Wanhope had that distant look in his eyes which warned his familiars of a
possible excursion, and I said, in the hope of keeping him from it, “Then
isn’t there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to that in a
personification?”
“Ah, yes--a personification,” he repeated with a freshness of interest,
which he presently accounted for. “The place they had taken was very
completely furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen and
silver; but what was more important to poor Ormond was the library, very
rich in the English classics, which appeared to go with the house. The
owner was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these were her
father’s books. Mrs. Ormond said that her husband had the greatest
pleasure in them: their print, which was good and black, and their
paper, which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, which was tree
calf in the poets, he specially liked. They were English editions as well
as English classics, and she said he caressed the books, as he read them,
with that touch which the book-lover has; he put his face into them, and
inhaled their odor as if it were the bouquet of wine; he wanted her to
like it, too.”
“Then she hated it,” Minver said, unrelentingly.
“Perhaps not, if there was nobody else there,” I urged.
For once Wanhope was not to be tempted off on another scent. “There was a
good deal of old-fashioned fiction of the suspiratory and exclamatory
sort, like Mackenzie’s, and Sterne’s and his followers, full of feeling,
as people understood feeling a hundred years ago. But what Ormond
rejoiced in most were the poets, good and bad, like Gray and Collins and
Young, and their contemporaries, who personified nearly everything from
Contemplation to Indigestion, through the whole range of the Vices,
Virtues, Passions, Propensities, Attributes, and Qualities, and gave them
each a dignified capital letter to wear. She said he used to come roaring
to her with the passages in which these personifications flourished, and
read them off with mock admiration, and then shriek and sputter with
laughter. You know the way he had when a thing pleased him, especially a
thing that had some relish of the quaint or rococo. As nearly as she
would admit, in view of his loss, he bored her with these things. He was
always hunting down some new personification, and when he had got it,
adding it to the list he kept. She said he had thousands of them, but I
suppose he had not so many. He had enough, though, to keep him amused,
and she said he talked of writing something for the magazines about them,
but probably he never would have done it. He never wrote anything, did
he?” Wanhope asked of me.
“Oh, no. He was far too literary for _that_,” I answered. “He had a
reputation to lose.”
“Pretty good,” said Minver, “even if Ormond _is_ dead.”
Wanhope ignored us both. “After awhile, his wife said, she began to
notice a certain change in his attitude toward the personifications. She
noticed this, always expecting that fit of sickness for him; but she was
not so much troubled by his returning seriousness. Oh, I ought to tell
you that when she first began to be anxious for him she privately wrote
home to their family doctor, telling him how strangely happy Ormond was,
and asking him if he could advise anything. He wrote back that if Ormond
was so very happy they had better not do anything to cure him; that the
disease was not infectious, and was seldom fatal.”
“What an ass!” said Rulledge.
“Yes, I think he was, in this instance. But probably he had been
consulted a good deal by Mrs. Ormond,” said Wanhope. “The change that
began to set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking the
personifications more seriously. Why, he began to ask, but always with a
certain measure of joke in it, why shouldn’t there be something _in_ the
personifications? Why shouldn’t Morn and Eve come corporeally walking up
their lawn, with little or no clothes on, or Despair be sitting in their
woods with her hair over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their
back door for a hand-out? Why shouldn’t they any day see pop-eyed Rapture
passing on the trolley, or Meditation letting the car she intended to
take go by without stepping lively enough to get on board? He pretended
that we could have the personifications back again, if we were not so
conventional in our conceptions of them. He wanted to know what reason
there was for representing Life as a very radiant and bounding party,
when Life usually neither shone nor bounded; and why Death should be
figured as an enemy with a dart, when it was so often the only friend a
man had left, and had the habit of binding up wounds rather than
inflicting them. The personifications were all right, he said, but the
poets and painters did not know how they really looked. By the way,”
Wanhope broke off, “did you happen to see Hauptmann’s ‘Hånnele’ when it
was here?”
None of us had, and we waited rather restively for the passing of the
musing fit which he fell into. After a while he resumed at a point whose
relation to the matter in hand we could trace:
“It was extremely interesting for all reasons, by its absolute
fearlessness and freshness in regions where there has been nothing but
timid convention for a long time; but what I was thinking of was the
personification of Death as it appears there. The poor little dying
pauper, lying in her dream at the almshouse, sees the figure of Death. It
is not the skeleton with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face,
but a tall, beautiful young man,--as beautiful as they could get into the
cast, at any rate,--clothed in simple black, and standing with his back
against the mantlepiece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long,
two-handed sword. He is so quiet that you do not see him until some time
after the child has seen him. When she begins to question him whether she
may not somehow get to heaven without dying, he answers with a sort of
sorrowful tenderness, a very sweet and noble compassion, but unsparingly
as to his mission. It is a singular moment of pure poetry that makes the
heart ache, but does not crush or terrify the spirit.”
“And what has it got to do with Ormond?” asked Rulledge, but with less
impatience than usual.
“Why, nothing, I’m afraid, that I can make out very clearly. And yet
there is an obscure connection with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a
vision. Mrs. Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, perhaps
because even at the last moment he was not definite himself. What she was
clear about, was the fact that his mood, though it became more serious,
by no means became sadder. It became a sort of solemn joy instead of the
light gaiety it had begun by being. She was no sort of scientific
observer, and yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely
observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him psychologically.
Sometimes the light in his room would wake her at night, and she would go
to him, and find him lying with a book faced down on his breast, as if he
had been reading, and his fingers interlaced under his head, and a kind
of radiant peace in his face. The poor thing said that when she would ask
him what the matter was, he would say, ‘Nothing; just happiness,’ and
when she would ask him if he did not think he ought to do something, he
would laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But it did not go
off; the unnatural buoyancy continued after he became perfectly tranquil.
‘I don’t know,’ he would say. ‘I seem to have got to the end of my
troubles. I haven’t a care in the world, Jenny. I don’t believe you could
get a rise out of me if you said the nastiest thing you could think of.
It sounds like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I have found
out the reason of things, though I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ve only
found out that there _is_ a reason of things. That would be enough,
wouldn’t it?’”