XXXVPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXXV
PHILIP TO JESSICA
It seems to me as I read your letters, my sweet wife to be, that I am only beginning to learn the richness of my fortune. And will you not, when you write to me next time—will you not call me by one of those dear names that you speak in the whispering gallery of your heart? I shall barely receive more than one letter from you now before I come to see you in person and tell over with you face to face the story of our love. Just a few more days and I shall be free.
But for the present I want to talk to you about Jack. Indeed, I feel a little sore on this point. It was you who proposed our adopting him, yet, after your first words of advice, you have left me to work outthe situation quite unaided; and now I can see that you are laughing at me. Poor Jack, he was something like a “philosophical proposition” which I had never very thoroughly analysed. One thing, however, begins to grow perfectly clear: my home is no place for him; he is only a shadow in my life and needs to take on substance. Well, I thought at last I had solved the problem—or at least that O’Meara had solved it for me; but here too I was disappointed. Really, you must help me out of this muddle.
Do you remember the note-book of O’Meara’s that I told you about? Ever since his death I have been too busy really to look through the volume; but day before yesterday it occurred to me that I might find some information there about Jack’s parentage, and with that end in view I spent most of the day deciphering the smeared pages. At first I found everything in the notes except what I wanted, but toward the end of the book I discovereda whole group of memoranda and reflections in which the name Tarrytown occurred again and again. I will read you the notes when I come; without giving many events they tell in a disjointed way a little idyllic episode in the story of his life. He, too, knew love, and was loved. There in that village by the Hudson for a few short months he kept the enemy at bay and was happy. And then, too soon, came the fatal story—the only dated note in the book, I believe:
September 3d: A son was born and she has left me to care for him alone. I had thought that happiness might endure, and this too was illusion. I stand by the tomb and read the graven words:Et ego in Arcadia fui.
September 3d: A son was born and she has left me to care for him alone. I had thought that happiness might endure, and this too was illusion. I stand by the tomb and read the graven words:Et ego in Arcadia fui.
And so, yesterday, on a venture I took our little goblin boy with me to Tarrytown, and after some inquiry found that his mother’s relations were farm people living on the outskirts of the town. They proved to have been poor but respectable people. At present only the grandfatheris living alone in the house, and he is very feeble. He was willing to assume the care of Jack, but I cannot persuade myself to leave the child in those trembling hands. Indeed, when it comes to the issue, I cannot quite decide to let him go entirely from me, for is he not one of the ties that bind me to you? I have brought him back with me to New York—which will only increase your merriment at my expense.
Some day when you have come to live in New York—if this is to be our home—we will go together up the river to Tarrytown, and you shall see the land where O’Meara dreamed his dream of happiness and where your adopted child was born.
And when we go there, I will take you to a bowered nook overhanging the river, where I passed the afternoon reading and thinking of many things. There together we will sit in the shadow of the trees and talk and plan together howourhappiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and you shall teach me to lose this haunting senseof illusion in the great reality of love. And as the evening descends and twilight steals upon the ever-flowing water, I will take you in my arms a moment, and this shall be my vow: God do so to me and more also, if any darkness falls from my life upon yours, until our evening, too, has come and the light of this world passes quietly into the dream that lies beyond.
All this I thought yesterday while I sat alone and read once more the sad record of O’Meara’s ruin. He did not stay long in Tarrytown, it seems, after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in the hope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas, you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful days returned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them—so one may surmise from a number of memoranda—with a new meaning he began to discover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of theÆneidbecame asymbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the last bewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to his destruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses from those books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not a touch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?—
There the meaning of theGeorgicswas opened to me as it never was before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of thelœtas segetesseemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills, and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the poet:
There the meaning of theGeorgicswas opened to me as it never was before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of thelœtas segetesseemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills, and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the poet:
Flumina amem silvasque inglorius,
and his pathetic envy of those
and his pathetic envy of those
Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew
The wonders of their state!
And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself, still I was in Virgil’s haunted world. Some distance from the house was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I learned to enjoy thelevium spectacula rerum, as he calls the story of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,—so wide and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of men,—I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself, still I was in Virgil’s haunted world. Some distance from the house was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I learned to enjoy thelevium spectacula rerum, as he calls the story of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,—so wide and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of men,—I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast,
With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest.
In this way Jack’s father learned the illusion of life by looking back on his happy days. I did not mean to fill my letter with this long extract from his note-book, nor would I end with such ill-omened words. Dear girl, I too have learned the deception of life in other ways. Teach me, when Icome to you, the great reality. In all O’Meara’s memoranda after his return to New York I could find only a single direct allusion to the woman he loved. It was very brief: “On this day two years ago she said I made her happy!”
Shall I bring happiness to you when I come?
A CODICIL TO LETTER XXXIV
A CODICIL TO LETTER XXXIV
JESSICA TO PHILIP. WRITTEN BEFORE THE RECEIPT OF THE PRECEDING LETTER FROM PHILIP
Think of this,—I love you, but I do not know you. I only know your heart, your mind, that part of you which meets me in spirit like the light from some distant star that slips across my window sill at evening. But you, oh! Philip, I do not knowyou. You are a stranger whom I have seen only twice in my life. Do not be angry, my beloved, I do love you; but cannot you understand that I must get used to the idea of your being some one very real? These are thoughts forced upon me by your approaching visit, and so I ask a favour: Do not tell me when to expect you. If you threaten me with the identical day of your coming, I will vanishfrom the face of the earth! But if you come upon me unawares, I shall have been spared that consciousness ofconfessionface to face involved by a deliberate welcome. And if you come thus, I shall not have time to retire behind my instinctive defence against you. You see that I plan in your favour, that I wish to be unrestrainedly glad when you come.
And about the kisses, you understand of course, dear Philip, that I am incapable of determining them really! I only contemplated the possibility when distance made it an impossibility. Still, you cannot fail to know that I love you, that it would even break my heart if you did not come! For, Philip, a woman’s heart is like the Scriptures, apparently full of contradictions, but really it is the symbol of our everlasting truth, if only you have the wisdom to understand it.
And another thing, Philip, the more I think of it, the more I am scandalised by the way you drag that poor goblin childabout. My heart yearns for him and his solitude in the midst of your philosophies. You have made a perfect jumping-jack of him for your lordly amusement, and it isn’t fair. Bring him with you to Morningtown. I charge you. And remember, don’t lose him or philosophise him out of existence on the way. I have talked with father about the boy, and he is primed with religious zeal to snatch this tender brand from your burning.
XXXVIPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXXVI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Just a note, sweet lady, to bid you expect me on the afternoon train Thursday—and is not that a long while from to-day? And please do not come to the station. I would not have our meeting chilled by the curious eyes of that station-master’s wife; I remember the scrutiny of her gaze too well. And as for our greeting—you have made a very pretty story out of that, but have you not omitted Philip from the account? Is it not just possible that he may mar all Jessica’s nicely laid plans? I have a suspicion that, in his crude masculine way, he may prefer to translate into fact what Jessica finds so easy to contemplate in words. I feel a bit uncertain as to how he will behave as a lover; the rôleis new to him, and he may be awkward and a bit vehement.
Yes, I will bring Jack and leave him to be brooded under your kind maternal feathers. You will love him for the pathos of his eyes and for his quaint ways.
[2]It is unnecessary to say that the spelling throughout these letters has been corrected for the press.
It is unnecessary to say that the spelling throughout these letters has been corrected for the press.
[3]Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence.
Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence.
The Third Partwhich shows how the editor again visitsJessica in the country, and how loveis buffeted between philosophyand religion.
The Third Part
which shows how the editor again visits
Jessica in the country, and how love
is buffeted between philosophy
and religion.
XXXVIIPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXXVII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
WRITTEN ON RETURNING FROM HIS VISIT TO MORNINGTOWN
Here I am back in my own room, in this solitude of books; and how different is this home-coming from that other when I brought with me only bitterness and despair!
Shall I tell you, sweetheart, some of the things I learned during my three days in Morningtown? First of all, I discovered that you are clothed with wonderful beauty. In a dim way I knew this before, but the full mystery of your loveliness was not revealed to me until this third time. Can it be that love has transformed you a little andadded grace to grace, or is it only my vision that has been purged of its earthly dulness? I could love a homely woman whose spirit was fair, but to love one who is altogether beautiful, in whose perfect grace I can find no spot or blemish—that is the miracle of my blessedness. There was a strange light in your eyes that haunts me yet. Such a light I have seen on a lonely pool when the evening sunlight slanted upon it from over the brown hills of autumn, but nowhere else. My soul would bathe in that pure water and be baptised into the new faith.
For my faith, of which I boasted so valiantly, has changed since I have seen you. Faith, I had thought, was a form of insight into the illusion of earthly things, of transient joys and fears. And always a little dread would creep into my heart lest love, too, should prove to be such an illusion, the last great deception of all, binding the bewildered soul in a web of phantom desires. So I still felt as I walked with youthat first evening out into the circle of your trees. And there, dear Jessica, in the waiting silence and the grey shadows of that seclusion I put my arms about you and would have drawn you to my heart. Ah, shall I not remember the wild withdrawing of your eyes as I stooped over your face! And then with a cry of defiance and one swift bound, you tore yourself loose from me and ran like a frightened dryad deeper into the forest. That was a mad chase, and forever and forever I shall see your lithe form darting on before me through the mingled shadow and light. And when at last I caught you and held you fast, shall I not remember how you panted and fluttered against me like a bird in the first terror of captivity! And then, suddenly, you were still, and looked up into my face, and in your eyes I beheld the wonder of a strange mystery which no words can name. Only I knew that my dread was forever at end. It was for a second—nay, an eternity, I think—as if we two were raptout of the world, out of ourselves, into some infinite abysm of life. It was as if the splendour of the apocalypse broke upon us, and poured upon our eyes the ineffable whiteness of heaven. I knew in that instant that love is not an illusion, but the one reality, the one power that dispels illusion, the very essence of faith. I shuddered when the vision passed; but its memory shall never fade. So much I learned on that day.
And I also learned, or thought I learned, that your father’s real objection to my suit lay not so much in his hostility to my views, as in his fear of losing you out of his life. And as I talked with him, even plead with him, I was filled with pity and with something like remorse for the sorrow I was to bring upon his heart. He is a saint, dear Love, but very human. You have said that I acted like a robber toward you. I could smile at your fury, but to your father I do indeed play the robber’s part. Yet in the end I think he will learn to trust me andwill give me the one jewel he treasures in this world. Shall a man do more than this? It is hard to remain in this uncertainty, but our love at least is all our own.
XXXVIIIJESSICA TO PHILIP
XXXVIII
JESSICA TO PHILIP
I have just received your letter, dear lover, and as I read it, all my lilies changed once more to roses—as they did, you remember how often, while you were here. This is your miracle, my Philip, for in the South you know we do not have the brilliant colour so noticeable in your Northern women. But now I have only to think of you, to whisper your name, to recall something you said or did, and immediately I feel the red rose of love burn out on cheek and brow. Indeed, I think it was this magic of colour that made the difference in my appearance which seems to have mystified you.
And will it please you to learn that at the end of each day, as the shadows begin to crowd down upon the world, I keep a trystwith you beneath the old Merlin oak where you first clasped me breathless and terrified in your arms? (Be sure, dear Heart, on this account, he will be the first sage in the forest to wear a green beard of bloom next spring!) And each time the memory of that moment, which began in such fright for me, and ended in such rapture for us both, rushes over me, I wonder that I could ever have feared the man whom I love. But you must not infer from this that I can be prodigal of my kisses. Only, in the future, I shall have a saner reason for withholding them,—that of economy. For if frugality is ever wise, and extravagance forever foolish, it must be true in love as in the less romantic experiences of life.
And now I have a sensation for you, Mr. Towers. Now that love has finished me, I have found my real self once more. I am no longer the bewildered woman, embarrassed by a thousand new sensations, lost in the maze of your illusions, but I am Jessica again, as remote from you, by moods,as the little green buds that swing high upon the boughs of these trees, wrapped yet in their brown winter furs. I mean that now I am able even to detach my thoughts from you at will and to live with the sort of personal emphasis I had before I knew you. I think it is because at last I am so sure of you that I can afford to forget you! How do you like that?
Besides, are we not now a part of the natural order, and does not everything there hint of a divine progression? The trees will be covered soon with the fairy mist of a new foliage, and our earth sanctified with many a little pageant of flowers. Goodness and happiness are foreordained. No real harm can befall us, now that we belong to this heavenly procession. All our days will come to pass, like the seasons of the year, inevitably. There is no longer any escape from our dear destiny. And as for me, dear Philip, I think there are already hopes enough in my heart to grow a green wreath about my head by next spring!
Jack is very well, but still a little foreigner in this land where there is so much space between things, so many wide sweeps of brown meadow for him to stretch his narrow street faculties across. He is silent but acquisitive, so I do not tease him with too many explanations. He will be happier for learning all these mysteries of nature herself, as he watches the miracle of new life now about to begin on the earth. Occasionally, however, when an unbidden thought of you makes it imperative that some one should be kissed, I sweep him up into my arms rapturously, and bestow my alms upon his brow. But if you could see the nonchalance, the prosaic indifference with which he endures these caresses, youcouldnot be jealous!
XXXIXPHILIP TO JESSICA
XXXIX
PHILIP TO JESSICA
I have always known, dear Love, that the first gentleman was a gardener and that all men hanker after that blissful state of Adam whose only toil was to care for the world’s early-blooming flowers. But what was our first great parent to me?
There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies show—
and I, even I, by some magic skill of commutation, am able to change the one bloom into the other. Was it not the rising colour on Cynthia’s cheek that the poet described as “rose leaves floating in the purest milk”? And was it not Keats (or who was it?) who vowed he could “die of a rose in aromatic pain”? I could write ananthology on Jessica Blushing; indeed I could hardly otherwise be so pleasantly and virtuously employed as in going through the poets and bringing together all that they have said in prophecy of your many divine properties.
Meanwhile you have turned me into a poet myself—think of that!—me, for these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions! I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of the first milk-waggons will come up from the street, and with that prosaic summons I shall go to bed when thrifty folk are beginning to yawn under the covers and think of the day’s work.
I wonder sometimes if my inveterate pedantries do not amuse or, worse yet, bore you. I am grown so used to books and the language of books. I believe when Gabriel blows his trump I shall start up from my long slumber with a Latinquotation on my lips—At tuba terribili, like as not. (Query: Does Gabriel understand Latin, or is Hebrew your only celestial speech?)
I am trying to be facetious, but really the matter worries me a little. Have you been laughing at me because I scolded you for neglecting your Latin, and because I took a copy of Catullus in my pocket when we made our Sunday excursion into the woods? Yet it was all so sweet to me. In the air hovered the first premonitions of spring, and the sunlight poured down upon the earth like an intoxicating wine that has been chilled in the cellar but is golden yellow with the glow of an inner fire. And some day I must set up an inscription on that Merlin oak over the nook where we sat together and talked and read, and ceased from words when sweeter language was required. As you leaned back against the warm, dry leaves I had piled up, with your great cloak twisted about your body—all except your feet, that would creep outinto the sun, tantalising me with a thousand forbidden thoughts—I understood how the old Greeks dreamed of dryads, fairer than mortal women, who haunted the forests. It pains me almost to think of that hour; I cannot fathom the meaning of so much beauty; a dumb fear comes upon me lest you should fade from my life like an aërial vision and leave me unsatisfied. Yet you seemed very real that day, and your lips had all the fragrance of humanity.
Was it not characteristic of me that I could not revel in that present bliss without seeking some warrant for my joy in ancient poetry? To read of Catullus and his passion while your heart throbbed against my hand seemed to lend a profounder reality to my own love. Dear dryad of the groves, yet womanly warm, because inevitably I connect my emotions with the hopes and fears of many poets who have trod the paths of Paradise before me, because I translate my thoughts into their passionate words, you must not therefore suppose that somethingfantastic and inhuman clings to my love for you. The deeper my feelings, the more certainly do they clothe themselves in all that my reading has garnered of rare and beautiful. Other men woo with flowers; I would adorn you also with every image and comparison of grace that the mind of man has conceived. The more fully my love invades every faculty of my soul and body, the more certain is it to assume for its own uses the labour and learning of my brain. You see I am welded more than I could believe into a feminine unity by your mystic touch, and that masculine duality of which I spoke is passing away. With some trepidation I write out for you these half-borrowed verses:
VIVAMUS ATQUE AMEMUS
Dear Heart, the solitary glen we found,
The moss-grown rock, the pines around!
And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms,
Catullus and his love’s alarms.
Da basia mille, so the poem ran;
And, lip to lip, our hearts began
With ne’er a word translate the words complete:—
Did Lesbia find them half so sweet?
A hundred kisses, said he?—hundreds more,
And then confound the telltale score!
So may we live and love, till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.
Yon failing sun shall rise another morn,
And the thin moon round out her horn;
But we, when once we lose our waning light,—
Ah, Love, the long unbroken night!
XLJESSICA TO PHILIP
XL
JESSICA TO PHILIP
A letter from my lover, so like him that it is the dearest message I have ever had from him. In this mood you are nearest akin to my heart. For if love fills my mind with a thousand woodland images, it sends you back to the classic groves of the ancients, where the wings of a bird might measure off destiny to a lover in an hexameter of light across his morning, and where the whole world was full of sweet oracles. The truth is we have need of an old Latin deity now. There was a romantic sympathy between the Olympian dynasty of gods and common men, more vital than our ascetic piety. And there are some experiences so essentially pagan that no other gods can afford to bless them!
Indeed, since your departure I have found a sort of occult companionship with you in reading once more some of the old Latin poets. Father is gratified, for he thinks that after all I may sober into a Christian scholarship with the old Roman monks, and to this end he will tolerate even Catullus. But really the wisdom of love has given me a keener appreciation of these sweet classics. Did you ever think how wonderful is the youth, the simplicity, the morning freshness of all their thoughts. It is we moderns who have grown old, pedantic; and when some lyrical experience, such as love, suddenly rejuvenates us, drawing us back into the primal poetic consciousness, then we turn instinctively to these ancients for an interpretation of our hearts,—also because their definition of beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better than we can make now. With us “The Beautiful” is often mere cant, or a form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, aspirtual faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts. This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our prosaic world. You see Jessica grows “pedantic” also! The poem you sent has awakened in me these reflections. The words of it slipped into my heart as warm as kisses.
But I have anxieties to tell you of. I fear trouble is brewing for us in father’s prayer-closet. You remember the little volume you gave me,The Forest Philosophers of India? Well, he found it last night in the library, where I had inadvertently left it; and recognising the author as the same dragon who threatens the peace and piety of his household, he settled himself vindictively to reading it. The result exceeded my worst fears. If his daughter were about to become the hypnotised victim of an Indianjuggler he would not be more alarmed. He holds that all truth is based upon the God idea. And he vows that you have attempted to dissolve truth by detaching it from this divine origin. You speak the truth in other words, but you are accused of blasphemously ignoring its sublime authorship. Nor is that all. Your philosophy must have gripped him hard, for he declares that you have an abnormally clairvoyant mind, and that “no female intelligence” can long withstand the diabolical influence of your heathen suggestions. Really it made my flesh creep! You might have thought he was warning me against a snake charmer. And when I declined to be alarmed, he locked himself up in his closet to fast and pray. This is the worst possible symptom in his case, for he will work himself into a frenzy, and before ever he eats or drinks he will get “called” to take some radical stand against us.
Meanwhile, besides a growing affectionfor Jack, I take a factitious interest in him because he was your daily companion for several months. I am tempted to ask him many questions that are neither fair nor modest, particularly as he is devoted to you, and quite willing to talk of “Misther Towers.”
“Does he ever sing, Jack?” I began last evening, as we sat alone before the library fire.
“Nope,”—Jack is laconic, but wise far beyond his years in silent sympathy.
“Did he often talk to you?”
“Yes, when we went for a walk.”
“Tell me what about, Jackie.”
“I don’t know!” was the ungrateful revelation.
“You mean you have forgotten!” I insinuated.
“Never did know. He talks queer!”—I tittered and Jack wrinkled up his face into a funny little grimace. We both knew the joke was on you.
“Did he ever mention any of his friends,” I persevered.
“Nope. Once he give me your love and some things you sent,”—the little scamp knew the direction of my curiosity!
“But did he never tell you anything about me, Jackie?”
“Never did!”—I was wounded.
“What does he like best?”—for I had made up my mind to know the worst.
“His pipe,” he affirmed without hesitation.
“And when he smoked he’d lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his hand to ’em.”
“Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?”
“Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed.”
“Mean thing!” I comforted. “But run along now and put the puppy to bed; Mr. Towers was very rude to you!”
I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip,if you only knew how jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I could consider Jack’s treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to a prayer.
XLIPHILIP TO JESSICA
XLI
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and theirremedy was, not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and dizzy leap to pass over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to be my wife.
And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my affections. The little rascal! And why don’t you make that precocious imp write to me? Do I not stand to himin loco parentis? But, joking aside, he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment, (for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: “Jessica, sweet Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself.”
.ce begin XLII
JESSICA TO PHILIP .ce end
My dear Mr. Towers:
It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner—as if I had cast off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is open to me after what has happened.
After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and destroy her soul with “heathen mysticism,” his own must pay the forfeit, and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will become as sounding brass andtinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a fanatic’s decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon superstition, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when opposed.
And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand he has snatched from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in a way a prior authority over him.
Nothing more is to be said now that Ihave the right to say. I have tried to take refuge in the biologist’s definition of love,—that it is essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,—only that it is best for us both to forget now if we can.
XLIIIPHILIP TO JESSICA
XLIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
My dear Jessica:
My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father’s house while he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those wordswe read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:
So let us live and love till life be out,
And let the greybeards wag and flout.
And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my ears,—that solemnnox perpetua, that long unending night, for every joy you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have brought only misery to me—and this is the fruit of love’s battle with religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that resounding line, “So much of ill religion could persuade”? Do you know Landor’s tellingof that story, “O father! I am young and very happy”? And so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you. And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world, and wait—wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name. But I know that in the long silences of the night whileI sit reflecting after the day’s toil is done—that something shall go forth from me to you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses. And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting loves. And once again, good-bye.
(Enclosed with the foregoing)
Dear Sir:
My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step in where my daughter’s happiness was concerned and have commanded her to cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and esteem.
Faithfully yours,Ezra Doane.
Faithfully yours,
Ezra Doane.
XLIVEXTRACT FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
XLIV
EXTRACT FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, “some consequence yet hanging in the stars,” which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” a single, sobbing note of love’s tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myselfwhy love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows—for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?
And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone. Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past. And that is the torture of it,—the torture of a man in a wide sea who beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach, beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so unnecessary—thatwe should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined that the institutes of Calvin were still a seriousmatter. I have at least learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of Fate that warns us to be humble.
And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:Dabit deus his quoque finem—God will give an end to these things also.