THE FATES.
Bolton's letter excited in my mind a tumult of feeling. From the
beginning of my acquaintance I had regarded him with daily increasing
admiration. Young men like a species of mental fealty--a friendship that
seems to draw them upward and give them an ideal of something above
themselves. Bolton's ripe, elegant scholarship, his rare, critical
taste, his calm insight into men and things, and the depth of his moral
judgment, had inspired me with admiration, and his kindness for me with
gratitude. It had always been an additional source of interest that
there was something veiled about him--something that I could not exactly
make out. This letter, so dignified in its melancholy frankness, seemed
to let me into the secret of his life. It showed me the reason of that
sort of sad and weary tolerance with which he seemed to regard life and
its instincts, so different from the fiery, forward-looking hope of
youth. He had impressed me from the first as one who had made up his
mind to endure all things and hope for nothing. To keep watch every
moment, to do the duty of the hour thoroughly, bravely, faithfully, as a
sentinel paces through wind, rain and cold--neither asking why, nor
uttering complaints--such seemed to be Bolton's theory of life.
The infirmity which he laid open to my view was one, to be sure,
attributable in the first place to the thoughtless wrong-doing of
confident youth. Yet, in its beginning, how little there was in it that
looked like the deep and terrible tragedy to which it was leading! Out
of every ten young men who begin the use of stimulants as a social
exhilaration, there are perhaps five in whose breast lies coiled up and
sleeping this serpent, destined in after years to be the deadly tyrant
of their life--this curse, unappeasable by tears or prayers or
agonies--with whom the struggle is like that of Laocoön with the hideous
Python. Yet songs and garlands and poetry encircle the wine-cup, and
ridicule and contumely are reserved for him who fears to touch it.
There was about this letter such a patient dignity, such an evident
bracing of the whole man to meet in the bravest manner the hard truth of
the situation, and such a disinterested care for others, as were to me
inexpressibly touching. I could not help feeling that he judged and
sentenced himself too severely, and that this was a case where a noble
woman might fitly co-work with a man, and by doubling his nature give it
double power of resistance and victory.
I went hastily up to his room with the letter in my hand after reading
it. It was in the dusk of the evening twilight, but I could see him
sitting there gazing out of the window at the fading sky; yet it was too
dark for either of us to see the face of the other. There are some
conversations that can only be held in darkness--the visible presence of
the bodily form is an impediment--in darkness, spirit speaks directly to
spirit.
"Bolton," I said, "I am _yours_ to every intent and purpose, yours for
life and death."
"And _after_," he said in a deep undertone, grasping my hand. "I knew
you would be, Harry."
"But, Bolton, you judge yourself too severely. Why should you put from
yourself the joys that other men, not half so good as you, claim
eagerly? If I were a woman like Caroline, I can feel that I would rather
share life with you, in all your dangers and liabilities, than with many
another."
He thought a moment, and then said slowly, "It is well for Caroline that
she has not this feeling; she probably has by this time forgotten me,
and I would not for the world take the responsibility of trying to call
back the feeling she once had."
At this moment my thoughts went back over many scenes, and the real
meaning of all Caroline's life came to me. I appreciated the hardness of
that lot of women which condemns them to be tied to one spot and one
course of employment, when needing to fly from the atmosphere of an
unhappy experience. I thought of the blank stillness of the little
mountain town where her life had been passed, of her restlessness add
impatience, of that longing to fly to new scenes and employments that
she had expressed to me on the eve of my starting for Europe; yet she
had told me her story, leaving out the one vital spot in it. I
remembered her saying that she had never seen the man with whom she
would think of marriage without a shudder. Was it because she had
forgotten? Or was it that woman never even to herself admits that
thought in connection with one who seems to have forgotten her? Or had
her father so harshly painted the picture of her lover that she had been
led to believe him utterly vile and unprincipled? Perhaps his proud
silence had been interpreted by her as the silence of indifference;
perhaps she looked back on their acquaintance with indignation that she
should have been employed merely to diversify the leisure of a
rusticated student and abandoned character. Whatever the experience
might be, Caroline had carried it through silently.
Her gay, indifferent, brilliant manner of treating any approach to
matters of the heart, as if they were the very last subjects in which
she could be supposed to have any experience or interest, had been a
complete blind to me, nor could I, through this dazzling atmosphere,
form the least conjecture as to how the land actually lay.
In my former letters to her I had dwelt a good deal on Bolton, and
mentioned the little fact of finding her photograph in his room. In
reply, in a postscript at the end of a letter about everything else,
there was a brief notice. "The Mr. Bolton you speak of taught the
Academy in our place while you were away at college--and of course I was
one of his scholars--but I have never seen or heard of him since. I was
very young then, and it seems like something in a preëxistent state to
be reminded of him. I believed him very clever, then, but was not old
enough to form much of an opinion." I thought of all this as I sat
silently in the dark with Bolton.
"Are you sure," I said, "that you consult for Caroline's best happiness
in doing as you have done?"
There was a long pause, and at last he said with a deep, drawn breath,
"Yes. I am sure, the less I am to her the better."
"But may not your silence and apparent neglect and indifference have
given pain?"
"Probably; but they helped her to cease caring for me; it was necessary
that she should."
"Bolton, you are morbid in your estimate of yourself."
"You do not know all, Hal; nor what nor where I have been. I have been
swept far out to sea, plunged under deep waters, all the waves and
billows have been over me."
"Yet now, Bolton, surely you are on firm land. No man is more
established, more reliable, more useful."
"Yet," he said with a kind of shudder, "all this I might lose in a
moment. The other day when I dined with Westerford, the good fellow had
his wines in all frank fellowship and pressed them on me, and the very
smell distracted me. I looked at the little glass in which he poured
some particularly fine sherry, and held to me to taste, and thought it
was like so much heart's blood. If I had taken one taste, just one, I
should have been utterly worthless and unreliable for weeks. Yet
Westerford could not understand this; nobody can, except one who has
been through my bitter experience. One sip would flash to the brain like
fire, and then, all fear, all care, all conscience would be gone, and
not one glass, but a dozen would be inevitable, and then you might have
to look for me in some of those dens to which the possessed of the devil
flee when the fit is on them, and where they rave and tear and cut
themselves with stones till the madness is worn out. This has happened
to me over and over, after long periods of self-denial and self-control
and illusive hope. It seems to me that my experience is like that of a
man whom some cruel fiend condemns to go through all the agonies of
drowning over and over again--the dark plunge, the mad struggle, the
suffocation, the horror, the agony, the clutch at the shore, the weary
clamber up steep rocks, the sense of relief, recovery, and hope, only to
be wrenched off and thrown back to struggle, and strangle, and sink
again."
He spoke with such a deep intensity of voice that I drew in my breath,
and a silence as of the grave fell between us.
"Harry," he said, after a pause, "you know we read in the Greek
tragedies of men and women whom the gods have smitten with unnatural and
guilty purposes. In which they were irresistibly impelled toward what
they abominated and shuddered at! Is it not strange that the Greek fable
should have a real counterpart in the midst of our modern life? That
young man in all the inexperience and thoughtlessness of youth should be
beguiled into just such a fatality; that there should be a possibility
that they could be blighted by just such a doom, and yet that song, and
poetry, and social illusion, and society customs should all be thrown
around courses which excite and develop this fatality! What opera is
complete without its drinking chorus? I remember when it used to be my
forte to sing drinking songs; so the world goes! Men triumph and rejoice
going to a doom to which death is a trifle. If I had fallen dead, the
first glass of wine I tasted, it would have been thought a horrible
thing; but it would have been better for my mother, better for me, than
to have lived as I did."
"Oh, no, no, Bolton! don't say so: you become morbid in dwelling on this
subject."
"No, Hal. I only know more of it than you. This curse has made life an
unspeakable burden, a doom instead of a privilege. It has disappointed
my friends, and subjected me to humiliations and agonies such that death
seems to me a refuge; and yet it was all in its beginning mere
thoughtlessness and ignorance. I was lost before I knew it."
"But you are not lost, and you shall not be!" I exclaimed, "you are good
for more than most men now, and you will come through this."
"Never! to be just as others are. I shall be a vessel with a crack in
it, always."
"Well, a vase of fine porcelain with a crack in it is better than
earthenware without," I said.
"If I had not disappointed myself and my friends so often," said Bolton,
"I might look on myself as sound and sane. But the mere sight and smell
of the wine at Westerford's dinner gave me a giddy sensation that
alarmed me; it showed that I was not yet out of danger, and it made me
resolve to strengthen my self by making you my keeper. You have the
advantage of perfectly healthy nerves that have come to manhood without
the strain of any false stimulus, and you can be strong for both of us."
"God grant it!" said I, earnestly.
"But I warn you that, if the curse comes upon me you are not to trust
me. I am a Christian and a man of honor in my sane moments, but let me
tell you one glass of wine would make me a liar on this subject. I
should lie, and intrigue, and deceive the very elect, to get at the
miserable completion of the aroused fury, and there are times when I am
so excited that I fear I may take that first irrevocable step; it is a
horror, a nightmare, a temptation of the devil,--for that there is a
devil, men with my experience know; but there is a kind of safety in
having a friend of a steady pulse with me who knows all. The mere fact
that you do know helps hold me firm."
"Bolton," said I, "the situation you offer to Caroline in the care of
the _Ladies' Cabinet_ will of course oblige her to come to New York.
Shall you meet her and renew your acquaintance?"
"I do not desire to," he said.
There was a slight hesitancy and faltering of his voice as he spoke.
"Yet it can hardly be possible that you will not meet; you will have
arrangements to make with her."
"That is one of the uses, among others, of having you. All that relates
to her affairs will pass through you; and now, let us talk of the
magazine and its programme for the season. What is the reason, Hal, that
you waste your forces in short sketches? Why do you not boldly dash out
into a serial story? Come, now, I am resolved among other things on a
serial story by Harry Henderson."
"And I will recommend a taking title," cried Jim Fellows, who came in as
we were talking, and stood behind my chair. "Let us have
_HENDERSON'S HORROR; or, The Mystery
of the Bloody Latch-Key._
_There's_ a title to take with the reflecting public! The readers of
serials are generally girls from twelve to twenty, and they read them
with their back-hair down, lounging on the bed, just before a nap after
dinner, and there must be enough blood and thunder, and murder and
adultery and mystery in them to keep the dear creatures reading at least
half an hour."
"I think serial stories are about played out in our day," said I.
"Not a bit of it. There's sister Nell, don't read anything else. She is
regularly running on five serial stories, and among them all they keep
her nicely a-going; and she tells me that the case is the same with all
the girls in her set. The knowledge of the world and of human nature
that the pretty creatures get in this way is something quite astounding.
Nell is at present deeply interested in a fair lady who connives with
her chambermaid to pass off her illegitimate child upon her husband as
his own; and we have lying and false swearing, I say nothing of all
other kinds of interesting things on every page. Of course this is
written as a moral lesson, and interspersed with pious reflections to
teach girls as how they hadn't oughter do so and so. All this, you see,
has a refining effect upon the rising generation."
"But, really, Bolton, don't you think that it is treating our modern
society as children, to fall in with this extreme fashion of
story-telling? It seems so childish to need pictures and stories for
everything. Isn't your magazine strong enough to lead and form public
taste instead of following it?"
"Well, if I owned my magazine I would try it," said Bolton. "But, you
see, the Westerfords, while they give me _carte blanche_ as to means to
run it, expect of course that it is to be run in the approved popular
grooves that the dear thoughtless ten million prefer. The people who
lounge on beds after dinner are our audience, and there must be nothing
wiser nor stronger than they can apprehend between sleeping and waking.
We talk to a _blasé_, hurried, unreflecting, indolent generation, who
want emotion and don't care for reason. Something sharp and spicy,
something pungent and stinging--no matter what or whence. And now as
they want this sort of thing, why not give it to them? Are there no
other condiments for seasoning stories besides intrigues, lies, murders,
and adulteries? And if the young and unreflecting will read stories
shouldn't some of the thoughtful and reflecting make stories for them to
read?"
"Of course they should, Q. E. D.," said Jim Fellows, touching the gas
with a match, and sending a flare of light upon our conference. "But
come, now, behold the last novelty of the season," said he, tossing two
cards of invitation. "This is for us, as sons of the press and recording
angels, to be present at Wat Sydney's grand blow-out next Tuesday. All
the rank and fashion are to go. It is to be very select, and there are
people who would give their eye-teeth for these cards, and can't get
'em. How do ye say, Old Man of the Mountain, will you go?"
"No," said Bolton; "not my line."
"Well, at all events, Hal has got to go. I promised the fair Alice that
I'd bring him if I had to take him by the hair."
I had a great mind to decline. I thought in my heart it was not at all
the wisest thing for me to go; but then, _Amare et sapere vix Deo_--I
had never seen Sydney, and I had a restless desire to see him and Eva
together--and I thought of forty good reasons why I should go.