THE SPIRAL STONE
THE graveyard on the brow of the hill was white with snow. The marbles
were white, the evergreens black. One tall spiral stone stood painfully
near the centre. The little brown church outside the gates turned its
face in the more comfortable direction of the village.
Only three were out among the graves: “Ambrose Chillingworth, ætat 30,
1675;”
“Margaret Vane, ætat 19, 1839;” and “Thy Little One, O God, ætat 2,”
from the Mercer Lot. It is called the “Mercer Lot,” but the Mercers are
all dead or gone from the village.
The Little One trotted around busily, putting his tiny finger in the
letterings and patting the faces of the cherubs. The other two sat on
the base of the spiral, which twisted in the moonlight over them.
“I wonder why it is?” Margaret said. “Most of them never come out at
all. We and the Little One come out so often. You were wise and learned.
I knew so little. Will you tell me?”
“Learning is not wisdom,” Ambrose answered. “But of this matter it was
said that our containment in the grave depended on the spirit in which
we departed. I made certain researches. It appeared by common report
that only those came out whom desperate sin tormented, or labors
incomplete and great desire at the point of death made restless. I
had doubts the matter were more subtle, the reasons of it reaching out
distantly.” He sighed faintly, following with his eyes, tomb by tomb,
the broad white path that dropped down the hillside to the church. “I
desired greatly to live.”
“I, too. Is it because we desired it so much, then? But the Little
One”---
“I do not know,” he said.
The Little One trotted gravely here and there, seeming to know very well
what he was about, and presently came to the spiral stone. The lettering
on it was new, and there was no cherub. He dropped down suddenly on the
snow, with a faint whimper. His small feet came out from under his gown,
as he sat upright, gazing at the letters with round troubled eyes, and
up to the top of the monument for the solution of some unstated problem.
“The stone is but newly placed,” said Ambrose, “and the newcomer would
seem to be of those who rest in peace.”
They went and sat down on either side of him, on the snow. The peculiar
cutting of the stone, with spirally ascending lines, together with the
moon's illusion, gave it a semblance of motion. Something twisted and
climbed continually, and vanished continually from the point. But the
base was broad, square, and heavily lettered: “John Mareschelli Vane.”
“Vane? That was thy name,” said Ambrose.
1890. Ætat 72.
An Eminent Citizen, a Public Benefactor, and Widely Esteemed.
For the Love of his Native Place returned to lay his Dust therein.
The Just Made Perfect.
“It would seem he did well, and rounded his labors to a goodly end,
lying down among his kindred as a sheaf that is garnered in the autumn.
He was fortunate.”
And Margaret spoke, in the thin, emotionless voice which those who are
long in the graveyard use: “He was my brother.”
“Thy brother?” said Ambrose.
The Little One looked up and down the spiral with wide eyes. The other
two looked past it into the deep white valley, where the river, covered
with ice and snow, was marked only by the lines of skeleton willows and
poplars. A night wind, listless but continual, stirred the evergreens.
The moon swung low over the opposite hills, and for a moment slipped
behind a cloud.
“Says it not so, 'For the Love of his Native Place'?” murmured Ambrose.
And as the moon came out, there leaned against the pedestal, pointing
with a finger at the epitaph, one that seemed an old man, with bowed
shoulders and keen, restless face, but in his manner cowed and weary.
“It is a lie,” he said slowly. “I hated it, Margaret. I came because
Ellen Mercer called me.”
“Ellen isn't buried here.”
“Not here!”
“Not here.”
“Was it you, then, Margaret? Why?”
“I didn't call you.”
“Who then?” he shrieked. “Who called me?”
The night wind moved on monotonously, and the moonlight was undisturbed,
like glassy water.
“When I came away,” she said, “I thought you would marry her. You
didn't, then? But why should she call you?”
“I left the village suddenly!” he cried. “I grew to dread, and then to
hate it. I buried myself from the knowledge of it, and the memory of it
was my enemy. I wished for a distant death, and these fifty years have
heard the summons to come and lay my bones in this graveyard. I thought
it was Ellen. You, sir, wear an antique dress; you have been long in
this strange existence. Can you tell who called me? If not Ellen, where
is Ellen?” He wrung his hands, and rocked to and fro.
“The mystery is with the dead as with the living,” said Ambrose. “The
shadows of the future and the past come among us. We look in their eyes,
and understand them not. Now and again there is a call even here, and
the grave is henceforth untenanted of its spirit. Here, too, we know a
necessity which binds us, which speaks not with audible voice and will
not be questioned.”
“But tell me,” moaned the other, “does the weight of sin depend upon its
consequences? Then what weight do I bear? I do not know whether it was
ruin or death, or a thing gone by and forgotten. Is there no answer here
to this?”
“Death is but a step in the process of life,” answered Ambrose. “I know
not if any are ruined or anything forgotten. Look up, to the order of
the stars, an handwriting on the wall of the firmament. But who hath
read it? Mark this night wind, a still small voice. But what speaketh
it? The earth is clothed in white garments as a bride. What mean the
ceremonials of the seasons? The will from without is only known as it is
manifested. Nor does it manifest where the consequences of the deed end
or its causes began. Have they any end or a beginning? I cannot answer
you.”
“Who called me, Margaret?”
And she said again monotonously, “I didn't call you.”
The Little One sat between Ambrose and Margaret, chuckling to himself
and gazing up at the newcomer, who suddenly bent forward and looked into
his eyes, with a gasp.
“What is this?” he whispered. “'Thy Little One, O God, ætat 2,' from
the Mercer Lot,” returned Ambrose gently. “He is very quiet. Art not
neglecting thy business, Little One? The lower walks are unvisited
to-night.”
“They are Ellen's eyes!” cried the other, moaning and rocking. “Did you
call me? Were you mine?”
“It is, written, 'Thy Little One, O God,'” murmured Ambrose.
But the Little One only curled his feet up under his gown, and now
chuckled contentedly.
THE MUSIDORA SONNET
THE clock in some invisible steeple struck one. The great snowflakes
fell thickly, wavering and shrinking, delicate, barren seeds, conscious
of their unfruitfulness. The sputter of the arc lights seemed explosive
to the muffled silence of the street. With a bright corner at either end,
the block was a canon, a passage in a nether world of lurking ghosts,
where a frightened gaslight trembled, hesitated midway. And Noel
Endicott conceived suddenly, between curb and curb, a sonnet, to be
entitled “Dante in Tenth Street,” the appearance of it occupying,
in black letter, a half page in the _Monthly Illustrated_, a gloomy
pencilling above, and below it “Noel Endicott.” The noiselessness of his
steps enlarged his imagination.
I walked in 19th Street, not the Florentine,
With ghosts more sad, and one like Beatrice
Laid on my lips the sanction of her kiss.
'Twas----
It should be in a purgatorial key, in effect something cold, white and
spiritual, portraying “her” with Dantesque symbolism, a definite being,
a vision with a name. “'Twas--” In fact, who was she?
He stopped. Tenth Street was worth more than a sonnet's confined
austerity. It should be a story. Noel was one who beat tragic
conceptions into manuscript, suffering rejection for improbability.
Great actions thrilled him, great desires and despairs. The massive
villainies of Borgia had fallen in days when art was strenuous. Of old,
men threw a world away for a passion, an ambition. Intense and abundant
life--one was compelled now to spin their symbols out of thin air, be
rejected for improbability, and in the midst of a bold conception, in a
snowstorm on canoned Tenth Street, be hungry and smitten with doubts of
one's landlady.
Mrs. Tibbett had been sharp that morning relative to a bill, and he
had remonstrated but too rashly: “Why discuss it, Mrs. Tibbett? It's
a negative, an unfruitful subject.” And she had, in effect, raved, and
without doubt now had locked the outer door. Her temper, roused at one
o'clock, would be hasty in action, final in result.
He stood still and looked about him. Counting two half blocks as one, it
was now one block to Mrs. Tibbett and that ambushed tragedy.
In his last novel, “The Sunless Treasure” (to his own mind his
greatest), young Humphrey stands but a moment hesitating before the
oaken door, believing his enemies to be behind it with ready daggers. He
hesitates but a moment. The die is cast. He enters. His enemies are not
there. But Mrs. Tibbett seemed different. For instance, she would be
there.
The house frontage of this, like the house frontage of the fatal next
block, was various, of brick, brownstone or dingy white surface,
with doorways at the top of high steps, doorways on the ground level,
doorways flush with the front, or sunken in pits. Not a light in any
window, not a battlement that on its restless front bore a star, but
each house stood grim as Child Roland's squat tower. The incessant
snowflakes fell past, no motion or method of any Byzantine palace
intrigue so silken, so noiseless, so mysterious in beginnings and
results. All these locked caskets wedged together contained problems
and solutions, to which Bassanio's was a simple chance of three with a
pointed hint. Noel decided that Tenth Street was too large for a story.
It was a literature. One must select.
Meanwhile the snow fell and lay thickly, and there was no doubt that by
persistent standing in the snow one's feet became wet. He stepped into
the nearest doorway, which was on the level of the street, one of three
doorways alike, all low, arched and deep.
They would be less noticeable in the daytime than in the night, when
their cavernous gaping and exact repetition seemed either ominous or
grotesque, according to the observer. The outer door was open. He felt
his way in beyond the drift to the hard footing of the vestibule, kicked
his shoes free of snow and brushed his beard.
The heroes of novels were sometimes hungry and houseless, but it seemed
to Noel that they seldom or never faced a problem such as Mrs. Tibbett
presented. Desperate fortunes should be carried on the point of one's
sword, but with Mrs. Tibbett the point was not to provoke her. She was
incongruous. She must be thrust aside, put out of the plot. He made a
gesture dismissing Mrs. Tibbett. His hand in the darkness struck the
jamb of the inner door, which swung back with a click of the half-caught
latch. His heart thumped, and he peered into the darkness, where a thin
yellow pencil of light stretched level from a keyhole at the farther end
of a long hall.
Dismissing Mrs. Tibbett, it was a position of dramatic advantage to
stand in so dark and deep an arched entrance, between the silence and
incessant motion of the snow on the one hand, and the yellow pencil
of light, pointing significantly to something unknown, some crisis
of fortune. He felt himself in a tale that had both force and form,
responsible for its progress.
He stepped in, closed the half door behind him softly, and crept through
the hall. The thin line of light barred the way, and seemed to say,
“Here is the place. Be bold, ready-minded, full of subtlety and
resource.” There was no sound within that he could hear, and no sound
without, except his own oppressed breathing and pulses throbbing in his
ears.
Faint heart never won anything, and as for luck, it belonged to those
who adventured with various chances, and of the blind paths that led
away from their feet into the future, chose one, and another, and so
kept on good terms with possibility. If one but cried saucily, “Open
this odd little box, you three gray women!” And this, and this the
gray Fates smiled indulgently, showing a latent motherliness. How many
destinies had been decided by the opening and shutting of a door, which
to better or worse, never opened again for retreat? A touch on this door
and Mrs. Tibbett might vanish from the story forever, to the benefit of
the story.
He lifted his hand, having in mind to tap lightly, with tact and
insinuation, but struck the door, in fact, nervously, with a bang that
echoed in the hall. Some one spoke within. He opened and made entry in a
prepared manner, which gave way to merely blinking wonder.
It was a large dining-room, brightly lit by a chandelier, warm from
a glowing grate, sumptuous with pictures and hangings, on the table a
glitter of glass and silver, with meat, cakes and wine.
On the farther side of the table stood a woman in a black evening dress,
with jewels on her hair and bosom. She seemed to have just risen, and
grasped the back of her chair with one hand, while the other held open a
book on the table. The length of her white arm was in relief against her
black dress.
Noel's artistic slouch hat, now taken off with uncertain hand, showed
wavy brown hair over eyes not at all threatening, a beard pointed,
somewhat profuse, a face interestingly featured and astonished. No
mental preparation to meet whatever came, of Arabic or mediaeval
incident, availed him. He felt dumb, futile, blinking. The lady's
surprise, the startled fear on her face, was hardly seen before it
changed to relief, as if the apparition of Noel, compared with some
foreboding of her own, were a mild event. She half smiled when he
began:--
“I am an intruder, madam,” and stopped with that embarrassed platitude.
“I passed your first door by accident, and your second by impulse.”
“That doesn't explain why you stay.”
“May I stay to explain?”
When two have exchanged remarks that touch the borders of wit, they
have passed a mental introduction. To each the mind of the other is a
possible shade and bubbling spring by the dusty road of conversation.
Noel felt the occasion. He bowed with a side sweep of his hat.
“Madam, I am a writer of poems, essays, stories. If you ask, What do I
write in poems, essays, stories, I answer, My perception of things. If
you ask, In what form would I cast my present perceptions of things, I
say, Without doubt a poem.”
“You are able to carry both sides of a conversation. I have not asked
any of these.”
“You have asked why I stay. I am explaining.”
The lady's attitude relaxed its stiffness by a shade, her half smile
became a degree more balmy.
“I think you must be a successful writer.”
“You touch the point,” he said slowly. “I am not. I am hungry and
probably houseless. And worse than that, I find hunger and houselessness
are sordid, tame. The taste of them in the mouth is flat, like stale
beer. It is not like the bitter tang of a new experience, but like
something the world shows its weariness of in me.”
The amused smile vanished in large-eyed surprise, and something
more than surprise, as if his words gave her some intimate, personal
information.
“You say strange things in a very strange way. And you came in by an
accident?”
“And an impulse?”
“I don't understand. But you must sit down, and I can find you more to
eat, if this isn't enough.”
Noel could not have explained the strangeness of his language, if it was
strange, further than that he felt the need of saying something in
order to find an opportunity of saying something to the point, and so
digplayed whatever came to his mind as likely to arrest attention. It
was a critical lesson in vagabondage, as familiar there as hunger and
houselessness. He attacked the cold meat, cakes and fruit with fervor,
and the claret in the decanter. But what should be the next step in the
pursuit of fortune? At this point should there not come some revelation?
The lady did not seem to think so, but sat looking now at Noel and now
at her own white hands in her lap. That she should have youth and beauty
seemed to Noel as native to the issue as her jewels, the heavy curtains,
the silver and glass. As for youth, she might be twenty, twenty-one,
two. All such ages, he observed to himself with a mental flourish,
were one in beauty. It was not a rosy loveliness like the claret in the
decanter, nor plump like the fruit in the silver basket, but dark-eyed,
white and slender, with black hair drawn across the temples; of a
fragile delicacy like the snowflakes, the frost flower of the century's
culture, the symbol of its ultimate luxury. The rich room was her
setting. She was the center and reason for it, and the yellow point of
a diamond over her heart, glittering, but with a certain mellowness, was
still more central, intimate, interpretative, symbolic of all desirable
things. He began to see the story in it, to glow with the idea.
“Madam,” he said, “I am a writer of whose importance I have not as yet
been able to persuade the public. The way I should naturally have gone
to-night seemed to me something to avoid. I took another, which brought
me here. The charm of existence--” She seemed curiously attentive. “The
charm of existence is the unforeseen, and of all things our moods are
the most unforeseen. One's plans are not always and altogether futile.
If you propose to have salad for lunch, and see your way to it, it
is not so improbable that you will have salad for lunch. But if you
prefigure how it will all seem to you at lunch, you are never quite
right. Man proposes and God disposes. I add that there is a third and
final disposal, namely, what man is to think of the disposition after it
is made. I hope, since you proposed or prefigured to-night, perhaps as
I did, something different from this--this disposition”--he lifted his
glass of claret between him and the light--“that your disposition what
to think of it is, perhaps, something like mine.”
The lady was leaning forward with parted lips, listening intently,
absorbed in his words. For the life of him Noel could not see why she
should be absorbed in his words, but the fact filled him with happy
pride.
“Tell me,” she said quickly. “You speak so well--”
Noel filled in her pause of hesitation.
“That means that my wisdom may be all in my mouth.”
“No, indeed! I mean you must have experience. Will you tell me, is it so
dreadful not to have money? People say different things.”
“They do.” He felt elevated, borne along on a wave of ornamental
expression. “It is their salvation. Their common proverbs contradict
each other. A man looks after his pence and trusts one proverb that the
pounds will look after themselves, till presently he is called penny
wise and pound foolish, and brought up by another. And consider how less
noticeable life would be without its jostle of opinion, its conflicting
lines of wisdom, its following of one truth to meet with another going
a different way. Give me for finest companionship some half truth, some
ironic veracity.”
She shook her head. It came to him with a shock that it was not his
ornamental expression which interested her, but only as it might bear on
something in her own mind more simple, direct and serious, something
not yet disclosed. “In fact,” he thought, “she is right. One must get on
with the plot” It was a grievous literary fault to break continuity, to
be led away from the issue by niceties of expression. The proper issue
of a plot was simple, direct, serious, drawn from the motive which began
it. Why did she sit here with her jewels, her white arms and black dress
these weird, still hours of the night? Propriety hinted his withdrawal,
but one must resist the commonplace.
“The answer to the question does not satisfy you. But do you not see
that I only enlarged on your own answer? People say different things
because they are different. The answer depends on temperaments, more
narrowly on moods; on tenses, too, whether it is present poverty
and houselessness or past or future. And so it has to be answered
particularly, and you haven't made me able to answer it particularly to
you. And then one wouldn't imagine it could be a question particular to
you.”
“You are very clever,” she murmured, half smiling again. “Are you not
too clever for the purpose? You say so many things.”
“That is true,” said Noel plaintively. “The story has come to a
standstill. It has all run out into diction.”
At that moment there was a loud noise in the hall.
The smile, which began hopefully, grew old while he watched it, and
withered away. The noise that echoed in the hall was of a banging door,
then of laden, dragging steps. The hall door was thrown open, and two
snowy hackmen entered, holding up between them a man wearing a tall hat.
“He's some loaded, ma'am,” said one of them cheerfully. “I ain't seen
him so chucked in six months.”
They dropped him in a chair, from which, after looking about him with
half-open, glassy eyes, and closing them again, he slid limply to the
floor. The hackman regarded that choice of position with sympathy.
“Wants to rest his load, he does,” and backed out of the door with his
companion.
“It goes on the bill. Ain't seen him so chucked in six months.”
The lady had not moved from her chair, but had sat white and still,
looking down into her lap. She gave a hard little laugh.
“Isn't it nice he's so 'chucked'? He would have acted dreadfully.” She
was leaning on the table now, her dark eyes reading him intently. The
man on the floor snorted and gurgled in his sleep.
“I couldn't kill anybody,” she said. “Could you?”
Noel shook his head.
“It's so funny,” she went on in a soft, speculative way, “one can't do
it. I'm afraid to go away and be alone and poor. I wish he would die.”
“It wouldn't work out that way,” said Noel, struggling with his wits.
“He's too healthy.”
It seemed to him immediately that the comment was not the right one. It
was not even an impersonal fact to himself, an advantage merely to the
plot, that the sleeper was unable to object to him and discard him from
it, as he had resolved to discard Mrs. Tibbett, but with such brutal
energy as the sleeper's face indicated. For it repelled not so much by
its present relaxed degradation as by its power, its solidity of flesh,
its intolerant self-assertion, the physical vigor of the short bull
neck, bulky shoulders, heavy mustache, heavy cheeks and jaw, bluish
with the shaving of a thick growth. He was dressed, barring his damp
dishevelment, like a well-groomed clubman.
But the lady was looking Noel in the eyes, and her own seemed strangely
large, but as if covering a spiritual rather than a physical space,
settled in melancholy, full of clouds, moving lights and dusky
distances.
“I was waiting for him because he ordered me. I'm so afraid of him,” she
said, shrinking with the words. “He likes me to be here and afraid of
him.”
“Tell me what I am to do?” he said eagerly.
“I suppose you are not to do anything.”
Noel caught the thread of his fluency. He drew a ten-cent piece from
his pocket, tossed it on the table, gestured toward it with one hand
and swung the other over the back of his chair with an air of polished
recklessness.
“But your case seems desperate to you. Is it more than mine? You have
followed this thing about to 'the end of the passage,' and there is my
last coin. My luck might change to-morrow. Who knows? Perhaps tonight.
I would take it without question and full of hope. Will you experiment
with fortune and--and me?”
The dark eyes neither consented nor refused. They looked at him gravely.
“It is a black, cold night. The snow is thick in the air and deep on the
street Put it so at the worst, but fortune and wit will go far.”
“Your wit goes farther than your fortune, doesn't it?” she said,
smiling.
“I don't conceal.”
“You don't conceal either of them, do you? You spread them both out,”
and she laughed a pleasant little ripple of sound.
Noel rose with distinction and bent toward her across the table.
“My fortune is this ten-cent piece. As you see, on the front of it is
stamped a throned woman.”
“Oh, how clever.” She laughed, and Noel flushed with the applause.