WHITE MAGIC
In the centre of her bedroom, with her back turned to that bookcase
which was filled with sugared false-hoods about life, Virginia was
standing very straight while Miss Willy Whitlow knelt at her feet and
sewed pale blue bows on her overskirt of white organdie. Occasionally,
the door opened softly, and the rector or one of the servants looked in
to see "Jinny" or "Miss Jinny dressed for the party," and when such
interruptions occurred, Mrs. Pendleton, who sat on an ottoman at the
dressmaker's right hand and held a spool of thread and a pair of
scissors in her lap, would say sternly, "Don't move, Jinny, stand
straight or Miss Willy won't get the bows right." At these warning
words, Virginia's thin shoulders would spring back and the filmy ruffles
stir gently over her girlish breast.
Through the open window, beyond the drooping boughs of the paulownia
trees, a few wistful stars shone softly through the web of purple
twilight. The night smelt of a thousand flowers--all the mingled
sweetness of old gardens floated in on the warm wind and caressed the
faded figure of Miss Willy as lovingly as it did the young and radiant
vision of Virginia. Once or twice the kneeling seamstress had glanced up
at the girl and thought: "I wonder how it feels to be as lovely as
that?" Then she sighed as one who had missed her heritage, for she had
been always plain, and went on patiently sewing the bows on Virginia's
overskirt. "You can't have everything in this world, and I ought to be
thankful that I've kept out of the poorhouse," she added a minute later
when a little stab of envy went through her at hearing the girl laugh
from sheer happiness.
"Am I all right, mother? Tell me how I look."
"Lovely, darling. There won't be any one there sweeter than you are."
The maternal passion lit Mrs. Pendleton's eyes with splendour, and her
worn face was illuminated as if a lamp had been held suddenly close to
it. All day, in spite of a neuralgic pain in her temples, she had worked
hard hemming the flounces for Virginia's dress, and into every stitch
had gone something of the divine ecstasy of martyrdom. Her life centred
so entirely in her affections that apart from love she could be hardly
said to exist at all. In spite of her trials she was probably the
happiest woman in Dinwiddie, for she had found her happiness in the only
way it is ever won--by turning her back on it. Never once had she
thought of it as an end to be pursued, never even as a flower to be
plucked from the wayside. It is doubtful if she had ever stopped once in
the thirty years of her marriage to ask herself the questions: "Is this
what I want to do?" or "Does this make me happy?" Love meant to her not
grasping, but giving, and in serving others she had served herself
unawares. Even her besetting sin of "false pride" she indulged not on
her own account, but because she, who could be humble enough for
herself, could not bear to associate the virtue of humility with either
her husband or her daughter.
The last blue bow was attached to the left side of the overskirt, and
while Miss Willy rose from her knees, Virginia crossed to the window and
gazed up at the pale stars over the tops of the paulownias. A joy so
vibrant that it was like living music swelled in her breast. She was
young! She was beautiful! She was to be loved! This preternatural
certainty of happiness was so complete that the chilling disappointments
of the last few days had melted before it like frost in the sunlight. It
was founded upon an instinct so much deeper, so much more primitive than
reason, that it resisted the logic of facts with something of the
exalted obstinacy with which faith has resisted the arguments of
philosophy. Like all young and inexperienced creatures, she was
possessed by the feeling that there exists a magnetic current of
attraction between desire and the object which it desires. "Something
told" her that she was meant for happiness, and the voice of this
"something" was more convincing than the chaotic march of phenomena.
Sorrow, decay, death--these appeared to her as things which must happen
inevitably to other people, but from which she should be forever
shielded by some beneficent Providence. She thought of them as vaguely
as she did of the remote tragedies of history. They bore no closer
relation to her own life than did the French Revolution or the beheading
of Charles the First. It was natural, if sad, that Miss Willy Whitlow
should fade and suffer. The world, she knew, was full of old people, of
weary people, of blighted people; but she cherished passionately the
belief that these people were all miserable because, somehow, they had
not chosen to be happy. There appeared something positively
reprehensible in a person who could go sighing upon so kind and
beautiful a planet. All things, even joy, seemed to her a mere matter of
willing. It was impossible that any hostile powers should withstand the
radiant energy of her desire.
Leaning there from the window, with her face lifted to the stars, and
her mother's worshipping gaze on her back, she thought of the
"happiness" which would be hers in the future: and this "happiness"
meant to her only the solitary experience of love. Like all the women of
her race, she had played gallantly and staked her world upon a single
chance. Whereas a man might have missed love and still have retained
life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one
emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted
as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and
spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so
secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs.
Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have been startled had she
penetrated that lovely head and discovered the ecstatic dreams that
flocked through her daughter's brain. Though love was the one window
through which a woman might look on a larger world, she was fatuously
supposed neither to think of it nor to desire it until it had offered
itself unsolicited. Every girl born into the world was destined for a
heritage of love or of barrenness--yet she was forbidden to exert
herself either to invite the one or to avoid the other. For, in spite of
the fiery splendour of Southern womanhood during the war years, to be
feminine, in the eyes of the period, was to be morally passive.
"Your father has come to see your dress, dear," said her mother in the
voice of a woman from whom sentiment overflowed in every tone, in every
look, in every gesture.
Turning quickly, Virginia met the smiling eyes of the rector--those
young and visionary eyes, which Nature, with a wistful irony, had placed
beneath beetling brows in the creased and wrinkled face of an old man.
The eyes were those of a prophet--of one who had lived his life in the
light of a transcendent inspiration rather than by the prosaic rule of
practical reason; but the face belonged to a man who had aged before his
time under the accumulated stress of physical burdens.
"How do I look, father? Am I pretty?" asked Virginia, stretching her
thin young arms out on either side of her, and waiting with parted lips
to drink in his praise.
"Almost as beautiful as your mother, and she grows lovelier every day
that she lives, doesn't she?"
His adoring gaze, which held the spirit of beauty as a crystal holds the
spirit of light, passed from the glowing features of Virginia to the
lined and pallid face of his wife. In that gaze there had been no shadow
of alteration for thirty years. It is doubtful even if he had seen any
change in her since he had first looked upon her face, and thought it
almost unearthly in its angelic fairness. From the physical union they
had entered into that deeper union of souls in which the body dissolves
as the shadow dissolves into the substance, and he saw her always as
she had appeared to him on that first morning, as if the pool of
sunlight in which she had stood had never darkened around her. Yet to
Virginia his words brought a startled realization that her mother--her
own mother, with her faded face and her soft, anxious eyes--had once
been as young and radiant as she. The love of her parents for each other
had always seemed to her as natural and as far removed from the
cloudless zone of romance as her own love for them--for, like most young
creatures, she regarded love as belonging, with bright eyes and rosy
cheeks, to the blissful period of youth.
"I hear John Henry's ring, darling. Are you ready?" asked Mrs.
Pendleton.
"In a minute. Is the rose right in my hair?" replied Virginia, turning
her profile towards her mother, while she flung a misty white scarf over
her shoulders.
"Quite right, dear. I hope you will have a lovely time. I shall sit up
for you, so you needn't bother to take a key."
"But you'll be so tired. Can't you make her go to bed, father?"
"I couldn't close my eyes till I knew you were safely home, and heard
how you'd enjoyed yourself," answered Mrs. Pendleton, as they slowly
descended the staircase, Virginia leading the way, and the rest
following in a procession behind her. Turning at the gate, with her arm
in John Henry's, the girl saw them standing in the lighted doorway, with
their tender gaze following her, and the faces of the little seamstress
and the two coloured servants staring over their shoulders. Trivial as
the incident was, it was one of the moments which stood out afterwards
in Virginia's memory as though a white light had fallen across it. Of
such simple and expressive things life is woven, though the years had
not taught her this on that May evening.
On the Goodes' lawn lanterns bloomed, like yellow flowers among the
branches of poplar trees, and beneath them Mrs. Goode and Abby--a loud,
handsome girl, with a coarsened complexion and a "sporting"
manner--received their guests and waved them on to a dancing platform
which had been raised between a rose-crowned summer-house and the old
brick wall at the foot of the garden. Ropes were stretched over the
platform, from the roof of the summer-house to a cherry tree at the end
of the walk, and on these more lanterns of red, blue, and yellow paper
were hanging. The air was scented with honeysuckle, and from an obscure
corner behind a trellis the sound of a waltz floated. As music it was
not of a classic order, but this did not matter since nobody was aware
of it; and Dinwiddie, which developed quite a taste for Wagner at the
beginning of the next century, could listen in the eighties with what
was perhaps a sincerer pleasure, to stringed instruments, a little
rough, but played with fervour by mulatto musicians. As Virginia drifted
off in John Henry's arms for the first dance, which she had promised
him, she thought: "I wonder if he will not come after all?" and a pang
shot through her heart where the daring joy had been only a moment
before. Then the music grew suddenly heavy while she felt her feet drag
in the waltz. The smell of honeysuckle made her sad as if it brought
back to her senses an unhappy association which she could not remember,
and it seemed to her that her soul and body trembled, like a bent flame,
into an attitude of expectancy.
"Let me stop a minute. I want to watch the others," she said, drawing
back into the scented dusk under a rose arbour.
"But don't you want to fill your card? If the men once catch sight of
you, you won't have a dance left."
"No--no, I want to watch a while," she said, with so strange an accent
of irritation that he stared at her in surprise. The suspense in her
heart hurt her like a drawn cord in throbbing flesh, and she felt angry
with John Henry because he was so dull that he could not see how she
suffered. In the distance, under the waving gilded leaves of the
poplars, she saw Abby laughing up into a man's face, and she thought:
"Can he possibly be in love with Abby? Some men are mad about her, but I
know he isn't. He could never like a loud woman, and, besides, he
couldn't have looked at me that way if he hadn't cared." Then it seemed
to her that something of the aching suspense in her own heart stole into
Abby's laughing face while she watched it, and from Abby it passed
onward into the faces of all the girls who were dancing on the raised
platform. Suspense! Was that a woman's life, after all? Never to be able
to go out and fight for what one wanted! Always to sit at home and wait,
without moving a foot or lifting a hand toward happiness! Never to dare
gallantly! Never even to suffer openly! Always to will in secret, always
to hope in secret, always to triumph or to fail in secret. Never to be
one's self--never to let one's soul or body relax from the attitude of
expectancy into the attitude of achievement. For the first time, born
of the mutinous longing in her heart, there came to her the tragic
vision of life. The faces of the girls, whirling in white muslin to the
music of the waltz, became merged into one, and this was the face of all
womanhood. Love, sorrow, hope, regret, wonder, all the sharp longing and
the slow waiting of the centuries--above all the slow waiting--these
things were in her brief vision of that single face that looked back at
her out of the whirling dance. Then the music stopped, the one face
dissolved into many faces, and from among them Susan passed under the
swinging lanterns and came towards her.
"Oh, Jinny, where have you been hiding? I promised Oliver I would find
you for him. He says he came only to look at you."
The music began joyously again; the young leaves, gilded by the yellow
lantern-light, danced in the warm wind as if they were seized by the
spirit of melody; and from the dusk of the trellis the ravished
sweetness of honeysuckle flooded the garden with fragrance. With the
vanished sadness in her heart there fled the sadness in the waltz and in
the faces of the girls who danced to the music. Waiting no longer seemed
pain to her, for it was enriched now by the burning sweetness of
fulfilment.
Suddenly, for she had not seen him approach, she was conscious that he
was at her side, looking down at her beneath a lantern which was
beginning to flicker. A sense of deep peace--of perfect contentment with
the world as God planned it--took possession of her. Even the minutes of
suspense seemed good because they had brought at last this swift rush
of happiness. Every line of his face--of that face which had captured
her imagination as though it had been the face of her dreams--was
illumined by the quivering light that gilded the poplars. His eyes were
so close to hers that she saw little flecks of gold on the brown, and
she grew dizzy while she looked into them, as if she stood on a height
and feared to turn lest she should lose her balance and fall. A
delicious stillness, which began in her brain and passed to her
throbbing pulses, enveloped her like a perfume. While she stood there
she was incapable of thought--except the one joyous thought that this
was the moment for which she had waited since the hour of her birth.
Never could she be the same afterwards! Never could she be unhappy again
in the future! For, like other mortals in other ecstatic instants, she
surrendered herself to the intoxicating illusion of their immortality.
After that silence, so charged with emotion for them both, it seemed
that when he spoke it must be to utter words that would enkindle the
world to beauty; but he said merely: "Is this dance free? I came only to
speak to you."
His look added, "I came because my longing had grown unbearable"; and
though she replied only to his words, it was his look that made the
honeysuckle-trellis, the yellow lanterns, and the sky, with its few soft
stars, go round like coloured balls before her eyes. The world melted
away from her, and the distance between her and the whirling figures in
white muslin seemed greater than the distance between star and star. She
had the sense of spiritual remoteness, of shining isolation, which
ecstasy brings to the heart of youth, as though she had escaped from
the control of ordinary phenomena and stood in a blissful pause beyond
time and space. It was the supreme moment of love; and to her, whose
soul acknowledged no other supremacy than that of love, it was, also,
the supreme moment of life.
His face, as he gazed down at her under the swinging leaves, seemed to
her as different from all other faces as the exquisite violence in her
soul was different from all other emotions she had ever known. She knew
nothing more of him than that she could not be happy away from him. She
needed no more infallible proof of his perfection than the look in his
eyes when he smiled at her. So convincing was the argument of his smile
that it was not only impregnable against any assault of facts, but
rendered futile even the underlying principle of reason. Had Aristotle
himself risen from his grave to prove to her that blind craving when
multiplied by blind possession does not equal happiness, his logic would
have been powerless before that unconquerable instinct which denied its
truth. And around them little white moths, fragile as rose-leaves,
circled deliriously in the lantern-light, for they, also, obeyed an
unconquerable instinct which told them that happiness dwelt in the flame
above which they were whirling.
"I am glad you wore blue ribbons" he said suddenly.
Her lashes trembled and fell, but they could not hide the glow that
shone in her eyes and in the faint smile which trembled, like an edge of
light, on her lips.
"Will you come into the summer-house and sit out this dance?" he asked
when she did not speak, and she followed him under the hanging clusters
of early roses to a bench in the dusk beside a little rustic table.
Here, after a moment's silence, he spoke again recklessly, yet with a
certain constraint of manner.
"I suppose I oughtn't to have come here to-night."
"Why not?" Their glances, bright as swords, crossed suddenly, and it
seemed to her that the music grew louder. Had it been of any use, she
would have prayed Life to dole the minutes out, one by one, like a
miser. And all the time she was thinking: "This is the moment I've
waited for ever since I was born. It has come. I am in the midst of it.
How can I keep it forever?"
"Well, I haven't any business thinking about anything but my work," he
answered. "I've broken with my uncle, you know. I'm as poor as a church
mouse and I'll never be better off until I get a play on the stage. For
the next few years I've got to cut out everything but hard work."
"Yes." Her tongue was paralyzed; she couldn't say what she felt, and
everything else seemed to her horribly purposeless and ineffectual. She
wondered passionately if he thought her a fool, for she could not look
into his mind and discover how adorable he found her monosyllabic
responses. The richness of her beauty combined with the poverty of her
speech made an irresistible appeal to the strongest part of him, which
was not his heart, but his imagination. He wondered what she would say
if she were really to let herself go, and this wonder began gradually to
enslave him.
"That's the reason I hadn't any business coming here," he added, "but
the truth is I've wanted to see you again ever since that first
afternoon. I got to wondering whether," he laughed in an embarrassed
way, and added with an attempt at levity, "whether you would wear a red
rose in your hair."
At his change of tone, she reached up suddenly, plucked the rose from
her hair and flung it out on the grass. Her action, which belied her
girlish beauty so strangely that only her mother would have recognized
it as characteristic of the hidden force of the woman, held him for an
instant speechless under her laughing eyes. Then turning away, he picked
up the rose and put it into his pocket.
"I suppose you will never tell me why you did that?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I can't tell. I don't know. Something took me."
"Did you think I came just for the rose?"
"I didn't think."
"If I came for the rose, I ought to go. I wish I could. Do you suppose
I'll be able to work again now that I've seen you? I've told myself for
three days that if I could only see you again I'd be able to stop
thinking about you."
She was not looking at him, but in every line of her figure, in every
quiver of her lashes, in every breath that she drew, he read the effect
of his words. It was as if her whole palpitating loveliness had become
the vehicle of an exquisite entreaty. Her soul seemed to him to possess
the purity, not of snow, but of flame, and this flame, in whose light
nothing evil could live, curved towards him as if blown by a wind. He
felt suddenly that he was swept onward by some outside power which was
stronger than his will. An enchantment had fallen over him, and at one
and the same instant he longed to break the power of the spell and knew
that life would cease to be worth living if he were ever to do so. He
saw her eyes, like blue flowers in the soft dusk, and the mist of curls
on her temples stirred gently in the scented breeze that blew over the
garden. All the sweetness of the world was gathered into the little
space that she filled. Every impulse of joy he had ever felt--memories
of autumn roads, of starlit mountains, of summer fields where bees
drifted in golden clouds--all these were packed like honey into that
single minute of love. And with the awakening of passion, there came the
exaltation, the consciousness of illimitable possibilities which passion
brings to the young. Never before had he realized the power that was in
him! Never until this instant had he seen his own soul in the making!
All the unquenchable faith of youth burned at white heat in the flame
which his desire had kindled. He felt himself divided between an
invincible brutality and an invincible tenderness. He would have fought
with beasts for the sake of the gentle and passive creature beside him,
yet he would have died rather than sully the look of angelic goodness
with which she regarded him. To have her always gentle, always passive,
never reaching out her hand, never descending to his level, but sitting
forever aloof and colourless, waiting eternally, patient, beautiful and
unwearied, to crown the victory--this was what the conquering male in
him demanded.
"I ought to go," he said, so ineffectual was speech to convey the tumult
within his brain. "I am keeping you from the others."
She had shrunk back into the dimness beyond the circle of lanterns, and
he saw her face like a pale moon under the clustering rose-leaves. Her
very breath seemed suspended, and there was a velvet softness in her
look and in the gesture of timid protest with which she responded to his
halting words. She was putting forth all her woman's power as innocently
as the honeysuckle puts forth its fragrance. The white moths whirling in
their brief passion over the lantern-flame were not more helpless before
the movement of those inscrutable forces which we call Life. A strange
stillness surrounded her--as though she were separated by a circle of
silence from the dancers beyond the rose-crowned walls of the
summer-house--and into this stillness there passed, like an invisible
current, the very essence of womanhood. The longing of all the dead
women of her race flowed through her into the softness of the spring
evening. Things were there which she could know only through her
blood--all the mute patience, all the joy that is half fear, all the
age-long dissatisfaction with the merely physical end of love--these
were in that voiceless entreaty for happiness; and mingled with them,
there were the inherited ideals of self-surrender, of service, pity,
loyalty, and sacrifice.
"I wish I could help you," she said, and her voice thrilled with the
craving to squander herself magnificently in his service.
"You are an angel, and I'm a selfish beast to bring you my troubles."
"I don't think you are selfish--of course you have to think of your
work--a man's work means so much to him."
"It's wonderful of you to feel that," he replied; and, indeed, at the
instant while he searched her eyes in the dusk, the words seemed to him
to embody all the sympathetic understanding with which his imagination
endowed her. How perfectly her face expressed the goodness and
gentleness of her soul! What a companion she would make to a man! What a
lover! What a wife! Always soft, exquisite, tender, womanly to the
innermost fibre of her being, and perfect in unselfishness as all
womanly women are. How easy it would be to work if she were somewhere
within call, ready to fly to him at a word! How glorious to go out into
the world if he knew that she sat at home waiting--always waiting, with
those eyes like wells of happiness, until he should return to her! A new
meaning had entered swiftly into life. A feeling that was like a
religious conversion had changed not only his spiritual vision, but the
material aspect of nature. Whatever happened, he felt that he could
never be the same man again.
"I shall see you soon?" he said, and the words fell like snow on the
inner flame of his senses.
"Oh, soon!" she answered, bending a little towards him while a sudden
glory illumined her features. Her voice, which was vibrant as a harp,
had captured the wistful magic of the spring--the softness of the winds,
the sweetness of flowers, the mellow murmuring of the poplars.
She rose from the bench, moving softly as if she were under an
enchantment which she feared to break by a gesture. An ecstasy as
inarticulate as grief kept him silent, and it was into this silence that
the voice of Abby floated, high, shrill, and dominant.
"Oh, Virginia, I've looked everywhere for you," she cried. "Mr.
Carrington is simply dying to dance with you!"
She bounced, as only the solid actuality can bounce, into the dream,
precipitating the unwelcome presence of Mr. Carrington--a young man with
a golden beard and the manner of a commercial minor prophet--there also.
A few minutes later, as Virginia drifted away in his arms to the music
of the waltz, she saw, over the heads of the dancers, Oliver and Abby
walking slowly in the direction of the gate. A feeling of unreality
seized her, as though she were looking through an azure veil at the
world. The dancers among whom she whirled, the anxious mothers sitting
uneasily on chairs under the poplars, the flowering shrubs, the
rose-crowned summer-house, the yellow lanterns with the clouds of white
moths circling around them--all these things had turned suddenly to
shadows; and through a phantom garden, the one living figure moved
beside an empty shape, which was Abby. Her feet had wings. She flew
rather than danced in the arms of a shadow through this blue veil which
enveloped her. Life burned within her like a flame in a porcelain vase,
and this inner fire separated her, as genius separates its possessor,
from the ordinary mortals among whom she moved.
Walking home with John Henry after the party was over, it seemed to her
that she was lifted up and cradled in all the wonderful freshness of the
spring. The sweet moist air fanned her face; the morning stars shone
softly on her through the pearly mist; and the pale fingers of dawn were
spread like a beneficent hand, above the eastern horizon. "To-morrow!"
cried her heart, overflowing with joy; and something of this joy passed
into the saddest hour of day and brightened it to radiance.
At the gate she parted from John Henry, and running eagerly along the
path, opened the front door, which was unlocked, and burst into the
dining-room, where her mother, wearied of her long watch, had fallen
asleep beside the lamp, which was beginning to flicker.
"To-morrow!" still sang her heart, and the wild, sweet music of it
filled the world. "To-morrow!"