That opportunity, however, did not come to me. The same train of
circumstances which forced me to leave Marshbury sooner than I expected
kept me away from it for the next seven or eight years. But even though
the impression which I have been recording had lost a little of its
early piquancy in becoming more human, there was something about that
quiet corner of New England which always stayed with me. In crowded
streets I thought of its open valley. Through the chatter of drawing
rooms I heard its running water. Among people sophisticated to the
vanishing point I remembered Mrs. Bennett and Mary.
So, when the propitious moment arrived, I went back to them. There
was, I fear, a touch of the practical even in my sentiment. I had
started to scribble a New England novel and I wanted to be quiet. I
therefore thought to kill the most birds with one stone by returning to
Marshbury. Be that as it may, when I drove in toward the town it was
with an unaffected thrill that I suddenly recognised the old feeling
of the river road. I scarcely know how to express it. There are
indefinable states of emotion, as distinct in their quality as odours
or colours. And only the surroundings which awakened them first can,
if ever, awaken them again. This, I suppose, is the ground of that
principle of conservatism in man which can never reconcile itself with
the flux of the world.
My last visit ought to have prepared me for changes. The drive,
however, upset the inner counsels with which I had fortified
myself--and Mrs. Bennett. She, immortal woman, was identically the same
being whom I had known eleven years earlier. Even Mary had not changed
so much between twenty and twenty-eight as she had between seventeen
and twenty--although it was curious to me that the effect of time
should be so much more visible in the one better able to resist it! The
strong colour of her girlhood had softened into that delicate bloom
which few but nuns can wear. And there was something about her eyes
that intrigued me. But I did not wonder long. I had other sensations
to take account of. For in my ointment of happiness at getting back I
suddenly discovered a very large and buzzing fly.
Not that the Reverend James Wentworth could precisely be compared to
that humble creature. I had come, though, to look upon the Bennetts as
my private property, upon their paradise as open to myself alone. And
to find it invaded by the new minister put my nose distinctly out of
joint. Particularly as I perceived that my hostess fancied herself and
me greatly honoured by such fellowship. Of course I could not be nasty
about it. In other circumstances, in fact, I might have appreciated it
as much as anybody. For I have an odd sympathy for young clergymen.
Without knowing very well how much they deserve it, I always look upon
them as among the few really romantic people of the world--the people
who follow an inner light, regardless of rival luminaries. But the
Reverend James, alas, was of those who carry the theory to its logical
conclusion. He was inalienably assured that his own inner light was the
sole reflection of Truth, and that all men else--with whom he happened
to differ--pursued false fires.
It was a tremendous disillusionment, this unexpected change of
_milieu_. I had two ideas of leaving on the spot. The new atmosphere,
charged with latent argument, was the medium in which I breathe least
easily. Being, however, more or less of a Jesuit, as I have intimated,
I merely fumed within--and took copious notes. I promised myself that
the Reverend James should one day affront a wider audience in the
panoply of fiction. It was doubtless a lame enough compromise. I have
always envied those single temperaments that can identify themselves
with one side of a cause. For myself, I am unable to do it. I suppose
I do not take things seriously enough, or people. They come to me as
cases rather than as questions. I have no sense of responsibility
about them. At any rate, the case of the Reverend James I proceeded to
accept as an element of my Marshbury impression. Little did I foresee
how sharply it was to throw into relief the other case with which I had
so long been occupied!
That had evidently grown more crucial with the years--Marvin’s case.
For Daphne was dead. She had been dead almost four years, it seemed.
And in circumstances--One could not expect anything but scandal where
such people were concerned, Mrs. Bennett told me. The only decent
thing about it was that she and the child had died together. Anybody
might have known that she would go wrong. It was what she was born
to. She had done it before one could turn around, and just for a
good-for-nothing young scamp she hardly had time to get acquainted
with. Old Marvin, however, had refused to turn his face from her. He
had only kept her the more carefully, and had been inconsolable since.
Mary had never known him so queer. But--
Yes, it was evident that there was a “but.” There were things of
another, a darker, kind: things which were not so easy to put into
words. Between Mary’s eyes and her mother’s mysterious shrugs it was
much as ever that I succeeded in getting at what the business was
about. If it had not been for the plain-spoken Mr. Wentworth--! There
was a strangeness to the thing, though, when I got it. There was a
strangeness which I never dreamed eleven years before. It was only the
stranger for the apparently conventional touches which my impression
had in the meantime received. But as I write of it I realise Mrs.
Bennett’s difficulty in speaking to me. It was not a thing that you
could say in so many words and then go out of the room. You had to know
the place, the people, the circumstances. It was so largely an effect
of relativities, and of relativities different for each person whom
they touched.
It all began with Daphne’s death. Then Marvin, who for seven years
had been as much like other people as he could be, said Mrs. Bennett,
suddenly turned more eccentric than ever. He refused to let the girl be
buried like a Christian, in the cemetery. Of course she wasn’t one; but
it was queer that he should be the first to say so. He said the place
for her was between him and the water, and he made them dig a grave
in his own orchard--on a sort of little mound there was beside the
brook. If it had been anybody else, the Selectmen would have stopped
him. But seeing it was that girl--! And instead of getting her a proper
tombstone, which he could well afford and which everybody supposed he
would do, considering the store he set by her, he just planted on her
grave a sprig of lambkill.
That was natural enough in a way, opined Mrs. Bennett. People like to
put flowers on graves. But lambkill! Laurel, he called it. He said
that was Daphne’s tree. It was all a part of some heathenish business
they had had between them. Mary thought he got it out of his books.
Anyway, he spent all his time taking care of it. Of course it’s right
to keep graves looking tidy. But you don’t build little green-houses
over the flowers in winter. Neither do you get up in thunder-storms,
in the middle of the night, to go out and attend to them. If the Lord
intends things to be taken care of, he takes care of them, in spite of
thunder-storms.
The strangest part of it, though, was something more unnatural
still--something almost supernatural. The laurel sprig had followed
for a time the ordinary course of cuttings; had by sheer force of
tenderness been kept alive, and had at last developed into a healthy
little plant that could live alone. But then of a sudden it received a
new and secret impulse. It began to grow as no laurel had ever grown
before. There was nothing like it in the whole country. It outdistanced
at a bound the humble shrubs from which it sprang, and bade fair to
rival even the great mountain laurel of the woods. And such flowers as
it bore--such deep and burning clusters as never would have passed for
cousins, even, to the faint-flushed wax of the lambkill!
The thing was unnatural enough in itself, Heaven knew. But Marvin
made it a scandal. It hardly needed Mrs. Bennett to make it plain. He
insisted that Daphne had turned into a laurel, after all. He called
the bush by her name. He spent all his time listening to the growing
whisper of its leaves. He said the strangest things to Mary about
it--things stranger than any he had told her in the days when he used
to say that there was a girl singing to him in the brook. A cult so
extraordinary was not one to pass unnoticed. Even if Mr. Wentworth had
not been in the village to formulate the moral issues of the case, the
miraculous laurel waved there on its mound, more indecently conspicuous
every day to those who passed on the road. An uneasiness spread among
them. It was a reproach to Church and State alike that such things
should go on in their midst. It corrupted youth and was an offence to
age. Something should be done.
Mr. Wentworth, accordingly, did it. He, like Mrs. Lovejoy of old, went
straight to Marvin. And again I could not help admiring the simplicity
of that attack. I almost wished, too, that I might have been present
at the encounter. It must have been such a contrast of types as one
does not often witness in this half-way world. But it was not difficult
to gather what happened. It was wonderful how little Mary said, and
how much she expressed! Almost as wonderful were the volubility, the
excitement, with which Wentworth came back from his interview.
“He is an enemy of God!” cried the minister. “He professes to believe
in God; but ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ He has faith
neither in heaven nor hell. He denies the sacredness of Scripture. He
says a soul is nothing but a word--that there is as much soul in a ruby
or a rose as there is in himself! And the kind of immortality he looks
forward to is worse than none. He is a perfect pagan!”
The table rang with it for days. Of course it was Mary who supplied the
necessary additions to the story. Incidentally, albeit unconsciously,
she likewise supplied additions to her own story of which I had begun
to feel a certain lack. Marvin had received his caller courteously, it
seemed; had even consented, with a new quietness that had come upon
him, to listen to Wentworth’s exhortations. But the poor zealous young
man finally lost his head and allowed himself to say that they both
knew where Daphne had gone, and it wasn’t heaven either. Well, the
minister departed rather suddenly, and Marvin went out to his laurel
tree.
With all this going on at the table, I found it hard to keep up my
Jesuitism. I was more than ever caught by the case of this pagan who
was the legitimate child of a New England village. It was such a
strange example of the protean perversity of things to melt into one
another. Then the poetry of it simply undid me. I sat there smugly
writing New England novels, but I could never have imagined anything
like this. And the trains it started off--! Had that little tree indeed
despoiled the secrets of the grave? Had some taproot, blindly groping
through the dark soil, become a channel whereby was made manifest the
alchemy of the earth? Was the laurel literally a transfiguration? Might
it be proof of the infinite resource of life that that unhappy heart
which life had broken should at once forget its pain and dishonour and
be transmuted into beauty?
To me more than ever the wind and the waters spoke mysteriously. For
me more than ever was there a kinship between crystal and plant and
creature transcending the jealous immortality of man. There was neither
superiority nor inferiority. It was all part of the unceasing life
of the earth--of that deathless ebb and flow which draws the ancient
elements again and again into new combinations, which always has
wrought with the same ones and always must, in changing forms of beauty
and wonder.
And I came the nearest ever to seeking Marvin’s acquaintance. He made
me think of what Pater says of Leonardo, who “seemed to those about him
as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” I was interested to
the verge of indiscretion. I even went so far, I must confess, as to
walk oftener than elsewhere on the Poorhouse road--whence could be seen
the sacred laurel above its little stream. It was indeed a prodigy.
Such blossoms I never saw in my life. It turned one’s head to see them
there, aflame among their glossy green, with the brook skirling below.
Mary told me that Marvin would never pick them. Indeed he never picked
any flowers now, she said. It began the spring after Daphne died, when
the trailing arbutus came out. She had brought him some, one day,
thinking to please him. But he asked her not to do it again. It hurt
them, he said. And they were Daphne’s cousins, the arbutus....
I do not know how far I might have gone. But there came a day when
all hope of acquaintance was suddenly cut off. There came a day! I
shall never forget it. I had been on a long walk in the country. My
book was stuck, and I knew of old that the only way to unstick a
book is to let it alone. So I walked miles and miles in one of those
delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an
elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened
in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured
as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy
whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely
another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are
but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for
this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road.
As I rounded the turn by the orchard I looked as usual toward the
laurel tree. To my surprise, I saw figures moving on the mound; and
there was a cart tied at the gate. It was so out of the ordinary that I
stopped in spite of myself. Then I suddenly discovered that the laurel
was gone! I could not believe my eyes. The thing was too inconceivable.
It was to me as if I had stumbled upon a scene of murder. In the first
horror of it, in the certainty that something terrible had happened, I
forgot my habit of taking no personal part in that village drama. My
unuttered feeling for Marvin caught me like a hand and led me, choking,
toward the mound.
All I had eyes for at first was the laurel. It lay inert on the ground,
that a few hours before had waved so royally aloft; and already the
magic flowers looked a little wilted in their green. Beside it crouched
Marvin. He said nothing; but the inarticulate sounds that came from
him were the most piteous I ever heard. And the way he caressed his
stricken beauty was more than one could bear to see. No lover could
more tenderly, more passionately, address the limbs of his dead. He
straightened out contorted twigs. He lifted petals from their contact
with the ground. Now and again he put his hand to the poor sawn trunk,
whence a little pale moisture was oozing, as if to stanch a mortal
flow. And all the while he kept by him the severed knot of the root,
with its one thick stem that had been broken off deep in the ground.
After the first instant the indecency of looking at such a spectacle
overwhelmed me. I turned away. I noticed Mary then for the first time.
Two men whom I recognised as farm-hands of the Bennetts were also
there, and another whom I did not know. And Wentworth. Wentworth! All
the shock of the moment suddenly flared into my long latent dislike of
the man.
“Are you responsible for this?” I almost shouted at him.
I could have killed him, and he knew it. Yet that certainty of right
and wrong which is the power of his type did not desert him. I had a
sub-conscious appreciation of it, so keen is my accursed sense of such
things, even in my fury.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I am!” Oh, he was not afraid or ashamed! He
was of the stuff that has kindled fires and fed them since the world
began. And he went on as if he had been in his pulpit--or at the
stake: “I have wished that this parish should administer both rebuke
and reparation. I have long regretted that heathen rites should be
tolerated in a Christian community--as also that a proper charity
should not be shown to all, irrespective of creed. I therefore took
steps, after asking counsel of God, to attain both ends. I cut down
this tree because it was a public scandal, an occasion of stumbling to
Christians and sinners alike. The very children of our village were
beginning to be infected by its heresy. And I shall adorn the house of
God with these spoils, thus to expiate a sin and to consecrate anew
a work of God which has been devoted to unholy uses. But I have not
wished to be hasty in the matter, to be needlessly harsh and wounding.
Furthermore, it has been my desire to make good a neglect which has
rested too long on the Christian conscience of this community. I have
accordingly taken steps to mark with fitness the last resting-place
of an unfortunate young woman who apparently from her birth was more
sinned against than sinning.”
He pointed behind him. Where the laurel had been I saw now a slab of
grey granite. And cut into it I read these words:
DAPHNE MARVIN
1894-1911
“_He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her._”