The Debatable Land Part 7

One night in January he came down Charles Street towards the church. He had fallen into the habit of playing an hour or two in the latter part of the evening, and people in the neighborhood had accepted the custom.

Some formed habits of their own to meet it, and went to their windows regularly about nine to hark whether he played that night. It was not an agreement, but the silent adaptation in close communities of habit to habit.

The snow was falling, blown by a keen wind, and the great side window of Mrs. Mavering's house glowed warmly through the sharp, slanting lines of the snow. It occurred to him that he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering that night than summon only spectral visitations from Saint Mary's organ. At that moment Helen clung with warm fingers to Mrs. Mavering's hand, saying, "I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful."

Chapter VIII

Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of the Individual

Helen put her forehead against the cold window.

"It's snowing. Do you think he'll play to-night? But he would if he knew we wanted to hear him, wouldn't he?"

"If he knew that we knew he knew it, he probably would."

The fire glowed and snapped, and reflected its varying mood on the andirons and the red-and-white tiles of the fireplace. Mrs. Mavering, garmented in black and dusky red, lay back in a deep chair, and the firelight played across her face and dress in a more subdued manner than on the tiles and andirons, as if it felt that was not the right place to be familiar and reckless.

"Why?"

"Men take great pains to be nice to us if they see their sacrifice is in the way to be appreciated. They would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service. Oh, it isn't like that, dear eyes!--not nearly so solemn!" Helen had come and curled herself at Mrs. Mavering's feet to consider this proposition. "If you always look at me so you'll frighten me out of all my little cynicisms, and I think them pretty."

Mrs. Mavering reminded one of something costly, like a vase upon which some master-workman had spent himself, careless of time, considering only line and curve, and how it might be made to glow from within and be more than worthy of the palace of the king; and as if afterwards, when the palace had been sacked, and fallen with ruin and wailing, and the vase had somehow escaped destruction, it had come to stand in the guarded corner of a museum. In this meaning Thaddeus had spoken of her as something to be seen rather than some one to know. Thaddeus's social instinct was quick, and sometimes accurate. He need not have been so mistaken, understood as implying the general facts of a period in Mrs.

Mavering's life.

Helen demanded personality even of things. She inveterately accused persons of being persons, and brought them to her judgment bar to account for themselves. Thaddeus thought Mrs. Mavering should be looked at for art's sake, for the improvement of the tone of society; that an official sign, so to speak, was somewhere at hand, warning that no one was permitted to touch her humanly.

Helen had not seen the sign. They had met first in the dark and had been introduced by a sigh, and she had never been aware of the barrier with which Mrs. Mavering was observed to be surrounded. Only Mrs. Mavering was given to riddling. She acknowledged herself a person to Helen, stormed by her headlong admiration, but she never accounted for herself at the bar, or, as Helen stated it. "Whenever you say something, and I ask what you mean, you always act as if you didn't like what you meant, but you never say what it was." So far as our sayings come out of ourselves and ourselves out of our experience, if part of the experience were such that we wished to fly from that part of ourselves and could only flutter the more about it, supposing this to be Mrs. Mavering's case, her impulse to dodge Helen's bar of equity might be understood--and the fact, too, that she found herself ever provoking an arraignment. Helen had to dismiss case after case for lack of evidence, and because the defendant wanted to play something else. So that she only wondered now what Mrs. Mavering meant by "Men would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service," and whether one would naturally become difficult by being ten years older.

"I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful," she said, and the organist of Saint Mary's stood outside the while and thought he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering than call spectres from the peaks of his gilded organ-pipes that blown, desolate night.

Of course, one could not become beautiful like Mrs. Mavering--not in a hundred years. One's nose would not become straight, one's hair black and heapy, nor eyes change from gray to amber and brown; and in order to become as difficult it would be necessary to be married and have one's husband become unapparent without becoming dead. Mrs. Mavering was an arduous ideal. Helen doubted that she would ever achieve it.

"Then I must call you Sir Helen, because you're such a valiant knight, and always charging something, and driving a spear into the middle of an idea, as if it were a dragon. But my ideas are not honest, so they have no middles, and it only makes them look mussy."

"Then," said Helen, quickly, "if I'm a knight I choose to be in love with you. You're locked in a tower and I'm after an ogre, only I don't make out very well what he's doing. Of course, he growls and rages."

"I dare say he does."

"Well, then, Saint Denis Montjoie! It is a beautiful fight."

Gard was announced and presently came in. Mrs. Mavering said:

"Can you play a game? You haven't met Miss Bourn? She is pursuing an ogre around a tower. I am locked in the tower. She doesn't care whether I like being rescued or not. She isn't sure yet about the ogre, but thinks she needs one."

"I am a humble person; so is an ogre, isn't he?" said Gard. "Maybe I'd do. An ogre ought not to be proud."

"But he always is," said Helen, eagerly. "He keeps a tower to be proud in."

"Where is my tower, then?"

Helen hesitated. She had never seen him near before. He looked a little singular, not quite like other people, a little weary and very white-faced, a little impenetrable. She remembered all he had said to her through Saint Mary's organ, things sensitive and intimate.

The process of putting together two groups of impressions to make one personality is difficult, and one ought to have time. But he insisted on knowing where the tower was. "I don't know how to be an ogre without it," so that she said, hastily, "You must have one in the organ-loft,"

and was not at all sure that it meant anything, if it were not an entire mistake, and was glad when they sat down without calling for more explanations. She slid down to her old place by Mrs. Mavering and half listened to them, and half studied a problem, to see what was honestly true about it, or whether it had any middle.

When Helen was little, she used to compose parables and sermons, and sometimes wept to think how beautiful they were, and declaimed them to her mother, who had only one comment to make. It was, "Why, Helen!" Such was the parable of the Perfect Cat, who lived a life of absolute sinlessness. There was a sermon on David and Absalom--"Oh, Absalom, my son!" It was tearful at that point. But the moral was that Absalom was hung by his hair--a sorrowful incident. People should not make their children have long hair. "And I have asked you three times to-day, 'Mother, please, may I cut it off?' and you just said, 'Why, Helen!' and I'm not going to ask again. I'm going to put you in the closing prayer."

So that now she put her conclusion into a sermon, to the effect that every one had a tower in which part of himself or herself was a proud ogre, and another part was a valiant knight who ought to eventually thrust a lance into the middle of the ogre to make him humble and social, or else dead, so that both together might become a perfect character before the benediction. Because a proper sermon was like a story, inasmuch as in the first part you made things look as badly as possible and talked about wickedness, so that everybody might become interested; and in the last part you talked about goodness and made goodness succeed after difficulty, so that everybody might become calm; and in the benediction you told everybody to be happy ever after.

"Do you read Emerson," Gard was saying to Mrs. Mavering--"the Ma.s.sachusetts lecturer? He says, 'The Eden of G.o.d is bare and grand'; but I don't see anything more than a personal fancy in that. Anyway, the poets would be wrong in putting music in such an Eden. An organ is full of sin and sorrow. The pipes always seem to me to hold so many human emotions compressed and stowed away, like the genius in Solomon's bottle. Say one of them is a pure aspiration and one of them a snarling desire. You set the snarling desire chasing the pure aspiration, and you have one of the simple formulae for expressing humanity. It isn't Eden."

"Oh, that's like my knight and ogre!" cried Helen. "Do you do sermons and parables? But you have the wrong one running away."

Gard looked surprised, and then laughed. "It was all going on round and round a tower, wasn't it? And if the tower were small you couldn't tell which was running away."

"But _they_ would know!" said Helen, triumphantly.

"But they might differ, or they might forget, on account of going so fast. Then they'd have to stop and ask the lady in the tower to straighten them out."

Helen looked puzzled, felt that the parable was too mixed to mean anything now, and suspected Gard of mixing it frivolously.

"The lady in the tower is too dizzy, you both run about so fast," said Mrs. Mavering. "But she thinks Helen would never run away."

"There's no chance for me to be proud in this tower," said Gard, and Helen murmured:

"It's all mixed up."

"Music, after all," said Gard, breaking a few moments' silence, "leaves you unsatisfied at your strongest. It is misty emotion. It has wings, but no feet. You seem to want something that has more grip and bite."

"That is heresy from you," said Mrs. Mavering.

"I've made a creed of heresy, you know. That Ma.s.sachusetts lecturer preaches the creed, 'Every man his own issue, for conformity is death.'

But I don't know whether he has said that conformity to the forms you have made yourself is as much death as conformity to those made by other men. I call myself a musician, and something keeps asking me, 'Is that all?' It seems to think it time I called myself something else."

"Then why not call yourself a still better musician?"

"Of course, one needn't stand still altogether. You become more skilful with your fingers and feet, and learn better how to render and interpret the emotions, musical ideas, more or less eccentric crotchets, of other men, the best of them dead. Their emotions are not so important, are they? Haven't we eyes of our own to see that gra.s.s is green? Oh yes, we compose. Have you seen my new book? It consists of a prelude, that is very bad, and highly praised by competent critics in journals; an offertory, in which Charity appears as despondent of the results of the collection--I'm conceited about that piece--and a symphony in five movements, which is a padded invalid. Room enough for improvement, you see. I might learn to symbolize a mood more accurately. It wouldn't make the mood any less futile. The point is really that it doesn't get you out of a rut, if you make the rut even a very good rut of its kind. The more you dig at it the deeper it grows. There is too much that you never see and never know. You take the shape of your mould. Do you know Dr.

Holmes' 'Chambered Nautilus'? The nautilus made a larger sh.e.l.l for himself every time he changed, but the poet didn't comment on his making each sh.e.l.l of the same shape as the last. He was a stale conformer after all, that nautilus."

"Do you think he would have done better if he had tried to make a sh.e.l.l for himself like an oyster's or a crab's?"

"He wouldn't have done better in the matter of sh.e.l.ls. But personally he would have gone up the scale of intelligence."

"He would have been very uncomfortable."

"Oh, it wasn't claimed that conformity was not comfortable. It was only said to be death."