The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless
trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition
which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to
see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we
feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal
melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward
that dreary November sunset.
Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because
of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the
cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its
space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late
as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I
had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on
one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself
with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its
origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities.
Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the
earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first
discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the
English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought
their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin,
and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the
mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all
dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that
it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young
oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all
sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to
the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water
some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror
their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing
inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.
I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends,
and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that
which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The
very name of things passes with the things themselves, and
"Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."
But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame?
What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than
a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our
minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of
action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with
us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless,
characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil
then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall
personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of
distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid
vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts,
zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe
we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking,
except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this
will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then,
evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which
should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but
the evil effect?
Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite
shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or
one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the
lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle
fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it
weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were
concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made
me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the
thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in
point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated
itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle
died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself
that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no
further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time.
Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre
just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a
fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth;
I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for
him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to
naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he
saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His
figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it
out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and
yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and
I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his
five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so
far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit,
and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both
stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man
made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of
pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.