brown hair and bluest eyes in the world. Sping! comes the lightning, and melts us together and the whole universe goes pink and rose-colored. No sense–neither of us–no more’n Anne and Nate, just one idea. I can’t think of nothing but her–war isn’t much; shackles on four millions slaves–no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his tent the day I left for the army; union forever–mere circumstance in the lives of two crazy people–in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft hands and whispers and flowers, eh–and–” The Captain does not finish his sentence.