He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth.
She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.
Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome and
temperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would die
to-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.
Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is the
most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been
wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded
man--among so many other bleeding folk--who perversely augments his
agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars over
the cut for him, as time does for all the others. He does not suffer
any longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, he
must henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."
"I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure of
fame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabble
immortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the price
without all this whimpering."
"Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is the
difference. At bottom I am a creature of the most moderate
aspirations, as you always complained; and for my part, Fate must in
reason demand her applause of posterity rather than of me. For I
regret the unlived life that I was meant for--the comfortable level
life of little happenings which all my schoolfellows have passed
through in a stolid drove. I was equipped to live that life with
relish, and that life only; and it was denied me. It was demolished in
order that a book or two be made out of its wreckage."
She said, with half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of all
this." And how he laughed!
"Did I not say you were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."
He motioned with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man,
who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girl
was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porter
in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed by
the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and so
candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the
girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the
attendant playwright made note of it.
"Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women
must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far
from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of
beauty?"
"The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiastic
answer. "So!--but who is she?"
He replied: "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for
whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any
lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot
read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very
much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from a
bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and so
I write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this
world an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and
kindliness--for could Herod be unkind to her?--and it is largely
populated by ardent young fellows who are intended chiefly to be
twisted about your fingers; and it is illuminated by sunlight whose
real purpose is to show how pretty your hair is. And if affairs go
badly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong--why, of
course, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. For
nothing that happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit,
because God orders all happenings, and God loves us. There you have
Judith's creed; and upon my word, I believe there is a great deal to be
said for it."
"And this is you," she cried--"you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!"
"I lived all that," he replied--"I lived it, and so for a long while I
believed in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many
illusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wicked
person. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sighted
people exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves always
to have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never because
of malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demand
commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find
humanity to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had
suspected. And so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because I
very potently believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men
lack an innate aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedly
attempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates on its pursuers.
This much, at least, has Judith taught me."
The woman murmured: "Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was
borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent
on me in all things." She said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he was so
little and so helpless! Now he is dead."
"My dear, my dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also had
a son. He would have been a man by this."
They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.
"I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands.
I know--they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought
that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say.
But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that
even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I
find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking
and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us--these buffet
us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did,
why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."
"Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all
happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not to
be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But
is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."
"With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are
ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely
by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my
day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each
maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day
their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an
urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine
intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to
look at, and--greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very
long--I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all
imaginable creeds--that if we do nothing very wrong, all human
imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will
be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic
truth--this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of
this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in
dealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter
tone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman?
Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if
it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and
the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she
were to find me out?"
"I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.
"Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in
me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's
owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then
Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me--and Judith
only in all the world!--as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah,
madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low
cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your
hand--much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the
clutching of a vine--and beg you never to be friends with anything save
sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys--who
did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her
father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding
attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees
in play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money--Judith, who
cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,--why, Judith, madam, did not ask,
but gave, what was divine."
"You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words,
make knives of them. . . . You" and she spoke as with difficulty--"you
have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either
man or woman!"
He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty
once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly
abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who
made a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of
ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under
old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped
from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all
that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward
the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal,
because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations
of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued
the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the
normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm--that
young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric,
and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the
date of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; and
then he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said--"there is a
leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."
She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And just
now you are more like him----"
"Faith, but he was really a poet--or, at least, at times----?"
"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this
powerful rhyme----'"
"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion
botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and
ungrammatical. _Shall_ should be changed to _will_." And at that the
woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayed
creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writing
must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement
of phrases. And so,
"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was
unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or
even just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my
poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I
had not come."
Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also
have lied to you--in part? Our work is done; what more is there to
say?"
"Nothing," she answered--"nothing. Not even for you, who are a
master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."
"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even
for a moment you consider me?"
She did not answer.
When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation;
and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an
uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.
"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "_We, too, are kin To dreams and
visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped
suns_--Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, _We are
such stuff As dreams are made on_--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out the
line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now
here, instead of _thickly-templed India_, suppose we write _the
still-vexed Bermoothes_--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ."
And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint
of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously
upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprising
Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a very
efficacious spur to composition.
And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase
flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and
surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted
nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter.
For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and weave beautiful
and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did
not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking
of a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and
error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.