|IF Mrs. Ulswater, then, had planned her riot in order to make my
position in Portate untenable--as a sort of explosion of blasting powder
to loosen me from South America, it seemed reckless. It was not like her
to make a mess of a man's business in order to please only a notion of
hers to have him in her floating asylum. She had had, as I remembered
her, a curious awe of business. It was implanted in her, I supposed, by
Mr. Mink of Ohio. One would say offhand, of course, that she had meant,
by these incendiary proclamations, merely to frighten the Mayor into
releasing me, and had not seen beyond that. Of course, that might be the
case.
But when I asked her just what was the extent of her plan, she seemed
reserved, and wanted to talk of settling somewhere in the States again.
She thought Portate a past issue. She wouldn't say whether or not her
conscience was clear about the riot, but she didn't seem to be troubled.
She was figuring about what kind of place would interest Dr. Ulswater to
live in.
We were to go first to San Francisco, where the doctor meant to ship
Hannah Atkins to the Eastern museum for which he collected. She asked my
advice about a place to settle in. Doctor Ulswater was fond of unsettled
travelling and might be hard to satisfy. She didn't find my advice
of much use. I judge there were too many rolling waves of moonlit
imagination in it. Something seemed to be lacking, but she wouldn't say
what the flaw was. I suspected she wasn't precisely stating the nature
of her aim and purpose. She began to consult Sadler instead of me, and I
took to running down Hannah Atkins to Dr. Ulswater, so as to induce his
eloquence, calling her obsolete and stolid, or criticising the way she'd
been laid out rather hunched up; and he would pour out South-American
archaeology till everybody took a new interest in life. All you had to
do to start him, like a spring flood in a thirsty land, was to begin
something like this:
“Of course,” you'd say, “I'm not real well acquainted with mummies, and
I'll take your word Hannah's a good specimen of her kind, only I'd call
her laying out pretty economic and bunchy; and of course she's not in
it with an Egyptian mummy for a minute, but we won't quarrel about that,
though on the outside she's pretty much like a bag of meal, and when
opened up, the difference is all in favour of the bag of meal; but
that isn't the point---” and so on. Give him an opening, and he'd shed
knowledge like rain off a roof, till you felt glad to be alive.
Or else I would go off with Susannah and help her write her poem on me.
That poetry was so candid that it got away from me. It soared off on the
wings of truth, and dealt too much with pure facts. My nose not being
straight, it stated the fact, not brutally, but simply. Any weakness I
had, and there was a rhyme for it, down it went, and if there wasn't a
rhyme, she just planted it in the beginning of the line instead of at
the end. Technical difficulties never balked her of that. There were one
thousand, two hundred and fourteen lines before we got to California. I
wouldn't take a fortune for that poem. It was more than a photograph. It
fitted me like the skin of a snake. But that's not its main value.
“Kit Kirby was an engineer,”
it began.
“ So handsome and so debonair.”
“Handsome!” I said, feeling interested. Susannah took an observation.
“Some.”
“Then you oughtn't to say 'so' when you mean 'some.'”
She scratched out and wrote:
“Some handsome in respect to him.”
But I was new at literary criticism or I wouldn't have made that
mistake. It went on:
“But very crooked in his nose,
And very vain about his clothes!”
I objected:
“Not at all, Susannah! Neat and cleanly!”
She corrected:
“And neat and cleanly in his clothes,”
which shows the value of literary criticism.
Then the poem went through with the circumstances of the Portate
Ultimatum, the Hannah Atkins plot, and the sequel of those
complications.
“And everything was in a muss,
And so he ran away with us.”
Now, from that point on, it went along something like a diary. It
recorded daily incidents, reflections, comments, the shades and
modifications of Susannah's opinion of me. It was minute, microscopic,
and detailed. It went into unsuspected corners, and hauled things out,
and delivered judgments on them. If the book of the Recording Angel is
put together on that model, it's surely a good model. Perhaps the first
sight of the record and analysis will make a man squirm. But I wouldn't
ask for a better Recording Angel than Susannah, or a judge on the whole
more just. But that is not the main value of the poem to me. It began to
strike me in a new light when I discovered that Susannah had my sins on
her conscience.
There were entries like these:
“June fifth.
“The night is dark as it can be,
The rain is falling on the sea,
And every one of us is gay.
Kit was very good all day.
“ June tenth.
“ Georgiana Tupper died,
I cried a lot, and then I cried
Because Kit did not care a fly,
But said he did, and told a lie,”
This was a kind of light to stand in, not only searching, but one that
manufactures repentance faster than a man can dispose of the goods.
Two things began to dawn on me: first, that, although, as the subject
of Susannah's poem it was natural I should be all around in it, on the
other hand, looking at the poem as a diary, I was more ubiquitous than
seemed reasonable: second, that the diary was getting on my nerves.
In fact, passing time was becoming a sort of running commentary on
Susannah. It dawned upon me that Susannah and I had fallen into the
habit of occupying each other's horizons. Then said to myself, “I'm
in for it. It's the way the world is made.” This was toward the end of
June. The _Violetta_ was in sight of the California coast, and the blue
mountains of the Coast Range were a fringe along the eastern skyline by
day.
One night I sat with Sadler, looking across the water toward where
our native land lay in the darkness, he twankling on his banjo and I
thinking of the condition of being a running commentary with an occupied
horizon. By and by he began to mutter and grumble into a sort of tune
whose joints didn't fit. On the whole, as a tune, it was an offence to
music, and didn't agree with my idea of what is morally right. But it
surely suited him. He began to sing to it, and the words didn't suit me
either.
“When first I kissed Susannah--
The facts I state precise--
The forty million little stars
They winked their little eyes,
They seemed to say, 'You dassn't'--
I guessed the same was true,--
They seemed to say, 'I reckon things
Will happen if you do';
When first I kissed Susannah.
“When first I kissed Susannah,
I wondered if I dared;
I see some little stars go out,
Implying they was scared;
I see a porpoise lift his head
And pop his eyes and drool;
And all the sea lay flat and prayed,
'Lord help this poor damn fool!'
When first I kissed Susannah.
“When first I kissed Susannah--
The facts I state 'em free--
She never done a single thing
To knock the head off me.
She melted like a snowflake,
That's crystal, keen and white,
That turns a drop of water,
That glimmers in the night,
When first I kissed Susannah.”
There was a long silence.
“Of course,” I said at last, “I might be mistaken, for though you're
some stiff maybe with ancientness, still you've got weight and
experience, and accident and foreordination ought to be allowed for.”
“Sure they ought. You're right, sonny. That there's a good balance of
facts.”
“Allowing for all that then, still I'd like to remark that if you kiss
Susannah again, I'll knock the head off you myself.”
Sadler twankled on peacefully.
“Is them sentiments genuine?” he asked, “Which I wish to inquire if
they're the offspring of wrath.”
“They are!”
“Well,” he said, “it's this way. Scrapping is roses and raptures to
me, but the facts don't allow it. The facts of that poem ain't in my
experience but yours, which is why I'm weeping to the moon.”
“They're not in mine either.”
“They _ain't!_ Well, why ain't they?” Then he swore in a slow, plaintive
manner.
“They ain't! Well, why ain't they? That's what I want to know.”
He went off leaving me reflecting about all the things a man misses.
Then I thought about the way things are linked together, one thing
happening because of another.
For if the King of Lua hadn't roused Mrs. Ulswater's wrath so that she
had to carry him off, she wouldn't have carried off Sadler too; and if
Sadler hadn't been a poet, probably Susannah wouldn't have been either;
and if Susannah hadn't begun a poem on me, it wouldn't have turned into
a semipublic diary; and if I hadn't seen her diary, and seen it grow
from day to day, I wouldn't have got into that tumultuous condition.
Susannah saw through me, as if I were a window pane, but the window,
through which I saw into Susannah's secrecy, was her diary.
At last I got up and went down into the cabin. Susannah was not there,
but the doctor was reading to Mrs. Ulswater.
“Mrs. Ulswater,” I said, “is Susannah too young to be kissed; that is,
by me?”
“Don't you mean too old?” she asked quietly, without looking up.
“No, I mean too young.”
Mrs. Ulswater was silent a moment.
“I suppose she is. But not too young for us to make plans.”
“Did you have a plan, Mrs. Ulswater?” I asked after a while.
“You needn't pretend you didn't know what it was.”
“I suspected it when it began to succeed.”
Dr. Ulswater took off his glasses and pointed them vaguely at me.
“As to the date of your suspicions,” he said, “you are an authority, but
as to the date of the success of Mrs. Ulswater's plan, you are in error,
in error. Mrs. Ulswater's plans begin to succeed when she begins to make
them. The beginning of the end is coincident with the beginning of the
beginning. She has an arrangement with destiny. She i----”
“Stuff!” said Mrs. Ulswater.
“Not at all! Not at all!” he cried. “I'll bet Hannah Atkins to a fresh
infant that Mrs. Ulswater laid the lines of your future a year and
a half ago, and started for a predestined Island of Clementina,
and collected a foreordinate orphan whom she had spotted from the
description of the late Mr. Tupper. 'Susannah,' she said to herself,
'will do for Kit. We'll go to Clementina.' Pundits, prime ministers, and
reigning monarchs she picked up by way--populations rioted as she found
convenient--mere incidental details to a further end. Through helplessly
remonstrant oceans, through a universe undisciplined and disorderly, she
pursued the judicious tenor of her way. Here and there she altered the
trend of history. It was nothing. Missions! Not at all. Her purpose was
to make a match. The feminine mind----”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Ulswater.