The Jessica Letters Part 11

"And when he smoked he'd lay back in his chair and stare at the rings he made like they was somebody, and once I saw him look jolly and kiss his hand to 'em."

"Oh! did you, Jack? then what did he do?"

"Caught me looking at him, and told me to go to bed."

"Mean thing!" I comforted. "But run along now and put the puppy to bed; Mr. Towers was very rude to you!"

I was so happy I wished to be alone, for no man, I am persuaded, ever smiled and kissed his hand to Brahma. Dear Philip, if you only knew how jealous I am sometimes of your Indian reveries, you would understand how I could consider Jack's treacherous little revelation almost as an answer to a prayer.

XLI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

Dear Jessica, you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is false or that I have discarded my opinion of the spiritual supremacy of those old forest philosophers of India, but I have come to see how unsuited their principles of life must be for our western world. They beheld a great gap between the body and the spirit, and their remedy was, not to construct a bridge between the two, but by some tremendous and dizzy leap to pa.s.s over the yawning gulf. We, to whom the life of the body is so real, we who have devoted the whole ingenuity of our mechanical civilisation to the building up of a comfortable home for that body, turn away from such spiritual legerdemain with distrust, almost with terror. A man among us to-day who would take the religion of India as his guide is in danger of losing this world without gaining the other. No, our salvation, if it comes, must come from Greece rather than from India. Some day I shall write my recantation and point out the way of salvation according to the Gospel of Plato. Indeed, since love has become a reality to me, I have learned to read a new meaning in this philosophy of reconciliation instead of renunciation. Tell your father all this. Some way we must bring this uncertainty to an end. I must know that you are to be my wife.

And so Jack thinks a fuliginous pipe holds the first place in my affections. The little rascal! And why don't you make that precocious imp write to me? Do I not stand to him _in loco parentis_? But, joking aside, he does not know and you can scarcely guess the full companionship of my pipe these days. As the grey smoke curls up about me in my abandonment, (for I never even read during this sacramental act,) there arises before my eyes in that marvellous cloudland the image of many wind-tossed trees down whose murmuring avenue treads the vision of a dryad, a woman; and as she moves the waving boughs bend down and whisper: "Jessica, sweet Jessica, he loves you; and when our leaves appear and all things awake into life, he will come to gather your sweetness unto himself."

.la begin XLII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

It seems unnatural for me to address you in this manner--as if I had cast off the dearer part of myself by the formality. But no other course is open to me after what has happened.

After praying and fasting till I really feared for his reason, father thinks he received a direct answer from Heaven concerning his duty toward us. He declares it has been made absolutely clear to him that if he deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit, and not only is his personal d.a.m.nation imminent, but his ministry will become as sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder for me by any protest, either in person or letter. No appeal can ever be made against a fanatic's decision, because it is based not upon reason, but upon superst.i.tion, a sort of spiritual insanity that becomes violent when opposed.

And father insists upon keeping Jack for the same reason he preserves me from your corrupting influence. He thinks the boy is another little brand he has s.n.a.t.c.hed from your burning. And I hope you will consent to his remaining with us, for he is a great comfort now to my sad heart. He will write to you, of course, for father cannot but recognise that you have in a way a prior authority over him.

Nothing more is to be said now that I have the right to say. I have tried to take refuge in the biologist's definition of love,--that it is essentially a fleeting emotion, a phantom experience. It is like the blossoms in May; to-day they are all about us, making the whole earth an epic in colours, to-morrow they are scattered in the dust, lost in the gale. Just so I try to wish that I may lose some memories, some tenderness out of my heart. But I have not the strength yet to take leave of all my glory and happiness, nor can I say that I wish you to forget,--only that it is best for us both to forget now if we can.

XLIII

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR JESSICA:

My first impulse on reading your letter was to come immediately to Morningtown and carry you away by storm; but second thoughts have prevailed and I am writing merely to bid you good-bye. For, after all, if I came, what could I do? I would not see you clandestinely and so mingle deceit with our love, and I could not see you in your father's house while he feels as he does. It would be fruitless too; you have come to the meeting of ways and have chosen. I think you have chosen wrong, for the world belongs to the young and not to the old. Life is ours with all the prophecy and hopes of the future. Ah, what mockery lurked in those words we read together in the shadow of your beloved trees, while your heart lay in my hands fluttering like a captive bird:

So let us live and love till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout.

And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my ears,--that solemn _nox perpetua_, that long unending night, for every joy you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of pa.s.sion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? G.o.d help me then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have brought only misery to me--and this is the fruit of love's battle with religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you.

And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world, and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name.

But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses.

And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting loves. And once again, good-bye.

(Enclosed with the foregoing)

DEAR SIR:

My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me a.s.sure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and esteem.

Faithfully yours, EZRA DOANE.

XLIV

EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not a.s.sure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy, far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the G.o.ds willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?

And thus from a brief dream of love I slip back into encircling shadows. I move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone.

Even the pa.s.sion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past.

And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach, beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my pa.s.sion. But that pa.s.sed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, pa.s.sed away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined that the inst.i.tutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of Fate that warns us to be humble.

And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection: _Dabit deus his quoque finem_--G.o.d will give an end to these things also.

XLV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest.

Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly.

Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree, holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw the woman was weeping quietly. There was no outcry; no kiss even pa.s.sed between them; only a long gaze, a quivering of the hands, and he was gone.

I saw the woman stand a moment looking hungrily after him and then walk away still weeping. And the sight stung me with madness. What is the meaning of these endless meetings and partings--meeting and parting till the last great separation comes and then no more? Are our lives no better than glinting pebbles that are tossed on the beach and never rest?

Suddenly the blood surged up into my head. It was as if all the forces of my physical being had concentrated into one frenzied desire to possess the thing I loved. For a moment I reeled as if smitten with a stroke, and then without reasoning, scarcely knowing what I did, started into a stumbling run. Only the evident amazement of the strollers on the Avenue when I left the Park brought me back partially to my senses, yet the madness still surged through my veins. All my philosophy was gone, all my remoteness from life; I was stung by that fury that comes to beast and man alike; I was bewildered by the feeling that my emotions were no longer my own, but were shared by the mob of strangers in the street. It was the pa.s.sion of love, pure and simple, unsophisticated by questioning; and it had turned my brain. Withal there ran through me an insane desire to commit some atrocious crime, to waylay and strike, to speak words of outrageous insult. I do verily believe that only the opportunity was wanting, some chance conflict of the street or temptation of solitude, to have changed these demoniac impulses to action--I whose most violent physical achievement has been to cross over Broadway. It is good that I am home and the blood has left my brain. What shall I think of this if I read it ten years hence?

XLVI

JACK TO PHILIP