Chapter IV: Part III: Which shows how the editor (4)

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 is _two_ men instead of one! And after he is married, I suppose he will be a domestic _trinity_, 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 are _two_ of you, and only _one_ of 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 what _I_ charged as selfishness, _you_ call "a prayer." I am confused by your argument; it seems incontestable. But do you know, my Philip, 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 invisible birds 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 abandon of love and the resentment of understanding. We know, and we do not know, and we _feel_. What we know is of little consequence, what we feel is written upon the faces of each succeeding generation. But what we do _not_ know 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 in upon 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 natural question. 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 much guile 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 course _you_ are the heathen, Philip, and of course _I_ am the "vain thing." But that is not father's idea. The vain thing you imagine is 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.

P.S.--What do you think, _our_ little 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!

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 a sort 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 believe the 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 a few 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's _Da 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 desert into 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 before me? 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 of that _magnum opus_ is 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. He seems 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.

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 in her 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,--and mind 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 been finished 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 I _wish_ to 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 most trivial 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 be _so_ glad 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 your _magnum opus_. No wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on 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.

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 out the 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 discovered a 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_.

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 grandfather is 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 how _our_ happiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and you shall teach me to lose this haunting sense of 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 the _AEneid_ became a symbol 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 the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was
before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the
_loetas segetes_ seemed 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

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 the _levium 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 I come 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

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 know _you_. 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 vanish from the face of the earth! But if you come upon me unawares, I shall have been spared that consciousness of _confession_ face 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 child about. 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.

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 role is 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.

[3] Alluding to a request not found in this correspondence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Third Part

which shows how the editor again visits Jessica in the country, and how love is buffeted between philosophy and religion.

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 and added 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 you that 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 rapt out 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 and will 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.

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 tryst with 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, you _could_ not be jealous!

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 an anthology 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 Latin quotation 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 out into 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 aerial 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 something fantastic 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!

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!