CHAPTER I. THE PARLOR
In the dusk of the old-fashioned best room of a farm-house, in the faint glow of the buried sun through the sods of his July grave, sat two elderly persons, dimly visible, breathing the odor which roses unseen sent through the twilight and open window. One of the two was scarcely conscious of the odor, for she did not believe in roses; she believed mainly in mahogany, linen, and hams; to the other it brought too much sadness to be welcomed, for it seemed, like the sunlight, to issue from the grave of his vanished youth. He was not by nature a sad man; he was only one that had found the past more delightful than the present, and had not left his first loves.
The twilight of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the eternal sort. While many of their neighbors were vying with each other in the effort to dress, and dwell, and live up to their notion of gentility, Richard Colman and his wife had never troubled themselves about fashion, but had sought to please each the taste of the other, and cultivate their own. Perhaps now as he sat thus silent in the dimmits, he was holding closer converse than he knew, or any of us can know, with one who seemed to have vanished from all this side of things, except the heart of her husband. That clung to what people would call her memory; I prefer to call it her.
The rose-scented hush was torn by the strident, cicala-like shrilling of a self-confident, self-satisfied female voice—
“Richard, that son of yours will come to no good! You may take my word for it!”
Mr. Colman made no answer; the dusky, sweet-smelling waves of the silence closed over its laceration.
“I am well aware my opinion is of no value in your eyes, Richard; but that does not absolve me from the duty of stating it: if you allow him to go on as he is doing now, Walter will never eat bread of his own earning!”
“There are many who do, and yet don’t come to much!” half thought, but nowise said the father.
“What do you mean to make of him?” persisted Miss Hancock, the half-sister of his wife, the a in whose name Walter said ought to have been an e.
“Whatever he is able to make himself. He must have the main hand in it, whatever it be,” answered Mr. Colman.
“It is time twice over he had set about something! You let him go on dawdling and dawdling without even making up his mind whether or not he ought to do anything! Take my word for it, Richard, you’ll have him on your hands till the day of your death!”
The father did not reply that he could wish nothing better, that the threat was more than he could hope for. He did not want to provoke his sister-in-law, and he knew there was a shadow of reason in what she said, though even perfect reason could not have sweetened the mode in which she said it. Nothing could make up for the total absence of sympathy in her utterance of any modicum of truth she was capable of uttering. She was a very dusty woman, and never more dusty than when she fought against dust as in a warfare worthy of all a woman’s energies—one who, because she had not a spark of Mary in her, imagined herself a Martha. She was true as steel to the interests of those in whose life hers was involved, but only their dusty interests, not those which make man worth God’s trouble. She was a vessel of clay in an outhouse of the temple, and took on her the airs—not of gold, for gold has no airs—but the airs of clay imagining itself gold, and all the golden vessels nothing but clay.
“I put it to you, Richard Colman,” she went on, “whether good ever came of reading poetry, and falling asleep under hay-stacks! He actually writes poetry!—and we all know what that leads to!”
“Do we?” ventured her brother-in-law. “King David wrote poetry!”
“Richard, don’t garble! I will not have you garble! You know what I mean as well as I do myself! And you know as well as I do what comes of writing poetry! That friend of Walter’s who borrowed ten pounds of you—did he ever pay you?”
“He did, Ann.”
“You didn’t tell me!”
“I did not want to disappoint you!” replied Richard, with a sarcasm she did not feel.
“It was worth telling!” she returned.
“I did not think so. Everybody does not stick to a bank-note like a snail to the wall! I returned him the money.”
“Returned him the money!”
“Yes.”
“Made him a present of ten pounds!”
“Why not?”
“Why then?”
“I had more reasons than one.”
“And no call to explain them! It was just like you to throw away your hard earnings upon a fellow that would never earn anything for himself! As if one such wasn’t enough to take all you’d got!”
“How could he send back the money if that had been the case! He proved himself what I believed him, ready and willing to work! The money went for a fellow’s bread and cheese, and what better money’s worth would you have?”
“You may some day want the bread and cheese for yourself!”
“One stomach is as good as another!”
“It never was and never will be any use talking to some people!” concluded sister Ann, in the same tone she began with, for she seldom lost her temper—though no one would have much minded her losing it, it was so little worth keeping. Rarely angry, she was always disagreeable. The good that was in her had no flower, but bore its fruits, in the shape of good food, clean linen, mended socks, and such like, without any blossom of sweet intercourse to make life pleasant.
Aunt Ann would have been quite justified in looking on poetry with contempt had it been what she imagined it. Like many others, she had decided opinions concerning things of which her idea nowise corresponded with the things themselves.
CHAPTER II. THE ARBOR
While the elders thus conversed in the dusky drawing-room, where the smell of the old roses almost overpowered that of the new, another couple sat in a little homely bower in the garden. It was Walter and his rather distant cousin, Molly Wentworth, who for fifteen years had been as brother and sister. Their fathers had been great friends, and when Molly’s died in India, and her mother speedily followed him, Richard Colman took the little orphan, who was at the time with a nurse in England, home to his house, much to the joy of his wife, who had often longed for a daughter to perfect the family idea. The more motherly a woman is, the nearer will the child of another satisfy the necessities of her motherhood. Mrs. Colman could not have said which child she loved best.
Over the still summer garden rested a weight of peace. It was a night to the very mind of the fastidious, twilight-loving bat, flitting about, coming and going, like a thought we can not help. Most of Walter’s thoughts came and went thus. He had not yet learned to think; he was hardly more than a medium in which thought came and went. Yet when a thought seemed worth anything, he always gave himself the credit of it!—as if a man were author of his own thoughts any more than of his own existence! A man can but live so with the life given him, that this or that kind of thoughts shall call on him, and to this or that kind he shall not be at home. Walter was only at that early stage of development where a man is in love with what he calls his own thoughts.
Even in the dark of the summer-house one might have seen that he was pale, and might have suspected him handsome. In the daylight his gray eyes might almost seem the source of his paleness. His features were well marked though delicate, and had a notable look of distinction. He was above the middle height, and slenderly built; had a wide forehead, and a small, pale mustache on an otherwise smooth face. His mouth was the least interesting feature; it had great mobility, but when at rest, little shape and no attraction. For this, however, his smile made considerable amends.
The girl was dark, almost swarthy, with the clear, pure complexion, and fine-grained skin, which more commonly accompany the hue. If at first she gave the impression of delicacy, it soon changed into one of compressed life, of latent power. Through the night, where she now sat, her eyes were too dark to appear; they sank into it, and were as the unseen soul of the dark; while her mouth, rather large and exquisitely shaped, with the curve of a strong bow, seemed as often as she smiled to make a pale window in the blackness. Her hair came rather low down the steep of her forehead, and, with the strength of her chin, made her face look rounder than seemed fitting.
They sat for a time as silent as the night that infolded them. They were not lovers, though they loved each other, perhaps, more than either knew. They were watching to see the moon rise at the head of the valley on one of whose high sloping sides they sat.
The moon kept her tryst, and revealed a loveliness beyond what the day had to show. She looked upon a wide valley, that gleamed with the windings of a river. She brightened the river, and dimmed in the houses and cottages the lights with which the opposite hill sparkled like a celestial map. Lovelily she did her work in the heavens, her poor mirror-work—all she was fit for now, affording fit room, atmosphere, and medium to young imaginations, unable yet to spread their wings in the sunlight, and believe what lies hid in the light of the workaday world. Nor was what she showed the less true for what lay unshown in shrouded antagonism. The vulgar cry for the real would bury in deepest grave every eternal fact. It is the cry, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” The day would reveal a river stained with loathsome refuse, and rich gardens on hill-sides mantled in sooty smoke and evil-smelling vapors, sent up from a valley where men, like gnomes, toiled and caused to toil too eagerly. What would one think of a housekeeper so intent upon saving that she could waste no time on beauty or cleanliness? How many who would storm if they came home to an untidy house, feel no shadow of uneasiness that they have all day been defiling the house of the Father, nor at night lifted hand to cleanse it! Such men regard him as a fool, whose joy a foul river can poison; yet, as soon as they have by pollution gathered and saved their god, they make haste to depart from the spot they have ruined! Oh, for an invasion of indignant ghosts, to drive from the old places the generation that dishonors the ancient Earth! The sun shows all their disfiguring, but the friendly night comes at length to hide her disgrace; and that well hidden, slowly descends the brooding moon to unveil her beauty.
For there was a thriving town full of awful chimneys in the valley, and the clouds that rose from it ascended above the Colmans’ farm to the great moor which stretched miles and miles beyond it. In the autumn sun its low forest of heather burned purple; in the pale winter it lay white under snow and frost; but through all the year winds would blow across it the dull smell of the smoke from below. Had such a fume risen to the earthly paradise, Dante would have imagined his purgatory sinking into hell. On all this inferno the night had sunk like a foretaste of cleansing death. The fires lay smoldering like poor, hopeless devils, fain to sleep. The world was merged in a tidal wave from the ocean of hope, and seemed to heave a restful sigh under its cooling renovation.
CHAPTER III. A PENNYWORTH OF THINKING
“A penny for your thought, Walter!” said the girl, after a long silence, in which the night seemed at length to clasp her too close.
“Your penny, then! I was thinking how wild and sweet the dark wind would be blowing up there among the ringing bells of the heather.”
“You shall have the penny. I will pay you with your own coin. I keep all the pennies I win of you. What do you do with those you win of me?”
“Oh, I don’t know! I take them because you insist on paying your bets, but—”
“Debts, you mean, Walter! You know I never bet, even in fun! I hate taking things for nothing! I wouldn’t do it!”
“Then what are you making me do now?”
“Take a penny for the thought I bought of you for a penny. That’s fair trade, not gambling. And your thought to-night is well worth a penny. I felt the very wind on the moor for a moment!”
“I’m afraid I sha’n’t get a penny a thought in London!”
“Then you are going to London, Walter?”
“Yes, indeed! What else! What is a man to do here?”
“What is a man to do there?”
“Make his way in the world.”
“But, Walter, please let me understand! indeed I don’t want to be disagreeable! What do you wish to make your way to?”
“To such a position as—”
Here he stopped unsure.
“You mean to fame, and honor, and riches, don’t you, Walter?” ventured Molly.
“No—not riches. Did you ever hear of a poet and riches in the same breath?”
“Oh, yes, I have!—though somehow they don’t seem to go together comfortably. If a poet is rich, he ought to show he couldn’t help it.”
“Suppose he was made a lord, where would he then be without money?”
“If to be a lord one must be rich, he ought never to wish to be a lord. But you do not want to be either lord or millionaire, Walter, do you?”
“I hope I know better!”
“Where does the way you speak of lead then, Walter? To fame?”
“If it did, what would you have to say against it? Even Milton calls it ‘That last infirmity of noble mind!’”
“But he calls it an infirmity, and such a bad infirmity, apparently, that it is the hardest of all to get rid of!”
The fact was that Walter wanted to be—thought he was a poet, but was far from certain—feared indeed it might not be so, therefore desired greatly the verdict of men in his favor, if but for his own satisfaction. Fame was precious to him as determining, he thought, his position in the world of letters—his kingdom of heaven. Well read, he had not used his reading practically enough to perceive that the praise of one generation may be the contempt of another, perhaps of the very next, so that the repute of his time could assure him of nothing. He did not know the worthlessness of the opinion that either grants or withholds fame.
He looked through the dark at his cousin, thinking, “What sets her talking of such things? How can a girl understand a man with his career before him!”
She read him through the night and his silence.
“I know what you are thinking, Walter!” she said. “You are thinking women can’t think. But I should be ashamed not to have common sense, and I can not see the sense of doing anything for a praise that can help nothing and settle nothing.”
“Why then should all men have the desire for it?”
“That they may get rid of it Why have all men vanity? Where would the world be on the way to now, if Jesus Christ had sought the praise of men?”
“But He has it!”
“Not much of it yet, I suspect. He does not care for the praise that comes before obedience!—that’s what I have heard your father say.”
“I never heard him!”
“I have heard him say it often. What could Jesus care for the praise of one whose object in life was the praise of men!”
Walter had not lived so as to destroy the reverence of his childhood. He believed himself to have high ideals. He felt that a man must be upright, or lose his life. So strongly did he feel it, that he imagined himself therefore upright, incapable of a dishonest or mean thing. He had never done, never could, he thought, do anything unfair. But to what Molly said, he had no answer. What he half thought in his silence, was something like this: that Jesus Christ was not the type of manhood, but a man by himself, who came to do a certain work; that it was both absurd and irreverent to talk as if other men had to do as He did, to think and feel like Him; that He was so high above the world He could not care for its fame, while to mere man its praises must be dear. Nor did Walter make any right distinction between the approbation of understanding men, who know the thing they praise, and the empty voice of the unwise many.
In a word, Walter thought, without knowing he did, that Jesus Christ was not a man.
“I think, Molly,” he said, “we had better avoid the danger of irreverence.”
For the sake of his poor reverence he would frustrate the mission of the Son of God; by its wretched mockery justify himself in refusing the judgment of Jesus!
“I know you think kindly of me, Molly,” he went on, “and I should be sorry to have you misunderstand me; but surely a man should not require religion to make him honest! I scorn the notion. A man must be just and true because he is a man! Surely a man may keep clear of the thing he loathes! For my own honor,” he added, with a curl of his lip, “I shall at least do nothing disgraceful, however I may fall short of the angelic.”
“I doubt,” murmured Molly, “whether a man is a man until he knows God.”
But Walter, if he heard the words, neither heeded nor answered them. He was far from understanding the absurdity of doing right from love of self.
He was no hypocrite. He did turn from what seemed to him degrading. But there were things degrading which he did not see to be such, things on which some men to whom he did not yet look up, would have looked down. Also there was that in his effort to sustain his self-respect which was far from pure: he despised such as had failed; and to despise the human because it has fallen, is to fall from the human. He had done many little things he ought to be, and one day must be, but as yet felt no occasion to be—ashamed of. So long as they did not trouble him they seemed nowhere. Many a youth starts in life like him, possessed with the idea, not exactly formulated, that he is a most precious specimen of pure and honorable humanity. It comes of self-ignorance, and a low ideal taken for a high one. Such are mainly among the well-behaved, and never doubt themselves a prize for any woman. They color their notion of themselves with their ideal, and then mistake the one for the other. The mass of weaknesses and conceits that compose their being they compress into their ideal mold of man, and then regard the shape as their own. What composes it they do not heed.
No man, however, could look in the refined face of Walter Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, “The imaginative intellect.” He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He would stand wrapped in the delight of what he counted its beauty, and yet more in the delight that his was the mind that had generated such a meteor! To be able to think pretty things was to him a gigantic distinction! A thought that could never be soul to any action, would be more valuable to him than the perception of some vitality of relation demanding the activity of the whole being. He would call thoughts the stars that glorify the firmament of humanity, but the stars of his firmament were merely atmospheric—pretty fancies, external likenesses. That the grandest thing in the world is to be an accepted poet, is the despotic craze of a vast number of the weak-minded and half-made of both sexes. It feeds poetic fountains of plentiful yield, but insipid and enfeebling flow, the mere sweat of weakness under the stimulus of self-admiration.
CHAPTER IV. A LIVING FORCE
Walter was the very antipode of the Molly he counted commonplace, one outside the region of poetry; she had a passion for turning a think into a thing. She had a strong instinctive feeling that she was in the world to do something, and she saw that if nobody tried to keep things right, they would go terribly wrong: what then could she be there for but to set or keep things right! and if she could do nothing with the big things, she must be the busier with the little things! Besides, who could tell how much the little might have to do with the big things! The whole machine depended on every tiny wheel! She could not order the clouds, but she could keep some weeds from growing, and then when the rain came, they would not take away the good of it!
The world might be divided into those who let things go, and those who do not; into the forces and facts, the slaves and fancies; those who are always doing something on God’s creative lines, and those that are always grumbling and striving against them.
“Another penny for your thought, Walter!” said Molly.
“I am not going to deal with you. This time you would not think it worth a penny! Why are you so inquisitive about my thoughts?”
“I want to know what you meant when you said the other day that thoughts were better than things.”
Walter hesitated. The question was an inclined plane leading to unknown depths of argument!
“See, Walter,” said Molly, “here is a narcissus—a pheasant’s eye: tell me the thought that is better than this thing!”
How troublesome girls were when they asked questions!
“Well,” he said, not very logically, “that narcissus has nothing but air around it; my thought of the narcissus has mind around it.”
“Then a thought is better than a thing because it has thought round about it?”
“Well, yes.”
“Did the thing come there of itself, or did it come of God’s thinking?”
“Of God’s thinking.”
“And God is always the same?”
“Yes.”
“Then God’s thought is about the narcissus still—and the narcissus is better than your thought of it!”
Walter was silent.
“I should so like to understand!” said Molly. “If you have a thought more beautiful than the narcissus, Walter, I should like to see it! Only if I could see it, it would be a thing, would it not? A thing must be a think before it be a thing. A thing is a ripe think, and must be better than a think—except it lose something in ripening—which may very well be with man’s thoughts, but hardly with God’s! I will keep in front of the things, and look through them to the thoughts behind them. I want to understand! If a thing were not a thought first, it would not be worth anything! And everything has to be thought about, else we don’t see what it is! I haven’t got it quite!”
Instead of replying, Walter rose, and they walked to the house side by side in silence.
“Could a thought be worth anything that God had never cared to think?” said Molly to herself as they went.