XXVIIIJESSICA TO PHILIP
XXVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
Kind Sir:
Which do you think requires the more grace in a woman, to hold out against a dear enemy or to yield? My own experience teaches me that there is more facility in resistance. Acting thus I have always felt in accord with natural instincts, and there is a barbaric sense of security in following them.... Yet I have only one thing to tell you in reply to your “so many.” Can you guess what it is? Already I think the birds know it. I have so far departed from my natural order of perversity and self-protection that they feel it, and twitter together when I pass by. I think they look down upon me now with high-feathered contempt. Could anything be more mortifying?
Do not laugh, Philip! You have behaved little better than a robber in this matter. I have lost to you, but the game was not fair; dear mendicant, you played with a card up your sleeve! All my life I have planned to outwit predestination. I have ignored Sabbath-day doctrines and faith-binding dogmas to this end. I could even have held out indefinitely against your “foreknowledge,” but when you come, heralded by an unexpected misfortune, asking “peace” of me that you may meet your own difficulties with a steadier courage, I find you invincible. It is as if you had suddenly slipped through the door of my heart and left will, betrayed, on guard outside. I have no defence in my nature against your plea. The diplomacy of your need takes me unawares, and, no matter how I fear the future, now I am bound to add myself to you in love and hope. The prospect is terrible and sweet. Already it has made me a stranger in my father’s house, a foreigner among the trees, and awakeful, frightened mystery to myself. I am full of tears and secresy. I am no longer Jessica, the wind-souled dryad of the forest, but merely a woman in definition, facing a new world of pain and joy. Oh, my beloved! you have taken all that I have, all that I am! Henceforth I shall be only a part of you,—a little hyperbole of domesticity always following after, or advancing to meet you.... Dear gods of the world, defend me from such a fate! ... After all, I cannot admit the “one thing.” I cannot submit to this annihilation, this absorption of character and personality. If you take me, you do so at your own risk, I will not promise “peace,” but confusion rather. But if you get me, you must take me. Yet, if you come to Morningtown after me, I will deny my love, not out of perversity, but out of fear. The sight of you is a signal for me to take refuge upon my tallest bough. And I can no more come down to you than a young lady robin could fly into your pocket. Itis all very well for you to exhort me to love you “simply and unreservedly,”—I do. Nothing could be simpler, more elemental, than my love is; and do I reserve a single thought of it from you? But I am not conventional enough in heart or training to surrender. My genius for you does not extend so far. To lose myself does not seem to me wise or logical, however scriptural or legal the practice is. The truth is, I cannot agree to be taken, any more than the little petticoated planet above your head can kick off her diadem of light. I do not know what you will do about it, because it is not my business to know these things. All I am sure of is that I love you, and that I belong to you if only you can get my extradition papers from Nature herself.
Meanwhile I have ventured to prepare my father’s mind for a new idea. As we sat before the library fire this evening, each employed according to his calling, he with Fletcher’sAppealand I with my sewing, Iasked the usual introductory question to our conversations. And it is always the signal for him to raise his shield of orthodoxy; for it has long been my habit to creep around the corner of my private opinion and tease him with what he is pleased to term “the most blasphemous speculations.” Therefore when I said, “Father, I wish to ask you a question,” he looked up with the guarded eye of a man who expects an assault from an unscrupulous antagonist.
“Well, my daughter, ask.”
“Which would you advise me to marry, father, a humanitarian whose highest law is the material welfare of his kind, or an ascetic whose spirituality is something more and something less than scriptural?”
“Neither, Jessica; if you must marry, choose a man who believes in the divinity of Christ and lives somewhere within the limits of the Ten Commandments!”—Heavens! think of bondage with a man who is bounded upon the north, east,south, and west of his soul by laws enacted to discipline the Israelites in the Wilderness! In that case, I should insist upon a bridal trip to Canaan, with the hope of reaching the Promised Land as a widow.
And this reminds me to ask you what manner of man you are yourself. Do you reflect that we have seen each other only twice? and both times you were on guard, once as an editor, and once as a lover. Even your face has faded to a mere shadow, and, if you persist in your petulant obstinacy about the picture[3], is like to vanish clean away into nothing. Only your encompassing eyes peer at me with solemn expostulation out of the shimmering form I conjure up and call my lover. Is it quite fair, Philip? And as for your character, my hope is that, in spite of your mental pose as a sage, you have an unreasonable disposition, a chaotic temper. A long term of years with a serene, gentle-spirited manwould be unbearable to me. Rather than prolong the futility of existence with one I could not provoke, even enrage, I should commit suicide. My own disposition is so equally divided between perversity and repentance that I could not endure the placidity, the ennui, of a level turnpike existence.
And now isn’t it an evidence of your high-minded heartlessness, that in the same letter where you sue for love you also introduce a philosophical discussion and show even more heat in maintaining it than you do in your amorous petition? Why I cannot take warning and fly to the ends of my earth away from you now while there is yet time, is a mystery to me!
And so you expect to make such a pother in your opposition to the spirit of the times that all the world will hear you. Dear Master, I doubt if you will! Your bells ring too high up. The angels in heaven may hear you, but men are not listening in that direction. I did not reply to yourcontention against Lyman Abbott, because it is a far cry from you to me on this subject. In consciousness we are at opposite ends of a great problem, and I think the normal man walks somewhere between. Besides, I am not sure that I understand your position; I am not familiar with the starry highways of your mind. Still, in a general way it has always seemed to me that material things are, after all, “counters which represent spiritual realities.” And I take comfort in the fact that it must require us all to work out the Great Plan,—humanitarian, sage, pilgrim, ascetic, even the butcher and candlestick maker. And while we do not know it, really we are working together for one end hidden now in the divine economy of far-off destiny and justice.... To me the wonder of wonders is that I may some day light a little taper in your upper chamber myself, and kneel together with you before the same window to worship. Only, dear Heart, please get your deity named before I come!
P.S.—As to my spelling, that is a coquettish licence I take with the genealogy of words. And you may tell your proofreader that the letterrhas never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour withoutg’s orr’s than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is Jack?
XXIXPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXIX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Kind Madam:
Yes, a little more than kind, dear Jessica, for you have put into my grasp the flower of perfect delight, and “my hand retains a little breath of sweet.” You have opened a window into my heart and poured through it the warmth and golden glory of your own sunlight. I am filled with a joyousness of a new spring—and yet there is something in your letter that makes me a little sad. You express so frankly that reserve of resentment, even of bitterness, which always, I think, abides with a woman in all the sweetness of her love, but which with most women never comes to entire consciousness. Listen, dear Heart, while I talk to you of yourself and myself,until we comprehend each other better. It is so much easier for me to understand you than for you to understand me, because a woman’s nature is single, whereas a man’s is double, and in this duality lies all the reason of that enmity of the sexes which draws us together yet still holds us asunder.
You complain of my letter because I argue a philosophical proposition in it while pleading for love. Do you not know that this is man’s way? And I would not try to deceive you: this philosophical proposition, which seems to you almost a matter of indifference, is more to me than everything else in the world. For it I could surrender all my heart’s hope; for it I could sacrifice my own person; even, if the choice were necessary, which cannot be, I might sacrifice you. There is this duality in man’s nature. The ambition of his intellect, the passion, it may be, to force upon the world some vision of his imagination or some theorem of his brain, works in him side byside with his personal being, and the two are never quite fused. Can you not recall a score of examples in history of men who have led this dual existence? You reviewed for me Bismarck’s Love Letters and were yourself struck by this sharp contrast between the iron determination of the man in public affairs and the softness and sweetness of his domestic life. That is but one case in point of the eternal dualism in masculine nature which a woman can never comprehend, and which always, if it confronts her nakedly, she resents. For a woman is not so. There exists no such gap in her between her heart and brain, between her outer and inner life. And the consequence shows itself in many ways. She is less efficient in the world and is never a creator or impresser of new ideas; but, on the other hand, her character possesses a certain unity that is the wonder of all men who observe. She calls the man selfish and is bitter against him at times, but her accusation is wrong. It isnot selfishness which leads a man if needs be to cut off his own personal desires while sacrificing another; it is the power in him which impels the world into new courses. A man’s virtues are aggressive and turned toward outer conquest and may have little relation to his own heart. But a woman’s virtues are bound up with every impulse of her personal being; they work out in her a loveliness and unity of character which make the man appear beside her coarse and unmoral. Men of vicious private life have more than once been benefactors of the human race; I think that never happened in the case of a woman.
And because of this harmony, this unconsciousness in woman’s virtue, a man’s love of woman takes on a form of idealisation which a woman never understands and indeed often resents. What in him is something removed from himself, something which he analyses and governs and manipulates, is in the woman beloved an integral part of her character. Virtue seemsin her to become personified and he calls her by strange names. For this reason men who make language tend always to give to abstract qualities the feminine gender, as you must have observed in Latin and might observe in a score of other tongues. For this reason, too, a man’s love of woman assumes such form of worship as Dante paid to Beatrice or Petrarch to Laura. It would be grotesque for a woman to love in this way, for virtue is not a man’s character, but a faculty of his character. And so is it strange that I should approach you asking for love that my soul may have peace? It cannot enter into my comprehension that such a cry should come from you to me. All that I strive to accomplish in the world, all that I gird myself to battle for, the ideals that I would lay down my life that men may behold and cherish,—is it not now all gathered up in the beauty and serenity of your own person? What I labour to express in words is already yours in inner possession. If I ask you for peace,it is not selfishness, dear girl; it is prayer. If you should come to me begging for peace, I should be filled with amazement; for I myself have it not. What I can give is love’s unwearied tenderness and love’s unceasing homage to the beauty of your body and your soul. More than that, I shall give you in the end the crown of the world’s honour. Without you I may accomplish the task laid upon me, but only with heaviness of soul and abnegation of all that my heart craves. I was reading in an old drama last night until I came to these words, and then I set the book aside:
Once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies.
In that sweet hyperbole I seemed to read a transcript of your beauty. If I am selfish, beloved, all love is selfishness.
Dear girl, it seems that always I must woo you in metaphysics and express my ardour in theorems. But have I not mademyself understood? “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,” as a thousand women have quoted: and it is true. But do you not see that even for this reason his love swells into a passionate idolatry of the woman who knows no such cleavage in her soul. Try us with sacrifices. I could throw away every earthly good to bestow on you a year of happiness—only not my philosophic proposition, as you sarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you—pray heaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think, meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of Æneas and Dido, only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within Æneas he expressed dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little understanding of the poem or of human nature to censure Æneas as a cold egotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart,multa gemens? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terror and death. Thetragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so the Fates have ordered.
But why do I write such grim reflections? There is no tragedy, no separation, for us, but a great wonder of happiness:
The treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman’s love.
All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber’s part, sweet Jessica, and he who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried away so large a draft on the world’s happiness as this that I have stolen. I cannot be repentant while this golden glow is upon me; later I shall begin to question my own worthiness.
I cannot now tell you one half that is in my mind to write, or answer one half the questions in your letter. Jack is living with me just at present, but of him I will speak next time. I have planned to changemy abode, but of that too next time. And I would not attempt to give a name to the deity I serve in a postscript, as it were. Dear Heart, only let your love add a little to your happiness as it has added so much to mine; and trust me.—I am sending a letter to your father, the contents of which you might imagine even if he should not show it to you.
XXXJESSICA TO PHILIP
XXX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER
My Beloved:
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.Yourthoughts 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 heartwillnot 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 oflast 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?
XXXIPHILIP TO JESSICA
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 perilousway. 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 aburning 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 andinhuman 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.
A RECONCILIATION
All beauteous things the world’s allurement knows:
Starred Venus, when she droops on Tyrian couch
While Evening draws her dusky curtains close,
Or pearled from morning bath she seems to crouch;
In bleak November one strayed violet;
The rathe spring-beauty scattered wide like snow;
The opal in a cirque of diamonds set;
Rare silken gowns that rustle as they flow;
The dumb thrush brooding in her lilac hedge;
The wild hawk towering in his proudest flight;
A silver fountain splashed o’er mossy ledge;
The sunrise flaming on an Alpine height;—
All these I’ve seen, yet never learned, till now
In thy sweet smiling, to accord my vow
Austere of truth with beauty’s charmed delight.
XXXIIJESSICA TO PHILIP
XXXII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
WRITTEN IN ANSWER TO LETTER XXIX
My Dear Philip:
You are a magician rather than a lover. And no lover, I think, was ever so subtle at reasoning. At least you do not act the part as I supposed it was played. A lover, I thought, was one who stood at the door of a woman’s heart and serenaded till she crept out upon her little balcony of sighs and kissed her hand to him, or shed a tokening bloom upon his upturned countenance. So far as I could imagine, he was prehistoric in the simplicity of his methods. Two things I never suspected: that love is the kind of romantic exegesis you represent it to be, or that every lover, psychically, is a sort of twin phenomenon—that he istwomen instead of one! And afterhe is married, I suppose he will be a domestictrinity, but with his godhead concerned with the affairs of the world at large. I am awed by the revelation; still, it excuses much in my conduct that I had before felt was reprehensible; for I have scarcely faced my own reflection in the glass since my ignominious capitulation. Something within charged treachery against poor Jessica. But if there aretwoof you, and onlyoneof me, that fact gives a new and honourable complexion to my part in the transaction.
However, the way you have multiplied yourself and doubled forces upon me may be good masculine tactics, but I am sure it is an unparliamentary advantage you have taken. For you have not only posed as a lover, but with the cunning words of a logician you prove what seemed wrong to be really a sublime right; and whatIcharged as selfishness,youcall “a prayer.” I am confused by your argument; it seems incontestable. But do you know, myPhilip, that a woman’s convictions are never reached by a mere argument? For they are hidden in her heart, not in her little bias-fold mind. And so, in spite of your sweet reasoning with me, and the assumption you make of omniscience concerning me, my convictions remain. Only, now, I do not know whether I cherish them against you or against the God who made me simple and you double.
But granting all you say to be true, that every man has a personal life and at the same time a universal life energy as well, that there is in him a little domestic fortress of love, and a battle power of life apart,—admitting all this, how do you reconcile justice with the fact that you frankly offer only half of your duality for all of Jessica? Have you never suspected that she also has fair kingdoms of thought apart from your science of her? My Prophet, it is you who have discovered them to me! Love has added a sweet Canaan to my little hemisphere. I have heard invisiblebirds singing, I have trysted with spirits of the air since I knew you. And I have felt the pangs of a consciousness in me so new and so tender, that I am no longer merely the maid you know, but, dear Master, I am some one else, near and kin to you as life and spirit are kin! What is this strange white space in my soul that love has made, so real, yet so holy that I dare not myself lift the veil of consciousness before it? And all I know is that I shall meet you there finally heart to heart!—Philip, kiss me! For I am a frightened white-winged stranger in my own new heavens and new earth. I am no longer as you imagine, simply one, but I have a foreign power of life and death in me, and the fact terrifies me.
You declare that there is a difference and a distance between a man’s love and a man’s mind which account for his dual nature. There is also an intelligence of the heart, more astute, more vital, which divides woman’s nature also between the abandonof love and the resentment of understanding. We know, and we do not know, and wefeel. What we know is of little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of each succeeding generation. But what we donotknow constitutes that element of mystery in us that makes us also dual. For we feel and suspect further than we can understand. Thus, your faculty for projecting yourself in spirit further than I can follow, excites in me a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment. I am widowed by the loss of the higher half of your entity. Can you not see, Philip, it is not your views I combat, your theory about humanitarianism and all that? They are but the geometrical figures of thought in your mind; and I have no wish to disturb your “philosophic proposition.” The point is, I love that in you more than I love the lover. And the passion with which you cling to it as something apart from our relationship offends me, excites forebodings. Tell me, are“philosophic propositions” alien to love? And after all do you think you are the only one who may claim them? This is a secret,—I have a little diagram of feminine wisdom hid away from you somewhere, founded upon the wit of love. And we shall see which lasts the longer, your proposition or my understanding!
But I must not forget to speak of a matter much more practical just now. You mentioned the letter that you sent to father,—“The contents you might imagine even if he did not show it to you.” Well, he did not show it to me, but from the effect it produced upon him I am obliged to infer that it contained the most iniquitous blasphemies. Philip, I do hope you are not subject to fits of “righteous indignation!” I could welcome a season of secular rage in a man as I could a fierce wind in sultry weather, but this kind of fury that cloaks itself in the guise of outraged piety is very trying. No sooner did father read your letter than he strode inupon me like a grey-bearded firebrand. The offending letter was crushed in his hand, and his glasses were akimbo on his nose, the way they always are when he is perturbed. I spare you the details, but from the nature of his questions you might have thought he was examining you through me for a licence to preach. I did not try to deceive him in regard to your views, but my own impression of them is so nebulous that the very vagueness of my replies increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in the felony of my love, and there was a certain humorous satisfaction in hearing father give a “philosophic proposition” to your criminality. My only prayer was that he might not ask me if I loved you. Philip, I would rather live on bread and water a week than confess it to any living man besides yourself. But father has dwelt too long outside the realm of romance to ask that very naturalquestion. Finally I protested feebly: “But how can it vitally affect a woman’s happiness whether or not her husband accepts the doctrine of repentance just as you do? Can he not love and cherish his wife even if he does question the veracity of Jonah’s whaling experience?” But when I looked up and saw his face, I was ashamed, and ran and kissed him, and straightened his glasses so that he could see me with both eyes. But, dear Heart, his eyes were too full of tears to fire upon me. And as I sat there upon the arm of his chair, twisting his sacred beard, this is what he told me. When my mother died, he said, and left me a little puckered pink mite in his arms, he had solemnly dedicated me to God. And he declared, moreover, that he could not be faithless to his vow by giving me in marriage to an infidel. Being an infidel, Philip, is much worse than being a plain heathen; an infidel is a heathen raised to the sixteenth power of iniquity! Now I rarely quote Scripture, for I have too muchguile in me to justify the liberty, but I could not refrain from mentioning Abraham’s dilemma, it seemed so appropriate to the occasion,—how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a little he-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggested that instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith’s little Johnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaical aptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul is as worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become a righteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this world of temptations an unconscionably long time? But father was not to be reasoned with or comforted. And yesterday, Sunday, he preached impressively from the text, “Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? ”Of courseyouare the heathen, Philip, and of courseIam the “vain thing.” But that is not father’s idea. The vain thing you imagineis that he will give his consent to our marriage! Well, you may settle it between you! All I know is that now I am predestined, but not in the dedicated deaconess direction!
Jessica, the Brave.
Jessica, the Brave.
P.S.—What do you think,ourlittle forest is for sale. And oh, Philip, if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life will die of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there and asked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (I suppose all the prophets were like this, their writings produce that impression!) And my father would consent, even if the bridegroom were a heathen instead of a prophet. For he would be obliged to attend religious services at Morningtown, and father does not believe any man can long remain under the drippings of his sanctuary without being forgiven. And I do not either. God would have mercy upon him somehow!
XXXIIIPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXXIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Your letter, dearest Jessica, and your father’s came by the same post, and the sensation they gave me was as if some moral confusion had befallen the elements and summer were mingled with winter in the same sky. Not that his letter was anything but kind and dignified, but it seemed to remove you and your life so far away from me. I confess I had some fears that he might insist on the little we have seen or, as the world judges, know of each other; it had not occurred to me that my “infidelity” would block my path to happiness—so little do the people I commonly meet reck of that matter. I have been accusing the world all along of indifference to the spirit and to theology, and now, by asort of poetical irony, I am blocked in my progress toward happiness by meeting one who adheres to an old-world belief in these things. The burden of his reply was in these words: “I cannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who was not strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I would gladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of those who trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility of Christian faith. ”Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love as well as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me without hearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father the whole truth.
Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I must leave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that I have faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief in the Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believethe whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, are divided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible world is real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible, and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusion whereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just this perception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to those without faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of the spirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because I find among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I deny the existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lost the sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony of the humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should do better to discuss household economy than religion.
Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties, but in afew days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my “infidelity” is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will Jessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoof which I never had and those ass’s ears which, alas! I did flourish so portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a new rendering of Catullus’sDa Basia.
And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land, sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by woman’s grace from the desertinto the circle of perfect Paradise. Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we should bend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of the trees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand in the cool of the evening,—sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voice of our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it was God. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for this dream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreams until I come to you and learn in your arms the more “sober certainty of waking bliss.”
Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your “brothers,” as you call the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the stern purpose I have set beforeme? There, indeed, the world and all the concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with seriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love’s isolation, but the rude contact of affairs, yet with love’s encouragement, to hold me within practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar the beauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk together when I come.
I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the——and have taken a couple of cheap rooms here at——. For some months I shall not be writing for money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. One room is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but still crowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have had in mind for several years,—the history and significance of humanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist ofthatmagnum opusis to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form as to stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I have learned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. When I return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition. Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material is already well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn to making money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income—and can you imagine what that means to you and me?
I had thought to send our goblin boy into the country as you bade me, but for a while I am keeping him here. He sleeps in a cot beside me, and in the day, when not at school or crouching in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone, he sits in a great chair by the window. Often when I look up from my book his eyes are fixed on me with a kind of mute appealing wonder. Somehow I could not let him go. Heseems a link between us in our separation; and while my thoughts are set upon rebuking the errors of humanitarianism it will be well to have this object of human pity before my eyes.
I wonder if you comprehend what a strange wistful letter you have written. You are no longer merely the maid I knew, and my ways of thought excite in you a terror of loneliness that sharpens into resentment—so you say. Once more, dear girl, we will talk of all this when I come. Until that happy day, wait, and fortify your love with trust.
XXXIVJESSICA TO PHILIP
XXXIV
JESSICA TO PHILIP
I have a number of terms, my Philip, with which I might begin this letter, but I have not yet the courage to call you by such dear names beyond the whispering gallery of my own heart.
And you wonder how I have concealed my romantic deflections from father. Indeed, I am sure he has noticed a heavenly-mindedness in me for some time past; but out of the sanctity of his own heart he probably attributed this improvement to the chastening effects of a particularly gloomy course of religious reading that he has insisted upon my undertaking this winter. And, after all, father is not so far wrong as to my spiritual state, for when love becomes a woman’s vocation, she carries blessings inher eyes and all her moods tiptoe reverently like young novices who follow one another down a cathedral aisle. This life of the heart becomes her piety, I think, and the highest form of religion of which she is capable. Jessica begins to magnify herself, you see! A kingdom of heaven has been set up within me, dear creator, and naturally I feel this extension of my boundaries.
But do not expect me to tell father “the whole truth,”—how you first fascinated me with editorial magnanimity, then baited me with compliments, and later with deepest confidences, and finally slipped into my Arcadia disguised as a philosopher, but, when you had got entire possession, declared yourself a victorious lover! I wonder that you can contemplate the record you have made in this matter without blushing!
As for your “infidelity,” and what you call your “faith,” I think father will denounce them both as blasphemous. Religion to father is something more than“the poetry he believes in.” It has the definition of experience, miracles, and a whole body of spiritual phenomena quite as real to him as your upper-chamber existence is to you. Only father has this advantage of you, he has a real Divinity, with all the necessary attributes of a man’s God. His “voice of happiness” speaks to him from the stars, and he does not call it an echo, as you do, of a fair voice within your own heart. Father gets his salvation from the outside of his warring elements; you speak to your own seas, “Peace be still!” As for me, between you, I stand winking at Heaven; and I say: “It is evident that neither of them understands this mystery of life; I will not try to comprehend. I will be good when I can, and diplomatic when I must, and leave the rest to heaven and earth and nature.” Meanwhile, I advise you not to quote your pagan authorities to father. If the very worst comes, you may say that you have almost scriptural proof of my affections,—andmind you say affections, father could not bear the romantic inflection of such a term as love. It sounds too secular, carnal, to him.
You ask me if I will consent to abandon such a life as our forest offers and come with you into “this great solitude of people” which you call New York. Philip, when a man holds a starling in his hand he does not ask the bird whether it will stay here or wing yonder, but he carries it with him where he will; and the starling sings, no less in one place than in another, because its nature is to sing. But, I think, dear Master, the motive which prompts the song in the cage is not the same as the impulse to sing in the forest. So it is with me. If we live here among the trees, where their green waves make a summer sea high in the heavens above our heads, I could be as content as any bird is. But if you make our home in the city, or in the midst of a desert for that matter, I could not withhold one thought from your happiness,for love has transformed me, adapted life itself to a new purpose. I have been “called,” and I have no will to resist, because my heart tells me there is goodness in the purpose, a little necklace of womanly virtues for me. When I think of pain, and sorrow, my eyes are holden, I can see only the fair form of love sanctified, and I can hear only your voice calling me to fulfil a destiny which you yourself do not understand. And as all these things approach, beloved, father’s God is more to me than your fine illusion. I wish for guardian angels, I feel the need of a Virgin Mary and of all the lady mothers in heaven to bless me.
But I have been telling you only of my inner life. Outwardly I shall ever be capable of the most heathen manifestations. For instance, loving as I do, how do you account for this personal animosity I feel toward you, almost a madness of fear at the thought of your approaching visit? There is something that has never beenfinished in this affair of our hearts. Perhaps it is that really you have never kissed me. Well, I find it as easy to write of kisses as to review a sentimental romance, but actually there is some instinct in me stronger than mind against the fact, do you understand? Philip, you have no idea of the depths of feminine treachery! Did I ever intimate a willingness to do such a thing? I do not say that Iwishto kiss another, but I affirm that it would be easier for me to kiss my father’s presiding elder—and heaven knows he is a didactic monster of head and whiskers! It is not that I do not love you, but that I do!
Do you know what will happen when you come to Morningtown? I will meet you at the station, not as Jessica, but as the demure little home-made daughter of the Methodist minister here; we will greet each other with blighting formality, for there will be the station-master’s wife to observe us; we will walk home along the main street, and we will speak of the mosttrivial or useful subjects, of the weather in New York, and of Jack more particularly. Out of sheer bravado I will scan your face now and then, but my eyes will not rest there long enough to fall before yours discomfited. When we reach the house father will greet you from his Sinai elevation, with pretty much the same holy-man courtesy Moses would have showed if a heathen Canaanite had appeared to him. And while you two are exchanging platitudes, I will escape into this room of mine, take one glance at my mirror, and then cover my face with my hands for joy and shame while the red waves of love mount as high as they will over it. Ah, Philip, I shall besoglad to see you, and so afraid! But you shall have small satisfaction in either fact, for I do not aim to make it easy for you to win what is already yours in my heart.
P.S.—So you are keeping Jack mured up with you and yourmagnum opus. No wonder he “crouches in sphinxlike silenceon the curbstone.” He prefers it to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a similar situation I may be driven to seek the cold curbstone for companionship.