The Dreamer Part 31

Ever since they had left Philadelphia the Poes had clung, in memory, to the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden. There, they told each other, they had a home to their minds. It was the dear "Muddie," their ever faithful earthly Providence to whom they were already so deeply indebted, who discovered in the suburb of Fordham, a tiny cottage which had much of the charm of which they dreamed--even to the infinitesimal price for which it could be rented.

It was only a story and a half high, but there was a commodious and cheerful room down stairs, with four windows, and from the narrow hallway a quaint little winding stair led to an attic which though its roof was low and sloping contained a room large enough to serve the double purpose of bed-chamber and study.

There was a pleasant porch across the front of the cottage which would make an ideal summer sitting-room and study, when the half-starved rose-bush upon it should have been nursed and trained to screen it from the sun.

The cottage stood upon a green hill, half-buried in cherry trees--just then in full bloom and filled with bird-song. Nearby was a grove of pines and a short walk away was the Harlem River, with its picturesque, high, stone bridge. It was an abode fit to be in Paradise, Edgar told Virginia and the Mother, and within a few days they and their few small possessions--including Catalina--were as well established there as if they had never known any other home.

The moving in recalled the earliest days of their life at Spring Garden.

Again "Muddie" was busy, not with soap and water only, but with the whitewash brush. Again their hearts were blythe with the pleasing sense of change--of the opening up of a new vista of there was no knowing what happiness--just as children welcome any change for the change itself, always expecting to find pleasant surprises upon a new and untried road.

But there was a difference in themselves since the moving into the Spring Garden Cottage, which had been so gradual that they were scarcely conscious of it. The years since then lay heavily upon them. They showed plainly in the deepened lines in Mother Clemm's face, in the deepened anxiety in her Mater Dolorosa eyes, in the frost upon the locks that peeped from under her immaculate widow's cap. They showed in the fragile figure of Virginia--once so full of sweet curves;--in the ethereal look that had come into the once rounded cheeks and full pouting lips, in the transparency of her skin and in the sweet eyes that when not filled with the merry laughter that had through thick and thin filled her dwelling place with sunshine and music, had a faraway expression in them, as if they were looking into another world.

They showed most of all in The Dreamer himself. To him these years had been years of fierce battle; battle, not for wealth, but for bread; battle not so much for selfish ambition as for his country, and in a high sense--for he had fought valiantly to win a place for America in the world of letters; battle with himself--with the devils that sought mastery over his spirit--the devil of excitement and exhilaration that lay in the bottom of the cup, the devil of blessed forgetfulness, accompanied by magical dreams that dwelt in the heart of the poppy, the devil of melancholy and gloom to whom he felt a certain charm in yielding himself, the devil of restlessness and dissatisfaction with whatsoever lay within his grasp--a dog-and-shadow sort of desire to drop the prize in hand in a chase after that of his vision,--the impish devil of the perverse.

At times he had been victorious, at other times there had been defeat.

But always the warfare had been fierce and the scars remained to tell the story. They remained in the emaciation and the deep lines of his still beautiful face; remained in the drooping curves of the mouth; remained above all in the ineffable sadness of the large, deep, luminous eyes.

Yet that sweet spring day when the three were moving into Fordham cottage, the years that had wrought upon them thus were as they had not been.

Their little possessions had dwindled pitifully. Virginia's golden harp that had been the glory of the sitting-room was gone to pay a debt. One by one others of their household G.o.ds had provided bread. But the spurt of prosperity the damages recovered in the "Thomas Done Brown" suit brought, made possible a new checked matting for the sitting-room floor and so bright and clean did it look that they felt it almost furnished the room of itself. It would mean much to them in saving the dear Mother the most laborious feature of her labor. It was a more difficult matter than formerly for her to get down upon her knees to scrub the floor and it had become impossible for the frail Virginia to help her in such work; yet as long as the floor was bare she had kept it as spotless and nearly as white as new fallen snow. When the matting had been laid, Eddie took her beautiful worn hands in his and kissed first one and then the other.

"No more scrubbing of the sitting-room floor, dear hands," he playfully said.

In addition to the matting there were in the way of furnishings only a few chairs, some book-shelves, a picture or two, vases for flowers, some sea-sh.e.l.ls, and, of course, Edgar's desk. Above the desk hung the pencil-sketch of "Helen" from which somehow, he was always able to draw inspiration. Sometimes the wings of his imagination would droop, his pen would halt. In desperation he would look up at the picture.--Could it be (he would ask himself) that her spirit had come to dwell in this representation of her which he had made from memory? Her eyes seemed to look at him through the eyes in the picture--the past came back to him as it sometimes did when the mingled scent of magnolias and roses on the summer night air placed him back beneath her window.

From this portrait of the lovely dead upon the wall, from the miniature of the lovely dead that he carried always next his heart, and from the lovely being who walked, in life, by his side, but toward whose bosom death had this long time pointed a warning finger, came all his inspiration in the new, as in each of the old homes.

Upstairs, close under the sloping roof, was the bare bed-room, barer than the one below--for there was no checked matting upon the floor, and there were only such pieces of furniture as were an absolute necessity; but against a small window in the end of the room leaned a great cherry-tree. The windows were open and the faint fragrance of the blossoms floated in with the song and gossip of the nesting birds. Edgar and Virginia laughed together like happy children and told each other that they would "play" that their room under the roof was a nest in the tree--which was so much more poetical than living in an attic.

And roundabout the cottage on the green hill, with its screen of blossoming cherry trees and (hardby) its dusky grove of Heaven-kissing pines, and its views of the river and walk leading to the stone-arched bridge, the three who lived for each other only had erelong reconstructed the wonderful dream-valley--the Valley of the Many-Colored Gra.s.s.

And the cottage at Fordham became a Mecca to the "literati of New York,"

even as the cottage at Spring Garden had been a Mecca to the literati of Philadelphia. Among those who made pilgrimages thither were many of the "starry sisterhood of poetesses"--chief of whom was the fair Frances Osgood. Yet in his retirement The Dreamer enjoyed for the first time since he had left Spring Garden long intervals of relief from company, and in the pine-wood and on the bridge overlooking the river, he found what his soul had long hungered for--silence and solitude. Under their influence he conceived the idea of a new work--a more ambitious work than anything he had hitherto attempted--a work in the form of a prose poem upon no less subject than "The Universe," whose deep secrets it was designed to reveal, with the t.i.tle "Eureka!"

Ah, Dreamer, could we but call the curtain here!--Could we but leave you in your cottage on the hill-top, overlooking the river, with the trees full of blossom and music about it, and the wood inviting your fancy, where as you pace back and forth with your hands clasped behind you your great deep eyes are filled with the mellow light that illumines them when they are turned inward exploring the treasures of your brain--leave you deep in the high joy of meditation upon G.o.d's Universe!

But "the play is the tragedy, 'Man,'" and it is only for the dread "Conqueror" to give the word, "Curtain down--lights out!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

All too soon the Wolf scratched at the door of the cottage on Fordham Hill. All too soon the shadow that had so often enveloped the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden--the shadow from the wing of the Angel of Death--fell upon the cottage among the cherry trees.

The Dreamer sat before his desk under the picture of "Helen," for hours and hours, or when Virginia was too ill to be up, at a little table beside her bed in the chamber which was like a nest in a tree. In fair weather and foul the stately figure and sorrowful eyes of Mother Clemm were to be seen upon the streets of New York as she went about offering the narrow rolls of ma.n.u.script for sale as fast as they were finished, or trying to collect the little, over-due checks from those already sold and published. Yet, with all they could do, had it not been for the generous gifts of friends the three must needs have succ.u.mbed to cold and hunger. And all the time the poison that fell from Rufus Griswold's tongue was at work. Even the visits of the angels of mercy who ministered to him and his invalid wife in this their darkest hour were made, by the working of this poison, to appear as things of evil. How was one of the furtive eye and the black heart of a Rufus Griswold to understand love of woman of which reverence was a chief ingredient?

These ministering angels--Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Gove, Mrs. Marie Louise Shew, and others whose love for the racked and broken Dreamer and for herself Virginia so perfectly understood--Virginia the guileless, with her sense for spiritual things and her warm, responsive heart--brought to the cottage not only encouragement and sympathy, but medicines and delicacies which were offered in such manner that even one of Edgar Poe's sensitive pride could accept them without shame.

Summer pa.s.sed, and autumn, and winter drew on--filling the dwellers in Fordham cottage with fear of they knew not what miseries. There had been ups and downs; there had been happiness and woe; there had been times of strength and times of weakness--of weakness when The Dreamer, unable to hold out in the desperate battle of life as he knew it; hungry, cold and heartbroken at the sight of his wife with that faraway look in her eyes, had fallen--had sought and found forgetfulness only to know a horrible awakening that was despair and that was oftentimes accompanied by illness. Now, there was added to every thing else the knowledge that she--his wife--his heartsease flower, and the Mother, in spite of all his striving for them, were objects of charity.

When some of his friends, in the kindness of their hearts, published in one of the papers an appeal to the admirers of Edgar Poe's work for aid for him and his family in their distress, he came out in a proud denial of their need for aid. The need was great enough, G.o.d knows!--but the pitiful exposure was more painful than the pangs of cold and hunger.

At last the day drew near of whose approach all who had visited the cottage knew but of which they had schooled themselves not to think.

January 1847 was waning. For many days the ground had not been seen. The branches of the cherry trees gleamed--not with flowers, but with icicles--as they leaned against the windows of the bed-chamber under the roof. Sometimes as the winter blast stirred them, they knocked against the panes with a sound the knuckles of a skeleton might have made. There was not the slightest suggestion of the soft-voiced "Ligeia"

in that harsh, horrible sound.

Upon the bed the girl-wife lay well nigh as still and as white as the snow outside. Now and again she coughed--a weak, ghostly sort of cough.

Over her wasted body, in addition to the thin bed-clothing, lay her husband's old military cape. Against her breast nestled Catalina, purring contentedly while she kept the heart of her mistress warm a little longer. Near the foot of her bed the Mother sat--a more perfect picture than ever of the Mater Dolorosa--chafing the tiny cold feet; at the head her husband bent over her and chafed her hands. About the room, but not near enough to intrude upon the sacred grief of the stricken mother and husband, sat several of the good women whose friendship had been the mainstay of the three. Through the window, gaining brilliance from the ice-laden branches outside, fell the rays of the setting sun, glorifying the room and the bed. Scarce a word was spoken, but upon the request of the dying girl for music one of the visitors began to sing in low, tremulous tones, the beautiful old hymn, "Jerusalem the Golden." To the man, bowed beneath his woe as it had been a physical weight, the words came as a knell, and a blacker despair than ever settled upon his wild eyes and haggard face. To his dying wife they were a promise--the smile upon her lip and the look of wonder in her eyes showed that she was already beholding the glories of which the old hymn told.

And so wandered her spirit out of the cold and the want and the gloom that had darkened and chilled the Valley of the Many-Colored Gra.s.s, into the regions of "bliss beyond compare."

But her husband, left behind, was as the man in his own story, "Silence," who sat upon a rock--the gray and ghastly rock of "Desolation." "With his brow lofty with thought and his eyes wild with care and the fables of sorrow and weariness and disgust with mankind written in furrows upon his cheek," he sat upon the lonely grey rock and leaned his head upon his hand and looked out upon the desolation. She was no more--no more!--the maiden who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him;--his wife--in all the storm and stress of his troubled life his true heartsease!

Out of the desolation he perceived a thing that was formless, that was invisible--but that was appalling--_silence_. Silence that made him shrink and quake--he that had loved, had longed for silence! Silence would crush him now. And solitude!--how often he had craved it! He had solitude a plenty now.

Like a hunted animal, he looked about for a refuge from the Silence and the Solitude that gave him chase, but he knew that however fast he might flee they would be hard on his heels.

How white she was--and how still! Nevermore to hear the sounds of her low sweet voice, nevermore to hear her merry laughter, nevermore her light foot-step that--like her voice and her laugh--was music to his ears! Nevermore!--for she was wrapped in the Silence--the last great silence of all.

Nevermore would she sit beside him as he worked, or plant flowers about the door, or lay her hand in his and explore with him the wonderful dream-valley; nevermore lay her sweet lips upon his or raise the snow-white lids from her eyes and shine on him from under their long, jetty fringes. Henceforth a Solitude as vast as the Silence would be his portion.

Their sweet friend Marie Louise Shew robed her for the tomb and over the snow they bore her to rest in a vault in the village churchyard.

Then, for many weeks Edgar Poe lay in the bed-chamber under the roof, desperately ill--for the most part unconscious. The mother bereaved of her child had no time to give herself over to mourning, for as she had wrestled with death for the possession of a son when he was first given into her keeping, even more fiercely did she wrestle now that he must be son and daughter too. The kind friends who had made Virginia's last days comfortable aided her in the battle, and finally the victory was won,--pale, shaken, wraith-like, the personification of woe made beautiful--The Dreamer came forth into the air of heaven once more, and as spring opened was to be seen, as of old, walking among the pines or beside the river.

And ever and anon his clear-cut, chastened features and his great, solemn eyes were turned skyward--especially at night when the heavens were sown with stars; for from some one of those bright worlds, peradventure, would she whose absence made the Solitude and the Silence be looking down upon him. And as he gazed and dreamed, high thoughts took form in his brain--thoughts of the "Material and Spiritual Universe; its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny,"--thoughts to be made into a book dedicated to "Those who feel rather than to those who think--to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities"--thoughts for his projected work, "Eureka!" Out of the Silence and the Solitude came the development and completion of this strange prose poem.

Like an uneasy spirit he wandered, night and day, up and down the river bank, in the wood or in the churchyard that held the tomb of his Virginia.

Meanwhile the Mother still kept the cottage bright. She asked no questions when he went forth, night or day, or when he came in, night or day; but her heart bled for him and sometimes when he would throw himself into a deep chair and sit by the hour, seemingly staring at nothing, but really (she knew by the hara.s.sed and brooding look in the great, deep eyes) "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before," she would steal gently to his side and with her long, slim, expressive fingers stroke the large brow until natural sleep brought respite from painful memories. Her ministrations were grateful to him, yet he was barely conscious of her presence. Not even for her, and far less for any other human being, did he feel kinship at this time. His vision, when not turned within, looked far beyond human companionship to the wonders of the universe--the stars and the mountains and the forests and the rivers; but his only real companion was his own stricken heart.

Many times he said to his heart in the prophetic words of his fantastic creation, "Morella,"

"Thy days henceforth shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over, and joy is not gathered twice in a lifetime as the roses of Paestum twice in a year."

Yet as the back is fitted to the burden and the wind tempered to the shorn lamb, so again, as in his early griefs, the sorrow of The Dreamer was not all pain, there was an element of beauty--of poetry--in it that made it possible to be endured. Out of the depths of the Solitude and the Silence he said to his soul,

"It is a happiness to wonder--it is a happiness to dream." And more than ever before in his life his whole existence had become a dream--the realities being mere shadows.

To dream, to wonder, to work; to work, to wonder, to dream--thus were the hours, the hours of sorrow, spent. The hours of which the poet lost all count, for between his dreams and his work so intensely full were the hours of vivid mental living that each day was as a lifetime in itself.