Ah, gentle are the days when the Year is young
And rolling fields with rippling hemp are green
And from old orchards pipes the thrush at morn.
No land, no land like this is yet unsung
Where man and maid at twilight meet unseen
And Love is born.
Oh, mighty summer days and god of flaming tress
When in the fields full-headed bends the stalk,
And blossoms what was sown!
No land, no land like this for tenderness
When man and maid as one together walk
And Love is grown.
Oh, dim, dim autumn days of sobbing rain
When on the fields the ripened hemp is spread
And woods are brown.
No land, no land like this for mortal pain
When Love stands weeping by the sweet, sweet bed
For Love cut down.
Ah, dark, unfathomably dark, white winter days
When falls the sun from out the crystal deep
On muffled farms.
No land, no land like this for God's sad ways
When near the tented fields Love's Soldier lies asleep
With empty arms.
The verses were too sorrowful for this day, with its new, half-awakened
happiness. Had Gabriella been some strong-minded, uncompromising New
England woman, she might have ended her association with David the
night before--taking her place triumphantly beside an Accusing Judge.
Or she might all the more fiercely have set on him an acrid conscience,
and begun battling with him through the evidences of Christianity, that
she might save his soul. But this was a Southern girl of strong, warm,
deep nature, who felt David's life in its simple entirety, and had no
thought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one of
its parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member.
Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, she
had never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference to
his. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable
character, his manners, his manhood--these were what Gabriella had
always been taught to look for first in a man.
In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type of
man to her. He was the most religious, the only religious, one she had
ever known--a new spiritual growth arising out of his people as a young
oak out of the soil. Had she been familiar with the Greek idea, she
might have called him a Kentucky autochthon. It was the first time also
that she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of student
mind--that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves so
unobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usually
unobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from the
confines of the state.
Touching his scepticism she looked upon him still as she had thought of
him at first,--as an example of a sincere soul led astray for a time
only. Strange as were his views (and far stranger they seemed in those
years than now), she felt no doubt that when the clouds marshalled
across his clear vision from the minds of others had been withdrawn, he
would once more behold the Sun of Righteousness as she did. Gabriella
as by intuition reasoned that a good life most often leads to a belief
in the Divine Goodness; that as we understand in others only what we
are in ourselves, so it is the highest elements of humanity that must
be relied upon to believe in the Most High: and of David's lofty nature
she possessed the whole history of his life as evidence.
Her last act, then, the night before had been, in her nightgown, on her
knees, to offer up a prayer that he might be saved from the influences
of false teachers and guided back to the only Great One. But when a
girl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that hour, seeks
this pure audience and sends upward the name of a man on her spotless
prayers, he is already a sacred happiness to her as well as a care.
On this day she was radiant with tender happiness. The snow of itself
was exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It buried out
of sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly things. This
ennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic effect on the
interior of the house itself; outside it was a marble palace,
surrounded by statuary; within--alas! It provoked her humor, that
innocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her environment the
more tolerable.
When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await David's
coming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of men and women
who made up her past, possessed her still. She made a fresh
investigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its peculiar
furnishings. The hearthstones--lead color. The mohair furniture--cold
at all temperatures of the room and slippery in every position of the
body. The little marble-top table on which rested a glass case holding
a stuffed blue jay clutching a varnished limb: tail and eyes stretched
beyond the reach of muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, on
summer days, the cook blew as a dinner horn for the hands in the field.
A collection of ambrotypes which, no matter how held, always caused the
sitter to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violence
of the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin wooden
frames--these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this.
The first time she saw these portraits, she turned and walked rapidly
out of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearing
the troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them with
equanimity--that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, the
unaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been a
death in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same grief
could have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked,
each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure to
be counted.
She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestral
gayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other with
unconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to the
other; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered this
nearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited with
happiness.
He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking.
When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of
beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of
transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would
probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and
continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night
such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined
singer. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable to
play a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stood
rooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it is
merely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advance
the approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot up
rapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankest
growth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was not
even serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the more
awkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But she
who witnesses this awkwardness and understands--does she ever fail to
pardon?
"Last night," he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was about
half spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about--Man's
place in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"
"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" said
Gabriella, laughing--Gabriella who at all times was simplicity and
clearness.
"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she enables him to do
for himself. In this way she has made a man of him; she has given him
his resources and then thrown him upon them. Beyond that she cares
nothing, does nothing, provides, arranges nothing. I used to think, for
instance, that the greenness of the earth was intended for his
eyes--all the loveliness of spring. On the contrary, she merely gave
him an eye which has adapted itself to get pleasure out of the
greenness. The beauty of spring would have been the same, year after
year, century after century, had he never existed. And the blue of the
sky--I used to think it was hung about the earth for his sake; and the
colors of the clouds, the great sunsets. But the blueness of the sky is
nothing but the dust of the planet floating deep around it, too light
to sink through the atmosphere, but reflecting the rays of the sun.
These rays fall on the clouds and color them. It would all have been
so, had Man never been born. The earth's springs of drinking water,
refreshing showers, the rainbow on the cloud,--they would have been the
same, had no human being ever stood on this planet to claim them for
ages as the signs of providence and of covenant."
Gabriella had her own faith as to the rainbow.
"So, none of the other animals was made for Man," resumed David, who
seemed to have some ulterior purpose in all this. "I used to think the
structure and nature of the ass were given him that he might be adapted
to bear Man's burdens; they were given him that he might bear his own
burdens. Horses were not made for cavalry. And a camel--I never doubted
that he was a wonderful contrivance to enable man to cross the desert;
he is a wonderful contrivance in order that the contrivance itself may
cross the desert."
"I hope I may never have to use one," said Gabriella, "when I commence
to ride again. I prefer horses and carriages--though I suppose you
would say that only the carriage was designed for me and that I had no
right to be drawn in that way."
"Some day a horse may be designed for you, just as the carriage is. We
do not use horses on railroads now; we did use them at first in
Kentucky. Sometime you may not use horses in your carriage. You may
have a horse that was designed for you."
"I think," said Gabriella, "I should prefer a horse that was designed
for itself."
"And so," resumed David, moving straight on toward his concealed
climax, "if I were a poet, I'd never write poems about flowers and
clouds and lakes and mountains and moonbeams and all that; those things
are not for a man. If I were a novelist, I'd never write stories about
a grizzly bear, or a dog, or a red bird. If I were a sculptor, I'd not
carve a lynx or a lion. If I were a painter, I'd never paint sheep. In
all this universe there is only one thing that Nature ever created for
a man. I'd write poems about that one thing! I'd write novels about it!
I'd paint it! I'd carve it! I'd compose music to it!"
"Why, what is that?" said Gabriella, led sadly astray.
"A woman!" said David solemnly, turning red.
Gabriella fled into the uttermost caves of silence.
"And there was only one thing ever made for woman."
"I understand perfectly."
David felt rebuffed. He hardly knew why. But after a moment or two of
silence he went on, still advancing with rough paces toward his goal:--
"Sometimes," he said mournfully, "it's harder for a man to get the only
thing in the world that was ever made for him than anything else! This
difficulty, however, appertains exclusively to the human species."
Gabriella touched her handkerchief quickly to her lips and held it
there.
"But then, many curious things are true of our species," he continued,
with his eyes on the fire and in the manner of a soliloquy, "that never
occur elsewhere. A man, for instance, is the only animal that will
settle comfortably down for the rest of its days to live on the
exertions of the female."
"It shows how a woman likes to be depended on," said Gabriella, with
her deep womanliness.
"Tom-cats of the fireside," said David, "who are proud of what fat mice
their wives feed them on. It may show what you say in the nature of the
woman. But what does it show in the nature of the man?"
"That depends."
"I don't think it depends," replied David. "I think it is either one of
the results of Christianity or a survival of barbarism. As one of the
results of Christianity, it demonstrates what women will endure when
they are imposed upon. As a relic of barbarism--when it happens in our
country--why not regard it as derived from the North American Indians?
The chiefs lounged around the house and smoked the best tobacco and
sent the squaws out to work for them. Occasionally they broke silence
by briefly declaring that they thought themselves immortal."
Gabriella tried to draw the conversation into other channels, but David
was not to be diverted.
"It has been a great fact in the history of your sex," he said, looking
across at her, with a shake of his head, as though she did not
appreciate the subject, "that idea that everything in the universe was
made for Man."
"Why?" inquired Gabriella, resigning herself to the perilous and the
irresistible.
"Well, in old times it led men to think that since everything else
belonged to them, so did woman: therefore when they wanted her they did
not ask for her; they took her."
"It is much better arranged at present, whatever the reason."
"Now a man cannot always get one, even when he asks for her," and David
turned red again and knotted his hands.
"I am so glad the schoolhouse was not damaged by the storm," observed
Gabriella, reflecting.
David fell into a revery but presently awoke.
"There are more men than women in the world. On an average, that is
only a fraction of a woman to every man. Still the men cannot take care
of them. But it ought to be a real pleasure to every man to take care
of an entire woman."
"Did you ever notice the hands in that portrait?"
David glanced at the portrait without noticing it, and went his way.
"Since a man knows nothing else was created for him, he feels his
loneliness without her so much more deeply. They ought to be very good
and true to each other--a man and a woman--since they two are alone in
the universe."
He gulped down his words and stood up, trembling.
"I must be going," he said, without even looking at Gabriella, and went
out into the hall for his coat.
"Bring it in here." she called. "It is cold out there." She watched how
careless he was about making himself snug for his benumbing walk. He
had a woollen comforter which he left loosely tied about his neck.
"Tie it closer," she commanded. "You had a cold last night, and it is
worse tonight. Tuck it in close about your neck."
David made the attempt. He was not thinking.
"This way!" And Gabriella showed him by using her fingers around her
own neck and collar.
He tried again and failed, standing before her with a mingling of
embarrassment and stubborn determination.
"That will never do!" she cried with genuine concern. She took hold of
the comforter by the ends and drew the knot up close to his throat, he
lifting his head to receive it as it came. Then David with his eyes on
the ceiling felt his coat collar turned up and her soft warm fingers
tucking the comforter in around his neck. When he looked down, she was
standing over by the fireplace.
"Good night," she said positively, with a quick gesture of dismissal as
she saw the look in his eyes.
Each of the million million men who made up the past of David, that
moment reached a hand out of the distance and pushed him forward. But
of them all there was none so helpless with modesty,--so in need of
hiding from every eye,--even his own,--the sacred annals of that moment.
He was standing by the table on which burned the candles. He bent down
quickly and blew them out and went over to her by the dim firelight.