The Jessica Letters Part 14

LVII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

There are two paths of consolation and we have strayed from both. There is the way of the _Imitation_ trod by those who have perceived the illusion of this life and the reality of the spirit,--the way over whose entrance stand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto G.o.d, the further doth he recede from all earthly solace." And truly he who hath boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows trample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that other way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,--the way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before the G.o.ds; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doing righteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity here or in the _Imitation_, for compa.s.sion after all is a perilous guest, and only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.

And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to G.o.d and to a man's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levelling human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as Millet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with the Hoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art with n.o.ble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.

LVIII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least he had to proclaim to the world,--the ancient imperishable truth that man lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he saw, too, as no one to-day seems to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were really playing into the hands of those who find in the acc.u.mulation of riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that attains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight of judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end certain decay.

LIX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

_Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, and it only remains now to see this labour of months--of years, rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book, in this heedless, mult.i.tudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend Sydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee." I have tried to show how from one ideal to another mankind has pa.s.sed to this present sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--that for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make n.o.ble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the ma.s.ses (though this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty and high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, make glad your heart!"

And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from that _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and better growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in themselves.

LX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a picture by Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide look of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event.

A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound into the distance, pa.s.sing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens.

Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespa.s.s for the human eye to intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden world had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure that he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through that act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austere exultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that the indignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him, as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heart of Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his,--to wrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlasting beauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yet purged of trouble.

LXI

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. It seemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land--not in wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau's picture, but in some wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarely through the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew that somewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted lay in an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through the night. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime pa.s.sed, and still I sought and could not find her--only shadows met me and fantastic shapes out of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, if this long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and she perish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be more than I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: "Fear not, beloved; be at peace until I come!" I think I must actually have called out in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound still ringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own misery has lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine what you too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to me so incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on your part has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood--can it be that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your days that has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while I have sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of my work, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused me once of conscientious selfishness--have I made you a victim of that sin?

Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a sure determination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that you walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of fresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspring within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my dream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace, beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.

LXII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack.

But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine, out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch.

But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a Hottentot,--provided either were possible.

I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion, burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hitt.i.te in father's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is deliverance.

But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,--submitting to a paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a redbird, even if you are the G.o.d of both. And not all the prayers in heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know, draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from it.

And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage to break my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a "revelation," when he is about to construe life for me according to the prayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble the Christian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle, and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, my life is so near and kin to Pan's that my vision never goes far beyond the green edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell your fortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!--as near as you were that day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in our forest,--for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures of Catullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too, rather than ascetic.

I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the long fairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our good stars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you.

Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear you swiftly upward and ever upward. But I--I cannot soar, I cannot breathe in that silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness of this long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of our love--until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning was when a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, which was not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way into the office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I can remember she was in search of fame, and she found,--ah, dear Heart,--she found both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to a primitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my whole experience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow you lifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehended me altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had a judgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! I was divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more natural one to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, that every woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day when first you encompa.s.sed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all in a moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you.

You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you were really thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a small winged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale.

All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown, a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart's heavens. I did not know for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life's dearest fulfilment was before me.

After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart, only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier destiny. I lost father's boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some limitation of my own mind pa.s.sed away and I entered into a sort of heathen fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters, foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your window sill.

This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you.

Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian att.i.tude which you a.s.sumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpa.s.s in philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention, compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of your "upper chamber." I resented that cold expression of your spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings against your high windows.

In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I _knew_ that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange alt.i.tudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the first a.s.surances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect peace,--the same I have heard father's repentant sinners profess. And I was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of romance to reality.

But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that his love is a sort of _fi. fa._, which he will some day serve upon her heart.

Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you, for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparent diffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantage over the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I to know there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your cla.s.sic pose?

Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth I marched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have saved myself if a thousand Bluchers had hurried to my defence. And there even came a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing to some perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will.

But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have come so much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same brigand determination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll you two looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting your welcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justify poor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed so ludicrously artificial,--as if you had somehow got an undeserved iota subscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at such a humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard, uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien, that the terror I had felt in antic.i.p.ation of your visit vanished away. I think the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be trying to domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenly that your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were less formidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to the walk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from your enigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effort to break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about something and kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now and then, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon the issue at hand.... Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. The world changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman in it. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, I could have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expression of a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startled me so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know how sincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should be captured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, I could not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that old Merlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorry for me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terror and shame against your breast. Philip, why does a woman always weep when the first man kisses her the first time, no matter how glad she is? I hope you do not know enough to answer this question. But I am sure every woman does weep; and I think it is because she feels even in the midst of her great happiness, an irremediable loss, for which nothing ever fully atones.

But another question is, How could I, after being lost to you in this dear way, turn my face from you at the command of a religious enthusiast? A regard for father and not for his righteousness is the explanation; for I felt more nearly right following my heart to you. But now, dear knight, I am ready to forgive you the fault of a.s.senting to such an unnatural sacrifice, if only you will come and take me once more. At present I am a sorry little vagabond, very much the worse for wear, owing to father's efforts to sanctify me. But if you will only love me enough, I think I could be Jessica again. And perhaps you have some more natural way of sanctifying me yourself; for I doubt now if I shall ever see heaven unless I may ascend through your portals.

Every day since our bereavement of each other, I have kept a tryst under our big tree in the forest. At first this was a tender formality, a memorial of a happiness that had pa.s.sed. But after a time I began to have a power of mental vision that was akin to communication. I came out of myself to meet you somewhere in that mysterious world of silence to which you seem to belong. There were hours when I felt absolutely certain of your nearness, a tender peace enfolded me as warm as your arms are. And I had the supreme satisfaction of having outwitted all father's powers and princ.i.p.alities. Then came days when by no sweet incantation could I bring myself near you. I wept upon my sod like one forsaken, and grieved the more because I conceived that you must be far out of my regions in one of your "upper chamber" moods, where all your faculties were concentrated upon some merely philosophical proposition. I wonder now if you are laughing! If you knew how I have suffered, you would not even smile. If you knew how I have _needed_ to be kissed, you would make haste to come to me.

I had been making these excursions into the forest for a long time before I discovered that Jack was playing the part of eavesdropping guardian angel. Do you know, by the way, what a quaint little ragam.u.f.fin philosopher that child is? He has a shrewd sobriety, a steady watchfulness over all about him, and he is endowed with a power of silent devotion that is absolutely compelling. He has been such a comfort to me! and there is no way of keeping him out of your confidence. He knows things by some occult science of loving. Thus I was not offended one day when I looked up from the shadows under my oak and saw him regarding me gravely, almost compa.s.sionately, from behind a neighbouring tree. After this we had a tacit understanding that he might play sentinel there when I came into the forest.