Sylvia went to her own room after dinner, still wondering what had
happened to her on her birthday. There is an age at which most of us
unexpectedly come across the truth about ourselves, and sometimes about
others, and it generally happens that in our recollection the change
turns upon one day, or even one hour.
The shock is sudden and unexpected. Floating down a quick smooth stream
in a boat, a man is aware of motion, as he watches the bank without
realizing the strength of the flowing water; but when the skiff is
suddenly checked by any obstacle in midstream, the whole force of the
river rushes upon it, and past it, and perhaps over it, in an instant.
Something of the same sort happens now and then in our lives. The great
illusion of childhood carries us along at a speed of which we have no
idea, in the little boat which is the immediate and undeniable reality
of near surroundings, the child's cradle afloat upon a fiction which is
wide and deep and strong, and sometimes we are grown men and women
before our small craft strikes upon a shoal of truth, with a dash that
throws us from the thwart, and frightens the bravest of us. There we
stick fast upon the rough fact for a while, and the flood that was so
smooth and pleasant rushes past us, foaming and seething and breaking
against the boat's side and threatening to tear her to pieces. And if
the tide is ebbing at the river's mouth, we may be left high and dry
upon the sharp reality for a long time; but if not, the high water will
presently float us, and off we shall spin again, smoothly and safely, on
the bosom of the sweet untrue.
Such accidents happen more than once to most people, and almost every
one resents them bitterly. Even in daily living, few men can bear to be
roughly roused from sleep. Much more is the waking rude from year-long
dreams of fancy.
Sylvia sat at her table and stared at the lamp, as if it were her own
heart which she could look into, and watch, and study, and criticise.
For most of all, she was in a humour to find fault with it, as having
played her false when she least expected that it could deceive her. She
had built on it, as it dictated; she had trusted it, as it suggested;
she had lived, and loved to live, for its sake; and now it had betrayed
her. It had not been in earnest, all the time, but had somehow made her
think that she herself was all earnestness. It was a false and silly
little heart, and she hated it, as she looked at it in the lamp, and she
wished that it would frizzle and burn like the poor moth that had gone
too near the hot glass while she had been downstairs.
It was positively laughing at her, now, and she set her small mouth
angrily. To think that she should ever have fancied herself in love
with a man who might have been her grandfather! And it wickedly showed
her the colonel as he would be in another ten years, a picture founded
upon the tired look she had just seen in his face. She was ashamed of
herself, and furious against herself for being ashamed, and she suddenly
wished that she were dead, because that would give people a real reason
for being sorry for her. It would be very pathetic to die so young! If
she did, her heart could not laugh at her.
She thought about it for a while, and among other reflexions she
suddenly found herself wondering whether young Knox, the officer on her
father's ship, would be very sorry. He had written her a letter from
Japan which she had not answered. Indeed, she was not sure that she had
read every word of it, for it had only come this morning. Life had been
too short for reading letters on that day. But there it was, on the
table. She had the evening before her, and though it was a long letter,
it could not take more than a quarter of an hour to go through it. She
put out her hand to take it and then looked at the lamp again.
A lean, brown young face was suddenly there, and bright eyes that looked
straight at her, without anything vastly superior in them, but full of
something she liked and understood and instantly longed for. Her heart
was not laughing at her any more, for she had forgotten all about it,
which is generally the best thing one can do in such cases.
Even the expression of her face changed and softened as she laid her
hand upon the letter. For Wimpole's sake, as she had made herself think
a few hours earlier, she would gladly have doubled her age, and the
forced longing for equality of years between herself and her ideal had
fleetingly expressed itself in her face by shadows, where there could
not yet be lines. But as the illusion sank down into the storehouse of
all impossibilities and all mistakes, the light of early youth fell full
and unscreened upon her face again, and she revived unconsciously, as
day-flowers do at sunrise, when the night-flowers fold their leaves.
It was surely no thought of love which made the change; or if that were
its cause, it was but love's fore-lightening in a waking dream. Much
rather it must have been the consciousness of living roused by the
thought of youth. For youth is the elixir of life, and the touch of old
age is a blight on youth, when youth is longing to be old; but youth
that is willingly young has power to give the old a breath of itself
again, before the very end. In their children men live again, and in
their children's children they remember the loveliness of childhood.
From a very far country, across half a world of land and water, the
letter had come to Sylvia on her birthday, as Harmon's had come to
Helen. There is something strange and terrible, if we realize it, in
man's power to harm or help by written words from any distance. The
little bit of paper leaves our hand with its wishing-carpet in the shape
of a postage stamp, and swiftly singles out the one man or woman, in two
thousand millions, for whom it is meant, going straight to its mark with
an aim far more unerring than steel or ball. A man may much more
probably miss his enemy with a pistol at ten paces, than with a letter
at ten thousand miles. If the fabled inhabitant of Mars could examine
our world under an imaginary glass, as we study a drop of water under a
microscope, he would surely be profoundly interested in the movements of
the letter-bacillus, as he might call it. He might question whether it
is generated spontaneously, or is the result of an act of will, more or
less aggressive, but he would marvel at the rapidity of its motion and
at the strength of its action upon the human animal through the eye. It
would be very inexplicable to him; least of all could he understand the
instant impulse of man to tear off the shell of the bacillus as soon as
it reaches him, for he would no doubt notice that in a vast number of
cases the sight of it produces discontent and pain, and he might even
find a few instances in which death followed almost immediately. In
others the bacteria produce amazingly exhilarating results, such as
laughter and the undignified antics of joy, and even sudden improvements
in the animal's health and appearance. He would especially notice that
these bacilli are almost perpetually in motion, from the time they leave
one human being until they fasten themselves upon another, and that in
parts of the world where they are not found at all, or only
sporadically, the animals behave in a very different way, are healthier,
and are less exposed to the fatal results of their own inventions. If
the inhabitant of Mars were given to jumping at conclusions, he would
certainly announce to his fellow-beings that he had discovered in Earth
the germ of a disease called by Terrenes 'Civilization.' And perhaps
that is just what the letter is.
Young Knox wrote to Sylvia because he was in love with her, which is the
best of all reasons for writing when love is right, and the worst
imaginable when it is wrong. He was so much in love that as soon as she
was out of his sight his first impulse was to set down on paper all
sorts of things which had very little sense in them, but made up for a
famine of wisdom by a corresponding plenty of feeling. There is
something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a young man's strength
before the object of his first true love. It is the abasement of the
real before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real takes vengeance
of the man for having trodden it under.
Young women rarely understand their power; older ones too often overrate
what they have. The girl who first breathes the air of the outer world
and first sees in a man's eyes that he loves her, knows that he is
stronger, better taught, more experienced than she is, and compares
herself with him by a measure which he rates as nothing. Man is much
more real to woman, when both are very young, than woman is to man; and
being real he represents to her a sort of material force. But to him
she is an imaginary being, strong with a mystic influence from which he
cannot escape when he has come within the pentagram of the spell. It is
bad for a man if she comes to know her strength before he has learned
his weakness. Then she riots in it, recklessly, for a time, until she
has hurt him. She says, 'Do this,' and he does it, like the Centurion's
servant; or 'Say this,' and he says it, be the words wise or foolish,
and she reckons his wisdom to herself and his folly to him, frankly, and
without the least doubt of her own perfection, for a while, rejoicing
senselessly in driving him. But by and by, as in a clock, the
mainspring feels the gentle regulation of the swaying balance, and the
balance takes its motion from the spring, till both together move in
perfect time, while each without the other would be but a useless bit of
machinery. Sylvia did not know all that, and if she had, she would
perhaps not have reasoned about it much. She did not understand why
young Knox wrote that he would live for her, die for her, and, if
necessary, convulse the solar system for her exclusive pleasure and
benefit. It seemed a great deal to promise under the circumstances, and
her moderate maiden vanity could not make her appear, in her own eyes,
as an adequate cause of such serious disturbance in the order of things;
yet it was not displeasing to be magnified into a possible source of
astronomical miracles, though the idea was slightly ridiculous and she
was glad that she had it entirely to herself and beyond carping
criticism.
She was not in the least in love with the man who wrote to her, and she
had not been in love with him when they had parted. That very morning,
when she had received the letter, she had been a little inclined to
smile at the writer's persistence, and had laid the letter aside, half
read, in no great hurry to finish it. But since then, her life had
changed. She had gone aground on the shoal of truth and she was already
longing for the waters of illusion to rise and float her away.
So she let the breezy memories come back to her, and they brought her a
sweet forewarning of her growing life. All at once, she knew that she
had never met any one so young who had pleased her so much, any one with
such clear eyes and manly ways, frank smile and honest voice, as the
young officer who had hated this hollow world with such grave conviction
because Sylvia Strahan could not go home in her father's ship. She read
on, and felt an unexpected thrill of pleasure when the words told her
what she had already known; namely, that the squadron would be far on
its way to San Francisco by the time the letter reached her, that Knox
was to come to the capital with her father, and that she was quite
certain to meet him there before very long. She was unconscious of
looking round at her things just then and wishing that they were already
packed for the homeward journey.
She wrote to him before she went to bed. It was a duty of civility to
answer him, though she felt herself under no obligation to reply to his
numerous questions. On the contrary, she said nothing at all about
them, but she gave him her impressions of Lucerne and told him that Aunt
Rachel had taken cold, but was now quite well, a piece of information
which, though satisfactory in its way, was not calculated to affect her
correspondent's happiness in any marked degree. 'It would be nice to
see each other again,' she said at the end, with which mild sentiment
she signed herself 'sincerely' his.
The only odd thing about it all was that when the letter was finished
she had not the slightest idea where to send it, a fact which had not
crossed her mind when she had unscrewed her travelling inkstand, but
which sufficiently proved that she had acted under an impulse of some
sort. She said to herself that it did not matter, but she was
disappointed, and the smile faded from her face for a little while.
When she was asleep it came back in the dark and lingered on her lips
all night, waning and waxing with her maiden dreams.
Her eighteenth birthday had been a good day in her life, after all.
There are few indeed who fall asleep happily when the first illusion has
gone down into darkness with the evening sun.