IT was early summer now.
In the depths of the greening woods the school-master lay reading:
"And thus it passed on from Candlemass until after Easter that the month of
May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth
fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in
likewise, every lusty heart that is any manner a lover springeth and
flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage--that
lusty month of May--in something to constrain him to some manner of thing
more in that month than in any other month. For diverse causes: For then all
herbs and trees renew a man and woman; and, in likewise, lovers call again
to their mind old gentleness and old service and many kind deeds that were
forgotten by negligence. For like as winter rasure doth always erase and
deface green summer, so fareth it by unstable love in man and woman. For in
many persons there is no stability;...for a little blast of winter's rasure,
anon we shall deface and lay apart true love (for little or naught), that
cost so much. This is no wisdom nor stability, but it is feebleness of
nature and great disworship whomever useth this. Therefore like as May month
flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in likewise let every man of
worship flourish his heart in this world: first unto God, and next unto the
joy of them that he promised his faith unto; for there was never worshipful
man nor worshipful woman but they loved one better than the other. And
worship in arms may never be foiled; but first reserve the honour to God,
and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady; and such love I call
virtuous love. But nowsdays men cannot love seven nights but they must have
all their desires... Right so fareth love nowadays, soon hot, soon cold:
this is no stability. But the old love was not so. Men and women could love
together seven years...and then was love truth and faithfulness. And lo! In
likewise was used love in King Arthur's days. Wherefore I liken love
nowadays unto summer and winter; for like the one is hot and the other cold,
so fareth love nowadays.".......
He laid the book aside upon the grass, sat up, and mournfully looked about
him. Effort was usually needed to withdraw his mind from those low-down
shadowy centuries over into which of late by means of the book, as by means
of a bridge spanning a known and an unknown land, he had crossed, and
wonder-stricken had wandered; but these words brought him swiftly home to
the country of his own sorrow.
Unstable love! feebleness of nature! one blast of a cutting winter wind and
lo! green summer defaced: the very phrases seemed shaped by living lips
close to the ear of his experience. It was in this spot a few weeks ago
that he had planned his future with Amy: these were the acres he would buy;
on this hill-top he would build; here, home-sheltered, wife-anchored, the
warfare of his flesh and spirit ended, he could begin to put forth all his
strength upon the living of his life.
Had any frost ever killed the bud of nature's hope more unexpectedly than
this landscape now lay blackened before him? And had any summer ever cost
so much? What could strike a man as a more mortal wound than to lose the
woman he had loved and in losing her see her lose her loveliness?
As the end of it all, he now found himself sitting on the blasted rock of
his dreams in the depths of the greening woods. He was well again by this
time and conscious of that retightened grasp upon health and redder stir of
life with which the great Mother-nurse, if she but dearly love a man, will
tend him and mend him and set him on his feet again from a bed of wounds or
sickness. It had happened to him also that with this reflushing of his blood
there had reached him the voice of Summer advancing northward to all things
and making all things common in their awakening and their aim.
He knew of old the pipe of this imperious Shepherd; sounding along the inner
vales of his being; herding him toward universal fellowship with seeding
grass and breeding herb and every heart-holding creature of the woods. He
perfectly recognized the sway of the thrilling pipe; he perfectly realized
the joy of the jubilant fellowship. And it was with eyes the more mournful
therefore that he gazed in purity about him at the universal miracle of old
life passing into new life, at the divinely appointed and divinely fulfilled
succession of forms, at the unrent mantle of the generations being visibly
woven around him under the golden goads of the sun. " ...for like as herbs
bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise, every heart that is in
any manner a lover spingeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds." . . . But all
this must come, must spend itself, must pass him by, as a flaming pageant
dies away from a beholder who is forbidden to kindle his own torch and claim
his share of its innocent revels. He too had laid his plans to celebrate his
marriage at the full tide of the Earth's joy, and these plans had failed
him.
But while the school-master thus was gloomily contemplating the end of his
relationship with Amy and her final removal from the future of his life, in
reality another and larger trouble was looming close ahead.
A second landscape had begun to beckon not like his poor little frost-killed
field, not of the earth at all, but lifted unattainable into the air, faint,
clear, elusive--the marriage of another woman. And how different she! He
felt sure that no winter's rasure would ever reach that land; no
instability, no feebleness of nature awaited him there; the loveliness of
its summer, now brooding at flood, would brood unharmed upon it to the
natural end.
He buried his face guiltily in his hands as he tried to shut out the
remembrance of how persistently of late, whithersoever he had turned, this
second image had reappeared before him, growing always clearer, drawing
always nearer, summoning him more luringly. Already he had begun to know the
sensations of a traveller who is crossing sands with a parched tongue and a
weary foot, crossing toward a country that he will never reach, but that he
will stagger toward as long as he has strength to stand.
During the past several days--following his last interview with Amy--he had
realized for the first time how long and how plainly the figure of Mrs.
Falconer had been standing before him and upon how much loftier a level.
Many a time of old, while visiting the house, he had grown tired of Amy; but
he had never felt wearied by her. For Amy he was always making apologies to
his own conscience; she needed none. He had secretly hoped that in time Amy
would become more what he wished his wife to be; it would have pained him to
think of her as altered. Often he had left Amy's company with a grateful
sense of regaining the larger liberty of his own mind; by her he always felt
guided to his better self, he carried away her ideas with the hope of making
them his ideas, he was set on fire with a spiritual passion to do his utmost
in the higher strife of the world.
For this he had long paid her the guiltless tribute of his reverence and
affection. And between his reverence and affection and all the forbidden
that lay beyond rose a barrier which not even his imagination had ever
consciously overleaped. Now the forbidding barrier had disappeared, and in
its place had appeared the forbidden bond--he knew not how or when. How
could he? Love, the Scarlet Spider, will in a night hang between two that
have been apart a web too fine for either to see; but the strength of both
will never avail to break it.
Very curiously it had befallen him furthermore that just at the time when
all these changes were taking place around him and within him, she had
brought him the book that she had pressed with emphasis upon his attention.
In the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania where his maternal Scotch-Irish
ancestors had settled and his own life been spent, very few volumes had
fallen into his hands. After coming to Kentucky not many more until of late:
so that of the world's history he was still a stinted and hungry student.
When,therefore, she had given him Malory's "LeMorte D'Arthur," it was the
first time that the ideals of chivalry had ever flashed their glorious light
upon him; for the first time the models of Christian manhood, on which
western Europe nourished itself for centuries, displayed themselves to his
imagination with the charm of story; he heard of Camelot, of the king, of
that company of men who strove with each other in arms, but strove also with
each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit.
She had said that he should have read this book long before but that
henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here
were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found;
characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding
comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated,
scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to
the end.
Of this and more he felt at once the truth, since of all earthly books known
to him this contained the most heavenly revelation of what a man may be in
manliness, in gentleness, and in goodness. And as he read the nobler
portions of the book, the nobler parts of his nature gave out their
immediate response.
Hungrily he hurried to and fro across the harvest of those fertile pages,
gathering of the white wheat of the spirit many a lustrous sheaf: the love
of courage, the love of courtesy, the love of honour, the love of high aims
and great actions, the love of the poor and the helpless, the love of a
spotless name and a spotless life, the love of kindred, the love of
friendship, the love of humility of spirit, the love of forgiveness, the
love of beauty, the love of love, the love of God. Surely, he said to
himself, within the band of these virtues lay not only a man's noblest life,
but the noblest life of the world.
While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though
it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he
also--in the imperfect measure of his powers--had always hated: all
cowardice of mind or body, all lying, all oppression, all unfaithfulness,
all secret revenge and hypocrisy and double-dealing: the smut of the heart
and mind.
But ah! the other things besides these.
Sown among the white wheat of the spirit were the red tares of the flesh;
and as he strode back and forth through the harvest, he found himself
plucking these also with feverish vehemence. There were things here that he
had never seen in print: words that he had never even named to his secret
consciousness; thoughts and desires that he had put away from his soul with
many a struggle, many a prayer; stories of a kind that he had always
declined to hear when told in companies of men: all here, spelled out,
barefaced, without apology, without shame: the deposits of those old, old
moral voices and standards long since buried deep under the ever rising
level of the world's whitening holiness.
With utter guilt and shame he did not leave off till he had plucked the last
red tare; and having plucked them, he had hugged the whole inflaming bundle
against his blood--his blood now flushed with youth, flushed with health,
flushed with summer.
And finally, in the midst of all these things, perhaps coloured by them,
there had come to him the first great awakening of his life in a love that
was forbidden.
He upbraided himself the more bitterly for the influence of the book because
it was she who had placed both the good and the evil in his hand with
perfect confidence that he would lay hold on the one and remain unsoiled by
the other. She had remained spirit-proof herself against the influences that
tormented him; out of her own purity she had judged him. And yet, on the
other hand, with that terrible candour of mind which he used either for or
against himself as rigidly as for or against another person, he pleaded in
his own behalf that she had made a mistake in overestimating his strength,
in underestimating his temptations. How should she know that for years his
warfare had gone on direfully? How realize that almost daily he had stood as
at the dividing of two roads: the hard, narrow path ascending to the bleak
white peaks of the spirit; the broad, sweet, downward vistas of the flesh?
How foresee, therefore, that the book would only help to rend him in twain
with a mightier passion for each?
He had been back at the school a week now. He had never dared go to see her.
Confront that luminous face with his darkened one? Deal such a soul the
wound of such dishonour? He knew very well that the slightest word or glance
of self-betrayal would bring on the immediate severance of her relationship
with him: her wifehood might be her martyrdom, but it was martyrdom
inviolate. And yet he felt that if he were once with her, he could not be
responsible for the consequences: he could foresee no degree of self-control
that would keep him from telling her that he loved her. He had been afraid
to go.
But ah, how her image drew him day and night, day and night! Slipping
between him and every other being, every other desire. Her voice kept
calling to him to come to her--a voice new, irresistible, that seemed to
issue from the deeps of Summer, from the deeps of Life, from the deeps of
Love, with its almighty justification.
This was his first Saturday. To-day he had not even the school as a post of
duty, to which he might lash himself for safety. He had gone away from town
in an opposite direction from her home, burying himself alone in the forest.
But between him and that summoning voice he could put no distance. It sang
out afresh to him from the inviting silence of the woods as well as from its
innumerable voices. It sang to him reproachfully from the pages of the old
book: "In the lusty month of May lovers call again to their mind old
gentleness and old service and many deeds that were forgotten by
negligence:" he had never even gone to thank her for all her kindness to him
during his illness!
Still he held out, wrestling with himself. At last Love itself, the
deceiver, snaringly pleaded that she alone could cure him of all this folly.
It had grown up wholly during his absence from her, no doubt by reason of
this. Many a time before be had gone to her about other troubles, and always
he had found her carrying that steady light of right-mindedness which had
scatteredhis darkness and revealed his better pathway.
He sprang up and set off sternly through the woods. Goaded by love, he
fancied that the presence of the forbidden woman would restore him to his
old, blameless friendship.