THE TIME OF DREAMS
I had Clem to myself for a time. Little Miss, it seemed, was not yet
rugged enough for travel into the far Little Country. Nor was she at
once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work. I suspect
that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a
weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss
Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of
half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an
imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed
recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet
come even to the egg-stage of their careers.
Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases
about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest
manner"--not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with
powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to
permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not
forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to
elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of
thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the
welfare of the Lansdales.
It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or
experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings. The impression
conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was
of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I
judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint
under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother
could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative
views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and
Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual,
literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost
raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness,
devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of
unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional
felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with
the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to
refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your
dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the
multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely
determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient
servant!
But I had convinced her. She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so
that Miss Caroline went to be with her--to fetch her when she should be
strong enough for the adventure of travel.
There were three weeks of my neighbor's absence--three weeks in which
Clem "cleaned house", polished the battered silver, "neated" the rooms,
and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would look like
a great deal of furniture indeed; three weeks in which Little Arcady
again decked itself with June garlands and seemed not, at first glance,
to belie its rather pretentious name; three weeks when I studied a
calendar which impassively averred that I was thirty-five, a mirror
which added weight to that testimony, and the game which taught me with
some freshness at each failure that the greater game it symbolizes is
not meant to be won--only to be played forever with as eager a zest, as
daring a hope, as if victory were sure.
The season at hand found me in sore need of this teaching. It was then
that errant impulse counselled rebellion against the decrees of calendar
and looking-glass. If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and
mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy
with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to
behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to
its call.
Wherefore I played the game diligently, torn by the need of its higher
lessons. And at last I was well instructed by it, as all may be who
approach it thus, above a trivial lust for winning.
Two of us played in that provocative June. One was myself, alert for
auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal
promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by
some trifling card. Thus was I schooled to expectations of a wise
shallowness, not so deep but that they might be overrun by the moderate
flow of human happiness. Thus one learned to expect little under much
wanting, and to find his most certain profit in observing the freshness
of those devices which left him frustrated. Jim, the other player of us,
chased gluttonous robins on the lawn, ever with an indifferent success,
but with as undimmed a faith, as fatuous a certainty, as the earliest of
gods could have wished to see. And between us we achieved a conviction
that the greater game is worth playing, even when one has discovered its
terrific percentage of failures.
I was not unpleased to be alone during this period of discipline when my
soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that
my neighbor should have gone where she might distract me never so
little.
For it was at the season when Nature brews the irresistible philter.
Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was
overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the
hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic
resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding--where
opposition is fated to avail not--is graceful in proportion to its
readiness, I surrendered as quietly as might be.
One woman face had been wholly mine for hidden cherishing through all
the years. A woman face, be it understood, not the face of a woman. At
first it had been that; but with the years it had lost the lines that
made it but that one. Imperceptibly, it had taken on an alien, vague
softness that but increased its charm while diminishing its power to
hurt.
It brought me now only a pensive pleasure and no feeling more acute. It
was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies
softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the
moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light--a dream-face,
exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets
that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.
This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden
of familiar surprises. All of which meant that I was a poor thing of
clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that
somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and
conscious, perhaps even longing. More plainly, it meant that I was a man
whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair.
Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt
"the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I
should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing
childish games of belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village
"character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the
judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would
affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past
unromantically barren.
There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought
them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing.
Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of
perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his
race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species
to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as
an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he knows,
perhaps, that there is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat
yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. But presently he is
up to dash at a bird, with a fine forgetfulness, quite as startled by
the trick of flight as in his first days. And I, envying him his gift of
credulity, weakly strive for it.
As I have said, I had noted that in these free dreamings of mine the
painted face above my neighbor's mantel seemed to have had a place long
before I looked upon its actual lines. This perplexed me not a little;
that the face should seem to have been familiar before I had seen
it--the portrait, that it should have blended with and then almost
replaced another's, so that now the woman face I saw was eloquent of
two, though fittingly harmonized in itself. Must I lay to the philter's
magic this audacious notion; that the face of Little Miss had tangibly
come to me in some night of the mind? Sober, I was loath to commit this
absurdity; but breasting drunkenly that tide of dreams, it ceased to be
absurd.
And so I had plunged into the current again one early evening when the
growing things seemed to have stopped reluctantly for rest, when the
robins had fluted of their household duties the last time for the day,
and when only the songs of children at a game were brought to me from a
neighboring yard.
Unconsciously my thoughts fell into the rhythm of this song, with the
result that I presently listened to catch its words--faint, childish,
laughing, yet musical in the scented dusk:--
"King William was King James's son and from the royal race he sprung;
Upon his breast he wore a star that showed the royal points of war.
Go choose your east and choose your west, and choose the one that you
love best.
If she's not here to take your part, go choose another with all your
heart.
Down on this carpet you must kneel, low as the grass grows in yon field.
Salute your bride and kiss her sweet, and then arise upon your feet."
The sentiment was ill suited to my own at the moment, but the raw-voiced
little singers appealed to my ears not unpleasantly. Again the verse
came--
"If she's not here to take your part--go choose another with all your
heart!"
I heard wheels then, nearer than the singing,--the clumsy rumble of our
big yellow 'bus. Voices were borne to me,--Clem's voice, Miss Caroline's
and another not like her's, a voice firmer, yet a dusky-warm woman's
voice. That was all I could think of at the time: perhaps the night
suggested it; they had qualities in common. It was a woman's voice, but
a determined woman's. I knew of course that Little Miss had come. But
also I knew at once--this being her voice--that it would not be in my
power to call her Little Miss.