listening for his predestined name, even, one might say, with all his
experimental pursuit of it, he never met it till at last.... Well, I am
anticipating. Being a man of leisure, he visited many countries, seeking
his name; there was not a country of Europe in which he had not sought
it, and even in Asia he had pursued it like a rare butterfly.
Common materialistic friends of his maintained that it was quite a
common name. “If it be so common,” he said, “how is it that in all my
wanderings I have never yet met a woman with that name?”
At last a friend suggested that he had not tried America!
“America!” he exclaimed, “America! wonderful country I know--but is it
likely that in so new a world, a world so busy making its own beautiful
names, that I shall find this rare old name of an ancient world? Surely
I might as well expect to dig up a Roman coin in some back garden in
Omaha!”
“Never mind!” said the friend of my friend. “Try America.”
So it was that my friend came at last to America, seeking his beautiful
name.
Being a man of some public significance, he was asked, upon landing,
what his business was in The Land of Promises; and, being a man of
simple mind, he answered that he came seeking a woman of the name
of--Irene. The assembled reporters shook their heads, and looked at him,
as though he was crazy. No such name had ever been heard of in America.
Of course, he was crazy; and so the papers had a day’s fun with the
eccentric Englishman, and then his numerous excellent introductions
started him upon that most generous pilgrimage in the world--the
pilgrimage of the American Continent.
His introductions, I say, were excellent. I wonder if that was the
reason why, though the best and most beautiful homes of America were
thus thrown open to him, visiting here and visiting there, he never once
heard the name he was journeying to hear.
At length three months had gone by, and no name remotely resembling the
name he loved had sounded in his ears. He was indeed planning to sail
back to Europe in a few days, when in a great Western town--I may as
well say Chicago--a circumstance occurred which changed his intention.
No one who has visited America can fail to have been struck by the
number and quality of the beautiful homes, so generously thrown open to
him, and by the singular purity of atmosphere which pervades them; a
purity so entirely free from priggishness--no negative purity, but a
purity which one might call elemental, a purity, so to say, of joyous
power, a purity as full of laughter and strength as a racing upland
breeze. One has sometimes heard that there is no American home. To one
sojourner in America at least this means the strangest of
misrepresentations; for, on the contrary, one might almost go so far as
to say that in no other country in the world is there such a genuine
home-life as in America. And I venture to think that in no American
city is this home-life to be found in fairer development than in
Chicago. In such a home, one never-to-be-forgotten evening, my friend
found himself a guest. Those who talk of American bad taste, of American
ignorance of, or disregard for, the beautiful things of life should be
taken to see that home. The gracious order of it, the unobtrusive
richness, the organic beauty of it, as distinct from a conscious
æstheticism, immediately impressed a nature very sensitive to such
conditions; and the moment my friend met the only daughter of the
household he knew at once from whom all this harmony proceeded. His host
and hostess were charming simple people, the polo-playing son-and-heir
was a delightful fellow; but it was evident that the harmony did not
proceed from them.
No! it very evidently came from this tall, lithe girl, with that heavy
crown of gold upon her head, those kind blue domestic eyes, and that
supernal light upon her exquisitely blonde features. As my friend
looked at her, sitting by her side at the dinner-table, he felt that
here at last was the woman he had been seeking so long, for, in every
particular she answered to the dream of his long-sought Irene. In her
father’s introduction to him, however, he had not quite caught her name;
so he sat through dinner in a fever of attention, hoping every moment to
hear it pronounced again. But by one of those exceptions to the usual
which do occur, no occasion for the direct use of her name occurred
throughout the dinner, and he being as yet so new an acquaintance, and
afraid besides lest he should hear the wrong name, had not courage to
ask it. However, after dinner, it being a summer night, coffee was
served on the veranda, and here he found both his courage and his
opportunity. There was a sentimental crescent moon in the sky, and the
veranda was filled with romantic lights and shadows. Miss Stanbery and
my friend had found themselves a little away from the rest. She had
seemed hardly less drawn to him than he to her, and at last he felt
that, without violating the proprieties of a guest, he might ask her
Christian name.
She bent her beautiful head, with a lovely shyness, and answered that
her name was--
“Ireen.”
“Ireen?” said my friend, leaning toward her beauty in the twilight.
“It is a beautiful name.”
To himself he was saying how strangely like, and yet how strangely
unlike, it was to the name of which she seemed the ideal embodiment.
“Ireen,” he said over to himself, and the drums of his ears almost
chimed back--but alas! failed quite to chime.
“Ireen? Ireen?” he said over and over to himself, trying to make the
name sound right, and, when he found it impossible, he looked again at
her young loveliness, and wondered to himself if her name was not near
enough to the name he loved.
But in the end his superstition prevailed, and reluctantly he bade
good-bye to Ireen Stanbery, and took train for New York, and boarded
his liner, and sailed back to Europe sad at heart.
A year went by, and having given up all hopes of finding his Irene, he
married, as I have said, a lady of the name of----, and was very
happy--that is as happy as a man or woman can be who has married the
wrong name.
He had been married about three years, when he chanced one evening to be
dining in London with an American gentleman.
They compared notes on America.
“Do you know the Stanberys of Chicago?” asked my friend, among other
questions.
“O yes! aren’t they delightful people? And what a beautiful girl Irene
is--she was married six months ago by the way.”
“What name did you call her?” asked my friend.
“Irene.”
“Irene! Why I thought they called her _Ireen_!”
“So they do--but didn’t you know that that is the American way of
pronouncing ‘Irene’?”
“Indeed, I didn’t,” gasped my friend, and in his soul he said “O that I
had known!”
The moral of which is that it is very hard to lose one’s love through a
mispronunciation.
REVISITING THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
Sid Norton could not recall a time when he had not been in love. From
his earliest boyhood, falling in love had been a habit with him; and his
heart, if he might be said to retain possession of an organ that was
always being lost to some new face, was a sort of sentimental graveyard,
a veritable necropolis of dead love-affairs--dead, but unforgotten; for,
incorrigible lover as Sid was, his memory would sometimes go flitting
from grave to grave, like a butterfly, philandering even with the past.
In spite of these excursions, and in defiance of the apparent paradox of
the statement, Sid Norton found himself in love--for the first and last
time. This he said of himself gravely, not only in private to the lady
who was credited with this marvel but also in public to his intimate
friends. He said it, and there was no doubt that he meant it.
Now Rosamund Lowther was an exceedingly clever young woman, an adept in
the management of the emotional male, and easily Sid Norton’s match in
experienced flirtation. The friends of both watched the progress of
their sudden volcanic attachment with cynical expectancy, and when,
after six months of a trance-like courtship, during which it might be
said that the infatuated pair had never taken their eyes off each other,
Sid Norton suddenly sailed for Europe, you can imagine the sensation and
comment it caused. Neither vouchsafed any explanation; their engagement
remained intact, at all events there was no formal bulletin to the
contrary; and the thing was a piquant mystery to all but the two
concerned. For them it was their whimsical secret.
One late summer afternoon a week or two before, the two enamoured ones
had been seated side by side in the old orchard of the Lowther country
home. Both were very evidently happy, but Sid’s face was absolutely
idiotic with bliss. The something so “utter” in Sid’s look touched
Rosamund’s elfish sense of humour, and, though she was just as much in
love herself, she could not refrain from a gay little teasing laugh.
“Is he so happy, little boy?” she said, lifting up his chin, and looking
whimsically into his face.
Sid’s answer was silent and long, and when it was ended, Rosamund
continued, holding his face at arm’s length, and looking into it with
quizzical seriousness.
“But, aren’t you just a little frightened sometimes?”
“Frightened?”
“Yes! when you think that--it’s for _life_!”
“Ah! thank God,” answered Sid rapturously.
“No, but think--for life! No more pretty flirtations, no more butterfly
by-paths--only me--_me_--till the end. Be honest--doesn’t that make cold
shivers run up and down your back?”
“You angel,” exclaimed the abject one, attempting to answer her as
before.
“No, no; listen to me. I am serious. Do you realise that you are in a
cage, my cage, for life--that escape is impossible--that it will be in
vain to beat on the bars--that only I have the key--that you are there
for better or for worse--that you are there, I repeat, for life--that
there is no help for it--nothing to do but make the best of it--do you
realise that?”
The sense of certitude, of absolute possession, which Rosamund, comedian
as she was, infused into her voice, was irresistible, and Sid laughed,
laughed for joy that the girl he loved had such attractive brains as
well.
“What a delightful fancy!” he exclaimed.
“Fancy, do you call it? Try and escape, my boy, and you will see how
much of a fancy it is.”
“Divine, adorable fact, of course, I mean. O Rosamund, how glad I am
that it is true. Let us take the key and throw it into the river. I
never want to be free again as long as I live!”
“No use if you did!” with a saucy toss of the confident little head.
“My poor boy,” she went on presently, in a caressing motherly tone, “I
really can’t help being rather sorry for you, you who have been so used
to your freedom; you such a wicked, wicked wanderer. How will you ever
endure it? Tell me the truth now--man to man, as they say--right at the
bottom of your heart, aren’t you just a tiny bit wistful sometimes for
the old freedom?”
“Never,” answered Sid, with portentous sincerity.
“Never! Quite sure? Don’t you ever feel a little homesick for some one
of your old loves, and wonder what it would be like to see her again?”
Sid shook his head with emphasis.
Rosamund, and for that matter, all Sid’s world, was well acquainted with
the main lines of his amatorious history, and knew something of the
various divinities who had figured in it. Besides, Sid, a promising
young lawyer, with known literary leanings, had put his heart on record
beyond withdrawal by the publication of a volume of verse entitled “The
Nine Muses.” The volume consisted of love-verses addressed to various
ladies to whom Sid had from time to time, or simultaneously, been
devoted; and though, of course, they figured under fanciful names, their
identities were no secret to the learned gossips of Sid’s circle. This
book had been a thorn in Sid’s side since he had met and loved Rosamund,
a thorn which she sometimes amused herself by using to his discomfiture.
She had the volume with her this afternoon, and as she turned to it,
with malicious merriment in her eye, Sid knew that she meditated some of
her merciless raillery.
“I do wish, Rosamund, you would let me forget that wretched book. I wish
it were at the bottom of the sea. I’ll have the whole edition destroyed.
I will, to-morrow....”
“O that would be sacrilege!” interrupted Rosamund, mockingly; “besides,
I should still have my copy.”
“I will manage to get it from you,” retorted Sid, making a clutch at his
printed past.
“Even if you should,” answered Rosamund, retaining possession of the
book, “I should still remember some of the poems by heart. They are so
beautiful.... This, for instance, to ‘Myrtilla’....”
“Do be quiet, Rosamund....”
“No, I insist, ... I don’t think you know how beautiful they are
yourself. Listen:
I know a little starlit spring--
Last night I leaned upon the brink,
And to the dimpled surface pressed
My hallowed lips to drink.
And now the sun is up, and I
Am with a dream athirst;
O was it good to drink that spring,
Or was the spring accurst?
Accurst, that he who drinks therein
Shall long, even as I,
To drink again, yet never drink
Again until he die.
“Truly now,” Rosamund continued, “doesn’t hearing that make you a bit
thirsty again for your little starlit spring? It is not too late. I am
sure that if you were to go back to her, she would let you drink all you
want.... I happen to know that she isn’t married yet?”
Sid sat dumb under the raillery, with set, gloomy face. Turning over a
page or two, Rosamund began again.
“Here is one of my favourites,” she said, ignoring Sid’s silence. “It is
to Meriel:
Was there a moon in the sky,
Was there a wind in the tree,
I only remember that you and I
Sat somewhere with you and me.
I only remember the joy--the joy--
And the ache of going away:
O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment Day.”
As she finished reading this, Rosamund let the book close in her lap,
and her mood seemed suddenly to have changed to a thoughtful
seriousness. She repeated, as if to herself, the last two lines.
“O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment Day--”
she said over slowly, as though weighing every word; and there was
something in her voice that might have suggested that in playfully
pressing this thorn into Sid’s side, she had unexpectedly pricked
herself. Sid sat on in the same attitude of patient gloom. Presently,
observing her silence, he turned to her.
“Are you finished?” he said.
“Yes!” she answered. “Yes!” with a certain aloofness in her voice, which
Sid, with the painful sensitiveness of a lover, did not miss.
“Is there anything the matter?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, speaking slowly, and with the same serious quietness
of tone, as though she were thinking hard. “No! but I’ve got an idea.
That last poem has set me thinking....”
“Curse the poem,” exclaimed Sid desperately, seizing hold of the volume.
“You can take it,” said Rosamund, to his surprise, “I don’t think I want
to see it again either.”
“But surely, you are not allowing it to trouble you. It is all past and
gone, and one cannot have reached thirty without some experiences. Even
you, dear....”
“O yes, I know, but there’s a peculiarly deep ring about those last two
lines, Sid--
O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment day--
whatever you may say, you meant them pretty badly, Sid,” she added,
turning upon him eyes whose recent mirth was replaced by a questioning
gravity.
“Of course I meant them at the time, or thought I meant them. Besides,
poetry always exaggerates,” answered Sid, writhing with explanation.
“No, Sid, don’t belittle your old feelings. That doesn’t help. Rather
the reverse,” and then once more she repeated the lines musingly as if
to herself. Then she turned to Sid with a sudden decision of manner, as
if her mind was made up.
“Sid, that was a very deep feeling. How do you know that it is not still
alive?”
Sid made the usual despairing protestations. Rosamund regarded them but
little.
“I wonder,” she continued, “if you really know your own mind. I wonder.
You think you love me now, but then you thought you loved her then--till
Judgment Day. Sid! Now see, I’m going to tell you my idea....”
Sid looked at her expectantly, waiting with anxious eyes. Then, with
something of a return to her gayer manner, she went on:
“You remember what we were saying just now about your cage. Well, I’m
going to let you out for a month or two.”
She waved aside a remonstrant ejaculation from Sid.
“Yes! and you are to spend the last breath of freedom in finding out if
there is still any truth left in these old impassioned statements. That
is, you will go to Myrtilla, and see if you still want to drink of that
‘little starlit spring,’ and you will go to Meriel and see, well ...
about Judgment Day! And, while you are on pilgrimage, there are one or
two other ‘muses’ it might be well to make quite sure about.”
Sid interrupted with impatient incredulity, not believing her serious.
But the more he expostulated, the firmer she became.
“I declare, the idea grows on me!” she said. “I wonder it never occurred
to me before. Now that it has, I must insist on your carrying it
out--for my sake. When I think of your nature, in the light of all this
printed experience, I should not really feel safe otherwise. Of course,
your cage is strong, I know. So long as I care to keep the key, your
escape is impossible. But then, I should not like to find some day in
the future, that, secure as you were, you were in secret pining to be
off after some little starlit spring on the other side of the bars. So,
Sid, I’m sorry, but you must pack up right away, and go on pilgrimage.”
In vain Sid protested that it was preposterous, that he was incapable of
seriously undertaking any such fanciful absurdity. Rosamund remained
obdurate. She would never marry him, she said, till he had subjected
himself to the proposed ordeal.
“Besides, if you refuse,” she continued, “I shall always feel that you
were afraid of it, secretly afraid that the temptations of it would be
too strong for your faith.”
To this Sid made a singularly blundering retort, which he tried in vain
to take back as he uttered it, to the effect that, however certain one
was of one’s love, there was no sense in playing with fire. This settled
the matter.
“Fire!” laughed Rosamund mercilessly--he admitted the danger then!
After that there was no argument--and this is the explanation of Sid
Norton’s sudden departure for Europe.
* * * * *
Say what you will, the test was a little unfair. So Sid Norton said to
himself, as he paced the moonlit deck in mid-ocean, and strove to
analyse his feelings toward the situation in which Rosamund’s whim had
placed him. He thought of the lady of old time who had thrown her glove
into the arena. Of course, no lover could decline such a challenge ...
but he hastily dismissed the image as unfortunate, for he was not
allowed to admit the existence of the lions. To recognise any
possibility of danger in his present so-called ordeal was in itself an
unfaithfulness. To admit that there was any element of an ordeal in his
fantastic adventure was to fail right away. To confess any temptation in
the circumstances was a sufficient backsliding. And yet would any man in
a like situation, dealing honestly with his own thoughts, declare
confidently that there was no danger here to a true love? The answer of
theory and idealism would of course be that there could evidently be
none. The words “true love” imply that, and a certain old writer has
disparaged “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” that shrinks from taking
the open field against temptation. Which is all very beautiful, but
another saying as to the relation of discretion to valour comes nearer
to the truth of a human nature, which, with the best will in the world,
is apt to be sorely tripped up in the very moment of its strength by
some half-forgotten weakness.
Sid Norton’s love for Rosamund Lowther was no less real and deep than he
deemed it. She was for him the divine event toward which his whole life
had deviously moved. To lose her love would be loss irremediable. She
was that final joy and enchantment which he had pursued from face to
face, yet found only at last in hers. She was the fairy tale of life
come true. He had no wish, no hope, no aim, beyond her. With his meeting
her life had at last seriously begun. Its future success was to be the
making perfect this love which she had brought him. This was the serious
truth about Sid Norton; it represented the serious responsible self
which had at length asserted its domination over the warring minor
selves that had preceded it--the self he seriously wished to go on
being. But alas! in this multiple being called man those minor selves,
though conquered and perhaps mortally wounded, are apt to die hard, and
occasionally one of them, in a last dying flash of vitality, will gain
the upper hand, and, in some fleeting but fatal moment, tragically belie
the self that is real and lasting. Sid, who was learned in his own
psychology, knew himself, or rather him-selves, too well to be
vaingloriously confident that no such disastrous aberration on the part
of one or other of his dead or dying selves might not in some unguarded
moment betray him. He did not, of course, seriously fear it, and it
seemed impossible indeed, as out there on the midnight ocean he lifted
up his eyes to the moon, as though she were the silver spirit of his
love.
Still, like a wise soldier, he prayed hard that night not to be led into
temptation.
In this spirit of discreet valour, he had, on embarking, after making a
survey of his fellow-passengers, congratulated himself on the singular
unseductiveness of the array feminine. As in the days of Odysseus, the
siren remains one of the most dreaded dangers of those that go down to
the sea in ships, and Sid’s previous crossings had not been uneventful
in this respect.
On coming on deck rather late next forenoon, Sid was immediately aware,
before he traced his impression to its cause, of a subtle attractive
change in the human atmosphere--just, as in early spring, suddenly, one
morning, we come out into the air, and know, before we have seen them,
that there are flowers in the garden. So poor Sid’s terribly sensitive
instinct warned him immediately of the unexpected presence of a
beautiful woman. Casting his eyes along the prosaic line of deck chair
mummies, he saw that his instinct had not been at fault. A beautiful
woman had blossomed there in the night. With the vividness of almond
stars among the bare boughs, she shone among the other passengers, an
apparition of fragrance, all dew and danger. One of the chairs had
remained vacant up till this morning. It was the chair next to Sid’s
own, and it was with a quick thrill in which pleasure was quaintly
blended with alarm, that he realised that it was in this chair that the
apparition was sitting.
“So it is,” sighed Sid, with an inward smile, “that heaven leads us not
into temptation.”
He did not seat himself at once, but walked the deck several turns,
partly to reconnoitre the fair enemy, and partly with the heroic resolve
of seeking out the deck steward and having his chair removed to a less
perilous position. This extreme measure, however, struck him as both
eccentric as well as cowardly, and the reconnaissance finally decided
the matter. After all, the voyage so far had been dull enough, and his
love for Rosamund surely called for no such fanatical self-denial.
So presently he found himself seated by the side of the apparition,
pleasantly enveloped in a delicate exhalation of violets, and
luxuriously conscious of the proximity of a beautiful, breathing woman.
For a while the first conventional reserves protected him. He took up
his book and appeared absorbed in it. She, too, was reading. One of
those modern novels sufficiently artistic and emotionally speculative to
arouse one’s interest in the personality of its reader, and to afford a
ready freemasonry of communication between strangers not unwilling to
make each other’s acquaintance.