"I am the belt and the girdle of this world. I carry in my arms the
souls of the dead and the sins of them; the souls of them that have not
yet lived, with their deeds, are in my bosom. I am sorrowful with the
sorrow of ages, and strong with the strength of ages yet unlived. What
is thy sorrow to my sorrow, or thy strength to my strength? Listen.
"Knowest thou whence I come, or whither I go? Fool, thou knowest not
even of thyself what thou shalt do to-morrow, and it may be that on the
next day I shall have thy soul, to take it away, and hold it, and buffet
it, and tear it as I will. Fool, thou knowest little! The gardens of
Persia are sweet this night; this night the maidens of Hindustan have
gone forth to greet the new moon, and I am full of their soft prayers
and gentle thoughts, for I am come from them. But the north, whither I
go, is cold and cruel, full of snow and darkness and gloom. Along the
lands where I will pass I shall see men and women dying in the frost,
and little children, too, poor and hungry, and shivering out the last
breathings of a wretched life; and some of them I will take with me
this night, to my journey's end among the ice-floes and the brown,
driving mists of the uttermost north. Dost thou wonder that I am sad?
"That is thy life. Thou art come from the sweet-scented gardens of thy
youth, thou must go to the ice desert of thine old age; and now thou art
full of strength and boastfulness, and thinkest thou shalt perchance be
the first mortal who shall cheat death. Go to! Thou shalt die like the
rest, the more miserably that thou lovest life more than the others."
The wind is in an ill humor to-night; I should not have thought he could
say such hard things. But he is a hopeless old cynic, even when he blows
warm from the south; he has seen so much and done so much, and has
furnished so many metaphors to threadbare poets, that he believes in
nothing good, or young, or in any way fresh. He is bad company, and I
have shut the window again. You asked me for a story, and you are
beginning to wonder why I do not tell you one. Do you like long stories
or short stories? Sad or gay? True or fanciful? What shall it be? My
true stories are all sad, but the ones I imagine are often merry. Could
I not think of one true, and gay as well? There was once a bad old man
who said that when the truth ceased to be solemn it became dull. Between
solemnity and dullness you would not find what you want, which, I take
it, is a little laughter, a little sadness, and, when it is done, the
comfortable assurance of your own senses that you have been amused, and
not bored. The bad old gentleman was right. When our lives are not
filled with great emotions they are crammed with insignificant details,
and one may tell them ever so well, they will be insignificant to the
end. But the fancy is a great store-house, filled with all the beautiful
things that we do not find in our lives. My dear friend, if true love
were an every-day phenomenon, experienced by everybody, it would cease
to be in any way interesting; people would be so familiar with it that
it would bore them to extinction; they would have it for breakfast,
dinner, and supper as a matter of course, and would be as fastidious of
its niceties as an Anglo-Indian about the quality of the pepper. It is
because only one man or woman in a hundred thousand is personally
acquainted with the sufferings of true-love fever that the other
ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine take delight in
observing the contortions and convulsions of the patient. It is a great
satisfaction to them to compare the slight touch of ague they once had
when they were young with the raging sickness of a breaking heart; to
see a resemblance between the tiny scratch upon themselves, which they
delight in irritating, and the ghastly wound by which the tortured soul
has sped from its prison.
To tell the truth, they are not so very much to blame. Even the
momentary reflection of love is a good thing; at least, it is better
than to know nothing of it. One can fancy that a violin upon which no
one had ever played would yet be glad to vibrate faintly in unison with
the music of a more favored neighbor; it would bring a sensation of the
possibility of music. The stronger harmony is caught up and carried on
forever in endless sound waves, but the slight responsive murmur of the
passive strings is lost and forgotten.
And now you will tell me that I am making phrases. That is my
profession: I am a twister of words; I torture language by trade. You
know it, for you have known me a long time, and, if you will pardon my
vanity, or rudeness, I observe that my mode of putting the dictionary on
the rack amuses you. The fact that you ask for a story shows that well
enough. I am a plain man, and there never was any poetry in me, but I
have seen it in other people, and I understand why some persons like it.
As for stories, I have plenty of them. I, Paul Griggs, have seen a
variety of sights, and I have a good memory. There is the south-east
wind again. I was speaking of love, a moment ago,--there is a story of
the wind falling in love. There is a garden of roses far away to the
east, where a maiden lies asleep; the roses have no thorns in that
garden, and they grow softly about her and make a pillow for her fair
head. A blustering wind came once and nearly waked her, but she was so
beautiful that he fell deep in love; and he turned into the softest
breeze that ever fanned a woman's cheek in summer, for fear lest he
should trouble her sleep. There was a poor woman in rags, in the streets
of London, on that March night, but she could not soften the heart of
the cruel blast for all her shivering and praying; for she was very poor
and wretched, and never was beautiful, even when she was young.
That is a short tale, and it has no moral application, for it is too
common a truth. If people would only act directly on things instead of
expecting the morality of their cant phrases to act for them, to feed
the hungry, to clothe the naked, to pay their bills, and to save their
souls into the bargain, what a vast deal of good would be done, and what
an incalculable amount of foolish talk would be spared! But there is a
diplomatic spirit abroad in our day, and it is necessary to enter into
polite relations with a drowning man before it is possible to pull him
out of the water.
But the story, you say,--where is it? Forgive me. I am rusty and
ponderous at the start, like an old dredger that has stuck too long in
the mud. Let me move a little and swing out with the tide till I am in
clearer waters, and I will promise to bring up something pretty from the
bottom of the sea for you to look at. I would not have you see any of
the blackness that lies in the stagnant harbor.
I will tell you the story of Paul Patoff. I played a small part in it
myself last summer, and so, in a certain way, it is a tale of my own
experience. I say a tale, because it is emphatically a tale, and nothing
else. I might almost call it a yarn, though the word would look
strangely on a printed title-page. We are vain in our generation; we
fancy we have discovered something new under the sun, and we give the
name "novel" to the things we write. I will not insult literature by
honoring this story with any such high-sounding designation. A great
many of the things I am going to tell you were told to me, so that I
shall have some difficulty in putting the whole together in a connected
shape, and I must begin by asking your indulgence if I transgress all
sorts of rules, and if I do not succeed in getting the interesting
points into the places assigned to them by the traditional laws of art.
I tell what happened, and I do not pretend to tell any more.