The Kempton-Wace Letters Part 13

STANFORD UNIVERSITY.

Wednesday.

Last night I delivered my address to the student body. Behold the chapel crowded to the doors, aisles and window-seats crammed, and faces peering in from without, those of boys and girls who had perched themselves on the outer sills. A student audience is at the same time most critical and the most generous. I spoke on Literature and Democracy.

Hester approved my effort. "How does it feel to be great?" she laughed.

"How does it feel to be cruel?" I retorted. "But think, Mr. Kempton, when you visited the English cla.s.ses you were just so much text for us.

It should count us a unit merely to have seen you."

A memory stood up and had its revenge on me. It taunted me for the half-expressed thought, for the fled insight, for the swelling note that midmost broke. Praise the artist, and he feels himself betrayer.

Blear-eyed, the poet recalls the poem's sunrise, straightens himself with the old pride, is held again by the splendour which forecasts the about-to-be-steadier glory of day, and even with the recalling he shrinks together before what he knows was a false dawn. There was never a day. The song's note never sang itself at all.

Hester looked up with that wistfulness which so draws me. Her look said: "I pity you. I wish you were as happy as I." And a thought leaped out in answer to her look which would have smote her had it spoken. It was, "You, too, are awakened by a false dawning." Why is she so sure of herself and of you? Is she sure? The puny bit of writing had a vigorous rising. The ragged author was clad in it as in ermine. So the seeming love makes a strong call, for a while holding the girl intent upon a splendour of unfolding, her nature roused, her being expectant. But later, for poet and lover, the failure and the waste! Were it otherwise with your feeling for your betrothed, the comparison would not hold.

Hester does not think these things, and she is beautiful and happy.

Yours devotedly, DANE KEMPTON.

x.x.xIV

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

STANFORD UNIVERSITY.

Sat.u.r.day.

Her happiness wrung it from me. Before I could intervene, the question asked itself, "How will it be with you in after years?"

Straight the answer came, "There will be Herbert."

Hester is proud. To-night I saw it in the lift of her chin, in the set of her neck, in the brilliance of her cheek. She knows herself endowed.

So when she prattled with abandon of all you both meant to be and do, her form erect before me, her hands eloquent with excitement, her voice pleading for the right to her very conscious self-esteem, I asked her to look still further. Further she saw you, and was content.

That was before dinner. Later we were walking. "I have a friend in Orion," she said. The witchery of starshine played in her eyes and about her mouth. Where were you, Herbert? This night will never return.

Yet what has been was for you--the more, perhaps, that you seemed away.

So it is with lovers. She thinks you love her.

"I am sorry for your mood," she said. "You are holding yourself to account these days in a way I know." Then she spoke, and I learned with new heaviness of spirit that she does know the way of it. You never thought Hester had much to struggle with?

"I am difficult," she said. And again, "There are times when no power can hold me." Then she quoted Browning:--

"Already how am I so far Out of that minute? Must I go Still like the thistle-ball, no bar, Onward, whenever light winds blow, Fixed by no friendly star?"

"Are you unhappy, Hester?" I asked.

"Yes, but with no more reason than you for your unhappiness. Since you have come here, you have renewed your demands upon yourself. You wish to go to school with the youngest and find you cannot. You suffer because more seems behind you than before." Her voice rose as if she were fighting tears. It was different with her, I told her. Nothing was behind her.

"You test your work and I test my love. When you are sad, it is because the soul of the song spent itself to gain body--" She did not finish.

Why is she sad? Because the soul of her love is narrower than she hoped?

On our return from our walk she sank on the seat under the '95 oak. "Did you think I meant I was always unhappy?" she asked. Her words seem always to say more than her meaning. She imparts something of her own elaborateness to them. I laughed.

"How could I with the 'Herbert is' in my ears?" Then her love became voluble. I forgot what I knew of your theories and grew aflame with her ardour. I antic.i.p.ated as largely as she. She was again possessed by her hopes.

There, under the shadow of the quadrangle which her young strides measured, she spoke of what, with you in her life, the years must be.

Beyond words you are blessed, Herbert. But if she mistakes?

D.K.

x.x.xV

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

STANFORD UNIVERSITY.

November 27, 19--.

Be outspoken! What will happen I can only surmise, but you must tell her what she is to you. Set her right.

This is the fourth letter in seven days about Hester. I am endeavouring to make you acquainted with her. I had no need if you loved her. How she loves you! Yet she thinks that your calm is depth, your silence prayer.

Her pride protects her, but she strains for the word which does not come. She has never been quite sure, and I thank G.o.d for that. Hester has been fearing somewhat, and she has been doubting, and it is this that may save her when the night sets in and the storm breaks over her head.

You, too, are thankful that her instincts served her true and that she never quite accepted the gift that seemed to have been proffered?

You have a right to demand the reason for my renewed attack. It is because I have learned the strength of her love. "You are blessed beyond words," I said two days ago, but as you reject the blessing, Hester must know it and you must tell her. Herbert, I am your friend.

DANE KEMPTON.

x.x.xVI

FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON

THE RIDGE, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.

November 29, 19--.

What a flutter of letters! And what a fluttery Dane Kempton it is! The wine of our western sunshine has bitten into your blood and you are grown over-warm. I am glad that you and Hester have found each other so quickly and intimately; glad that you are under her charm, as I know her to be under yours; but I am not glad when you spell yourself into her and write out your heart's forebodings on her heart. For you are strangely morbid, and you are certainly guilty of reading your own doubts and fears into her unspoken and unguessed thoughts.

Believe me, rather than the soul of her love seeming narrower than she hopes, the truth is she gives her love little thought at all. She is too busy--and too sensible. Like me, she has not the time. We are workers, not dreamers; and the minutes are too full for us to lavish them on an eternal weighing and measuring of heart throbs.