THE TRISTAN LOVE SONG
After dinner father and I sat out on the porch in the soft, warm breeze
that waved a misty spring moonlight around us, and talked garden until
after ten o'clock. He was brilliant and delightful, but three times he
made trips to ice bowl and decanter on the sideboard.
"It will be a great relief and happiness to me if Nickols does sanction
and set the seal of artistic approval upon our plans," he said, with
feverish but happy eyes. "You see, Nickols will represent the
cosmopolitan in judgment upon the normally developed insular. I remember
once that Mr. Justice Harlan said that in an opinion on freight rates I
had sent up to him I had represented both the cosmopolitan and the
insular interest with astonishing equity, and I told him that I
considered that it took at least six generations of insular mind culture
to see any kind of national equity. The same thing holds good with a
garden. It takes the sixth generation on a piece of land to produce a
garden, and then it has to be laid out around a library full of the
ideals of poet and scholar. In about three years I can, with your
permission, present the American nation with a garden that will
represent the best ideals of Americans; and I must go to bed if I expect
to get up and hunt the early worm. I can never decide which is the
harder work, the capture of that creature of tradition or the arousing
of Dabney to perform that task. You, Dabney."
"Yes, sir," came a sleepy groan from just within the door, and in a
second the old black face was lit up with father's candle until the
white wool above shone like a halo as it appeared from out the gloom.
And I sat and watched the two old gentlemen, one black and one white,
toil slowly up the steps and down the wide hall of the Poplars.
"Father _must_ come back; the nation needs him," I said fiercely under
my breath as I noticed that in Dabney's hand swung the ice bucket where
I had been accustomed to see it swing for years, but which I had not
seen him carry before since I came home. "And that's how _you_ help him
fight to come back," I arraigned myself with bitter scorn. "You have no
faith nor spiritual sources yourself, and you throw him back into
degradation when something is helping him crawl out. What's helping him?
No matter what it is, you are a coward to obstruct it."
And for a long hour I sat thus raging at myself and questioning
hopelessly, while the young moon rose higher and higher over the tops of
the silvery poplars and young spring slipped about in the lights and
shadows, invisible except for perfumed wreathings of gossamer mist.
Above, I heard father pacing up and down his rooms, slowly, almost
feebly. Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside
the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon
a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my
early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively
felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last
few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that threatened to
overwhelm me.
"Oh, I found him, and now I've thrown him away," I sobbed to myself.
Then, as I sat listening, I heard the faltering steps come out into the
hall above, descend the steps one by one, go through the dark dining
room groping pitifully, and down the side steps out into the beloved
garden. Silently I watched the tall figure with the white hair silvered
radiantly by the moonlight go slowly down the path, past the old
graybeard poplars, and even up to the lilac hedge that ran as a bulwark
in front of the dark chapel door, which I could see was ajar as it
always is.
"He's going for help," I muttered to myself, and I felt the padding of
fear pursuing me, while also something of the Methodist grandmother
within me began a queer calling and a tightening at my throat.
Then something happened that interested me so that I lost all personal
anxiety. Father stopped beside the hedge and picked up something from
the grass. I saw it was a long, heavy hoe. Walking over to a long bed of
early roses he and Dabney had been fertilizing in the late afternoon, he
bent feebly and began to dig the food into their roots. As he swung the
long handle, each blow upon the soft earth became more decided. I crept
down behind the old snowball bush to be nearer him; I didn't dare go to
him in his fight, because I had in my selfish heedlessness brought it
all on, but in a little while he was not alone, for a bent old figure
with grizzled white wool sticking out from under a red flannel nightcap
came quietly along the path with a hoe in his hand, fell in directly
behind his master, and began a rhythmic blow-answering-blow contest with
the fragrant earth and the demon within the man. For at least an hour
the two old friends worked up and down the long bed, until I could see
father begin to totter with weakness.
"Now, come on, Mas' Nick, honey, and go to bed. I'll pour a bucket of
cistern water over you and rub you down so as you'll sleep like a bug in
a rug," the staunch old comrade crooned, with a mother note in his
voice, as he took father's heavy hoe and shouldered it with his.
"I think evening exercise is good for me, Dabney," answered father with
all the dignity and command come back into his voice. "Put both those
hoes in the tool house this time, and I'll not tell Mr. Goodloe you
left one down by the lilac hedge."
"Yes, sir, thanky, sir, fer not telling him," answered Dabney, as he
followed his master to the tool house under the back steps, deposited
the garden implements where he was directed, and then again followed his
idol in through the long dining room window and was lost in the shadow.
I went back to the front steps, again sank down, put my arms on my
knees, and let my head fall upon my clasped hands. As I sat there alone,
with the dark house yawning behind me in its emptiness, someone sat down
beside me and laid a warm, strong hand on my interlaced and strained
fingers for just about half a second.
"Please forgive me about the apple dumplings and the hard sauce," a
merry, very lovely voice pleaded.
"I went out to Old Harpeth with you when you asked me; but I loathe
going to church--I haven't been in one since I was strong enough to
rebel--and I'm not going to yours," was the apology I graciously offered
in return for that about the apple dumplings. "But I'd pay fifty
dollars for a tenth row seat to hear you sing Tristan in the
Metropolitan any day if I had to go hungry for a week to pay for it," I
added, as I laughed as softly as he had pleaded. All the sorrow and
strain of the last hours had vanished at the touch of his hand, and I
felt like an impish, teasing child.
"I'll sing some of it for you now, if you'll give fifty cents to Mother
Spurlock for the Children's Day Picnic. And it'll be a bargain you are
getting," was the unexpected offer I encountered.
"And a freezer of vanilla ice cream to boot," I assented, generously.
And then something happened to me the like of which I know never
happened to anybody in all the world, and that could happen only the
once to me. Gregory Goodloe drew a little closer to me and bent his
great gold head until his face was just off my left shoulder, and in his
powerful, rich, fascinating voice, which he muted down in a way that
made it sound as if he were singing through a golden cloud, he sang
Tristan's immortal love agony in a way that shut out all the rest of the
universe and left me alone with him in a space swayed by his pleading
until my mortal body shook in actual pain.
"Don't! I can't stand it!" I gasped, as I seized his wrist in my strong
hands and wrung it. "Stop!"
The last tender note breathed itself into the air that seemed to hold it
in a long caress until it died away, and sobs shook me as I held on
desperately to his wrist. I felt that I _must_ be comforted. And I was!
Again the gentle fingers were laid over mine for a still smaller
fraction of a second, and then again the beautiful, clear voice began to
sing to me, just to me, out of the whole world.
"'Abide with me, fast falls the even tide,'" he chanted, and then waited
while my sobs died away and I let go my drowning grasp on his wrist.
"That's just what I mean. That's just why I wouldn't have any more
respect for myself if I should go to your church than if I joined in one
of Mammy's foot-washings down at the river and fell in a fit of shouting
in which it took two burly coons to 'hold my spirit down,' as she
describes those gymnastics to me. I hate you and I hate my friends for
indulging in religion, because it is just as 'potent an agent of
intoxication' as exists to-day, and it blinds us to the need of work
along scientific lines for the immediate improvement of the race. What
right have we to intoxicate reason with religion? If religion is
anything it must be reason." I fairly hurled my words of half-baked
skepticism at him, with the vision of father and Dabney digging in the
garden, still in my eyes.
"I felt just as you do about it a year ago to-day," he answered me
quietly. "As you state the case of religion as emotion versus reason, it
doesn't exist. Religion is reason plus emotion, and when you combine the
two the eyes of your soul are open, whereas they had been closed. Nobody
can tell you about it, but you begin really to live when you see and
comprehend. Yes, it is going to take all the scientific reason the world
possesses to start its salvation, but it will not get far without
'emotion,' as you call what I _know_ is love of God, and, through that
love, compassion for man."
"The assumption that every man is blind who does not believe as you do,
stops all argument," I said scornfully.
"I didn't come to talk religion with you; I came over to get that apple
dumpling off my conscience, as I couldn't digest it because it wasn't
there. I preach twice, on Sunday and on Wednesday night, and I'm in my
study behind the altar every afternoon that I'm not playing tennis. I'll
be there any time by appointment." The worldly and protective raillery
in that young Methodist minister's voice almost interrupted my religious
researches, but I was in depths that were strange to me, and I was
floundering for a line out.
"I'll never be there," I flared at him, then went on with my
floundering. "If a man is blind, how can he gain the sight that you
arrogate to yourself?"
"A great man once prayed, 'Lord, help thou my unbelief,'" was the gentle
answer in which was that queer note of apostolic surety with which I
heard him address the woman in the garden that night.
"I can't pray--there's nothing there," I said in a very small voice that
I could scarcely recognize as my own. "Oh, I mean that we are all
floundering, and where can we get the lifeline? Where did you get the
line that you think will pull you out of the vortex?"
Then for a long moment he and I sat again involved in the emptiness of
the universe that Tristan's love song had opened for us, and I knew that
with ruthless feet I had entered his Holy of Holies and was being
allowed to stand across the threshold.
"Forgive me," I gasped.
"I never felt that I could tell it before," he said, slowly, and the
bounds of the emptiness retreated still further away as he turned so
that he sat facing me and again bent his dull gold head closer to mine.
In a second I knew why in my mind I had been calling him a Harpeth
jaguar. It was just my pictorial expression for the word freedom, the
freedom that comes from power. I knew that mentally and bodily I was
looking upon the first free man I had ever encountered, and I was
abashed.
"Don't tell me," I said, with a gentleness in my voice I had never heard
before, and that came from something that I felt to be strangely like
meekness, though I had never before met that emotion in myself.
"You know the romance of my father's life," the soft voice went on,
speaking as if I had not interrupted him, "but nobody knows the tragedy.
Love for my mother came upon him like an arrow shot out of ambush, and
he married into a worldly, pleasure-loving, agnostic circle of people
who all adored and flattered him until he--he became confused and
doubting. He had transgressed the law: 'yoke not yourselves with
unbelievers,' and he suffered. She never understood. It killed him, and
when he had been dead nearly twenty years I found the diary he kept the
months before he died. It was last year, just after her death. It was a
cry to me, who at that time was a mere babe, and it--it lighted the
flame he had almost let go out. As I read, the apostolic call came to me
and I answered. I was starting to the front in France, and I went on. My
year there was a series of experiences that gave me my surety. One day
it came more clearly than ever. I had gone out into one of the trenches
of the first line, because I am so strong that I can carry any man back
to the stretchers across my back or in my arms. I have carried two at a
time. There were nineteen men in the trench, and I made the twentieth.
Suddenly a machine gun found the range and mowed them all down like
cornstalks or wheat heads. Only I was left standing, bleeding under my
left ribs. I raised my voice and praised God for my surety of
immortality, and then fell. While I was practically dying in the
hospital with a clip in my lung I got suddenly and unaccountably well
and strong, and felt I must come back to try and help others to see what
we must see to assure every man of his immortality. When the race
awakens to that fact there will be no more use for machine guns. I may
not help much, but I can only try. Perhaps I do only work through the
emotions as yet, but I believe that my ministry will have its fruits. I
can wait." And the humility and patience in his voice beat against my
heart and bruised it so that I cried out.
"Oh, why did you come here?" I positively moaned, as he and I both rose
and I put out my hand as if to force him out of that aloneness in which
we stood together.
"America must lead the world in spiritual as well as material
regeneration, and this is the only real and dispassionate America, with
no foreign pull on its vitals. You must wake up; the cry has been heard
to 'Come over and help.' Why do you fight the--"
"I can't help fighting. I must do what I conscientiously believe--" I
was saying with my hand still outstretched against him, when suddenly
the still place around us was invaded with a crash and its invisible
walls thrown down.
"Charlotte!" came in Nickols' languid, fascinating voice that always
draws me to the edge of his world. "And Greg Goodloe, by all that is
good and holy--in tennis flannels!"