The stillness of the May days is creeping into everything; the days in
which the furlough was to come; in which the bitter Peace has come
instead, and in which he would have been at home, never to go away from
me any more.
The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint sweetness makes me sick. The
moist, rich loam is ploughed in the garden; the grass, more golden than
green, springs in the warm hollow by the front gate; the great maple,
just reaching up to tap at the window, blazes and bows under its weight
of scarlet blossoms. I cannot bear their perfume; it comes up in great
breaths, when the window is opened. I wish that little cricket, just
waked from his winter’s nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp
at me. I hate the bluebirds flashing in and out of the carmine cloud
that the maple makes, and singing, singing, everywhere.
It is easy to understand how Bianca heard “The nightingales sing through
her head,” how she could call them “Owl-like birds,” who sang “for
spite,” who sang “for hate,” who sang “for doom.”
Most of all I hate the maple. I wish winter were back again to fold it
away in white, with its bare, black fingers only to come tapping at the
window. “Roy’s maple” we used to call it. How much fun he had out of
that old tree!
As far back as I can remember, we never considered spring to be
officially introduced till we had had a fight with the red blossoms. Roy
used to pelt me well; but with that pretty chivalry of his, which was
rare in such a little fellow, which developed afterwards into that rarer
treatment of women, of which every one speaks who speaks of him, he
would stop the play the instant it threatened roughness. I used to be
glad, though, that I had strength and courage enough to make it some fun
to him.
The maple is full of pictures of Roy. Roy not yet over the dignity of
his first boots, aiming for the cross-barred branch, coming to the
ground with a terrible wrench on his ankle, straight up again before
anybody could stop him, and sitting there on the ugly, swaying bough as
white as a sheet, to wave his cap,--“There, I meant to do it, and I
have!” Roy, chopping off the twigs for kindling-wood in his mud oven,
and sending his hatchet right through the parlor window. Roy cutting
leaves for me, and then pulling all my wreaths down over my nose every
time I put them on! Roy making me jump half-way across the room with a
sudden thump on my window, and, looking out, I would see him with his
hat off and hair blown from his forehead, framed in by the scented
blossoms, or the quivering green, or the flame of blood-red leaves. But
there is no end to them if I begin.
I had planned, if he came this week, to strip the richest branches, and
fill his room.
May 6.
The May-day stillness, the lazy winds, the sweetness in the air, are all
gone. A miserable northeasterly storm has set in. The garden loam is a
mass of mud; the golden grass is drenched; the poor little cricket is
drowned in a mud-puddle; the bluebirds are huddled among the leaves,
with their heads under their drabbled wings, and the maple blossoms,
dull and shrunken, drip against the glass.
It begins to be evident that it will never do for me to live alone. Yet
who is there in the wide world that I could bear to bring here--into
Roy’s place?
A little old-fashioned book, bound in green and gold, attracted my
attention this morning while I was dusting the library. It proved to be
my mother’s copy of “Elia,”--one that father had given her, I saw by the
fly-leaf, in their early engagement days. It is some time since I have
read Charles Lamb; indeed, since the middle of February I have read
nothing of any sort. Phœbe dries the Journal for me every night, and
sometimes I glance at the Telegraphic Summary, and sometimes I don’t.
“You used to be fond enough of books,” Mrs. Bland says, looking
puzzled,--“regular blue-stocking, Mr. Bland called you (no personal
objection to you, of course, my dear, but he _doesn’t_ like literary
women, which is a great comfort to me). Why don’t you read and divert
yourself now?”
But my brain, like the rest of me, seems to be crushed. I could not
follow three pages of history with attention. Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Whittier, Mrs. Browning, are filled with Roy’s marks,--and so down the
shelf. Besides, poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots
of things. One finds everywhere some strain at the fibres of one’s
heart. A mind must be healthily reconciled to actual life, before a
poet--at least most poets--can help it. We must learn to bear and to
work, before we can spare strength to dream.
To hymns and hymn-like poems, exception should be made. Some of them are
like soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast
without a spoken word. I do not know how many times Whittier’s “Psalm,”
and that old cry of Cowper’s, “God moves in a mysterious way,” have
quieted me,--just the sound of the words; when I was too wild to take in
their meaning, and too wicked to believe them if I had.
As to novels, (by the way, Meta Tripp sent me over four yesterday
afternoon, among which notice “Aurora Floyd” and “Uncle Silas,”) the
author of “Rutledge” expresses my feeling about them precisely. I do not
remember her exact words, but they are not unlike these. “She had far
outlived the passion of ordinary novels; and the few which struck the
depths of her experience gave her more pain than pleasure.”
However, I took up poor “Elia” this morning, and stumbled upon “Dream
Children,” to which, for pathos and symmetry, I have read few things
superior in the language. Years ago, I almost knew it by heart, but it
has slipped out of memory with many other things of late. Any book, if
it be one of those which Lamb calls “books which _are_ books,” put
before us at different periods of life, will unfold to us new
meanings,--wheels within wheels, delicate springs of purpose to which,
at the last reading, we were stone-blind; gems which perhaps the author
ignorantly cut and polished.
A sentence in this “Dream Children,” which at eighteen I passed by with
a compassionate sort of wonder, only thinking that it gave me “the
blues” to read it, and that I was glad Roy was alive, I have seized upon
and learned all over again now. I write it down to the dull music of the
rain.
“And how, when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed
as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt
life and death; and how I bore his death, as I thought, pretty well at
first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not
cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if
I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how
much I had loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness,
and wished him to be alive again to be quarrelling with him (for we
quarrelled sometimes), rather than not have him again.”
How still the house is! I can hear the coach rumbling away at the
half-mile corner, coming up from the evening train. A little arrow of
light has just cut the gray gloom of the West.
Ten o’clock.
The coach to which I sat listening rumbled up to the gate and stopped.
Puzzled for the moment, and feeling as inhospitable as I knew how, I
went down to the door. The driver was already on the steps, with a
bundle in his arms that proved to be a rather minute child; and a lady,
veiled, was just stepping from the carriage into the rain. Of course I
came to my senses at that, and, calling to Phœbe that Mrs. Forceythe
had come, sent her out an umbrella.
She surprised me by running lightly up the steps. I had imagined a
somewhat advanced age and a sedate amount of infirmities, to be
necessary concomitants of aunthood. She came in all sparkling with
rain-drops, and, gently pushing aside the hand with which I was trying
to pay her driver, said, laughing:--
“Here we are, bag and baggage, you see, ‘big trunk, little trunk,’ &c.,
&c. You did not expect me? Ah, my letter missed then. It is too bad to
take you by storm in this way. Come, Faith! No, don’t trouble about the
trunks just now. Shall I go right in here?”
Her voice had a sparkle in it, like the drops on her veil, but it was
low and very sweet. I took her in by the dining-room fire, and was
turning to take off the little girl’s things, when a soft hand stayed
me, and I saw that she had drawn off the wet veil. A face somewhat pale
looked down at me,--she is taller than I,--with large, compassionate
eyes.
“I am too wet to kiss you, but I must have a look,” she said, smiling.
“That will do. You are like your mother, very like.”
I don’t know what possessed me, whether it was the sudden, sweet feeling
of kinship with something alive, or whether it was her face or her
voice, or all together, but I said:--
“I don’t think you are too wet to be kissed,” and threw my arms about
her neck,--I am not of the kissing kind, either, and I had on my new
bombazine, and she _was_ very wet.