One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw
Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs
to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.
As he stood there with the morning sunlight flashing upon his face and
gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of
his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which
contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of
a lost type--of those purified prophets of old who walked with God and
trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking
contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical
expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in
scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that
poetized mysticism which constitutes the charm of a remote past. With
the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been
transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years
ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards
Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its
inconsistency with his external aspect.
Mariana, looking through the open window, smiled unconsciously. Anthony
glanced up, saw her, and nodded.
"Good-morning," he called. "Won't you come out and help quiet these
rogues?"
Mariana opened the little door beneath the window and stepped outside.
She looked shy and girlish, and the flutter with which she greeted him
had a quaint suggestion of flattery.
He came towards her, and they stood together beside the railing. Beneath
them the noise of trade and traffic went on tumultuously. Overhead the
sky was of a still, intense blueness, the horizon flecked by several
church-spires, which rose sharply against the burning remoteness. Across
the tenement roofs lines of drying garments fluttered like banners.
Mariana, in her cotton gown of dull blue, cast a slender shadow across
the fire-escape. In the morning light her eyes showed gray and limpid.
The sallow tones of her skin were exaggerated, and the peculiar harmony
of hair and brows and complexion was strongly marked. She was looking
her plainest, and she knew it.
But Anthony did not. He had seen her, perhaps, half a dozen times, and
upon each occasion he had discovered his previous conceptions of her to
be erroneous. Her extreme mobility of mood and manner at once perplexed
and attracted him. Yesterday he had resolved her character into a
compound of surface emotions. Now he told himself that she was cool and
calm and sweetly reasonable.
"I am glad you like sparrows," she said, "because nobody else does, and,
somehow, it doesn't seem fair. You do like them, don't you?"
"I believe," he answered, "that I have two passions beyond the usual
number with which man is supplied--a passion for books and a passion for
animals. I can't say I have a special regard for sparrows, but I like
them. They are hardy little fellows, though a trifle pugnacious, and
they have learned the value of co-operation."
"I had a canary," remarked Mariana, with pathos, "but it died.
Everything that belongs to me always dies, sooner or later."
He laughed, looking at her with quizzical humor. "Do you expect them to
escape the common fate?" he demanded; and then: "If there is anything
that could give me an attack of horrors sooner than a dancing dog--and
there isn't--it would be a bird in a cage. I left my last lodgings
because my neighbor kept a mocking-bird outside of her window. If it had
been a canary I might have endured it, but I knew that if I stayed there
a week longer I should break in and set that bird free. I used to hear
it at night beating itself against the cage."
"Oh, hush!" said Mariana, putting her hands to her ears. She wondered
vaguely at his peculiar sensitiveness of sympathy. It was a type of
manhood that she had not before encountered--one as unlike the jovial,
fox-hunting heroes of her childish days as mind is unlike matter. She
remembered that among them such expressions would have been regarded as
a mark of effeminacy and ruthlessly laughed to scorn. She even
remembered that her own father had denounced a prohibition of
prize-fighting as "mawkish rot." This eccentric type of nervous vigor,
in which all remnants of semi-barbarism were apparently extinguished,
possessed a fascination for her in its very strangeness. In his
character all those active virtues around which her youthful romances
were woven held no place. Patriotism was modified into a sense of
general humanity; chivalry was tempered into commonplace politeness. She
did not know that the force which attracted her was but a dominant
mentality; that where the mind holds sway the character is modified
accordingly. With a great expenditure of nerve force those attributes
which result from physical hardihood occupy a less prominent part. In
Anthony she beheld, without knowing it, a forced and abnormal result of
existing conditions. Nature often foreshadows a coming civilization by
an advance-guard of individuals. As a supreme test she places a century
before his time the victim of her experiments in vivisection. And a
character that might have fitted with uncut edges into the circle of
existence, had he but been permitted to insert himself at the proper
moment, has often been trampled into nothingness by the incessant trend
of the inopportune. The priest of the coming generation is the pariah of
the present, and the dogma of to-morrow the heresy of to-day.
To Mariana's ignorant eyes Anthony seemed one in whom passion had been
annihilated. In reality it was only smothered beneath the weight of a
strenuous will. Let the pressure be removed, and it would burst forth
the fiercer for its long confinement, ingulfing perhaps the whole
organism in its destructive flame.
"Oh, hush!" Mariana had said, and turned from him. "You seem to delight
in unpleasant things. I make it a point to believe that suffering and
death do not exist. I _know_ they do, but I _believe_ they do not."
He drew nearer. Across his face she saw a sudden flash--so vivid that it
seemed the awakening of a dormant element in his nature. "You are
wonderfully vital," he said. "There is as much life in you as there is
in a dozen of us poor effete mortals. What is your secret?"
The girl leaned her arm upon the railing and rested her chin in her
hand. She looked up at him and her eyes grew darker. "It is the pure
animal love of existence," she answered. "I love the world. I love
living and breathing, and feeling the blood quicken in my veins. I love
dancing and singing and eating and sleeping. The simple sensuousness of
life is delicious to me. If I could not be a queen, I had rather be a
beggar upon the road-side than to be nothing. If I could not be a human
being, I had rather be a butterfly in the sunshine than not to be at
all. So long as I had the blue sky and the air and the world about me I
could not be miserable. It is life--life in its physical
fulfilment--that I love. So long as they leave me the open world I can
be happy. Only, if I were taken and shut up in an ugly dungeon I should
want to die. And even then there would be hope."
She had spoken passionately, the words coming quickly from between her
parted lips. She seemed so light and etherealized as to be almost
bodiless. The materialistic philosophy to which she gave utterance was
spiritualized by her own illusiveness.
For an instant she hesitated, looking across the tenement roofs to the
horizon beyond. Then she went on: "I am different from you--oh, so
different! Where you think, I feel. You are all mind, I am all senses. I
am only fulfilling my place in nature when I am hearing or seeing or
feeling beautiful things. My sense of beauty is my soul."
Anthony watched her with steadfast intentness. He had never before seen
her in this mood, and it was a new surprise to him. His former
generalizations were displaced.
But if he had known it, the present aspect was a result of his own
influence upon Mariana. In a moment of contrition for small deceptions,
she had been precipitated into an extravagant self-abasement.
"You are disappointed," she added, presently, meeting his gaze. "You
expected something different, but I am shallow, and I can't help it." It
was like her that in the tendency to self-depreciation she was as
sincere as she had been in the former tendency to self-esteem.
And perhaps Anthony was the juster judge of the two. He was certainly
the more dispassionate.
"I have told you," concluded Mariana, with an eager catch at the
redeeming grace, "because I want to be truthful."
"My dear girl," responded Anthony, a warm friendliness in his voice,
"you might have spared yourself this little piece of analysis. It is as
useless as most morbid rot of the kind. It doesn't in the least affect
what I think of you, and what I do think of you is of little
consequence."
"But what do you think?" demanded Mariana.
"I think that you know yourself just a little less well than you know
that old lady wheeling her cart of vegetables in the street below. Had
she, by the way, known herself a little better she would not have flown
into such a rage because she spilled a few. If we knew ourselves we
would see that things are not very much our fault, after all, and that a
few slips the more or less on our uphill road are very little matter."
Mariana glowed suddenly. She looked up at him, a woman's regard for
power warming her eyes. To her impressionable temperament there seemed
an element of sublimity in his ethical composure.
"Teach me," she said, simply. Anthony smiled. If he seemed a Stoic to
Mariana, it was not because he was one, and perhaps he was conscious of
it. But our conceptions of others are colored solely by their attitudes
towards ourselves, and not in the least by their attitudes towards the
universe, which, when all is said, is of far less consequence.
"I should have first to learn the lesson myself," he answered.
"Would you, if you could?" asked Mariana.
For an instant he looked at her thoughtfully. "Teach you what?" he
questioned. "Teach you to endure instead of to enjoy? To know instead of
to believe? To play with skulls and cross-bones instead of with flowers
and sunshine? No, I think not."
Mariana grew radiant. She felt a desire to force from him a reluctant
confession of liking. "Why wouldn't you?" she demanded.
"Well, on the whole, I think your present point of view better suited to
you. And everything, after all, is in the point of view." He leaned
against the railing, looking down into the street. "Look over and tell
me what you see. Is it not the color of those purple egg-plants in the
grocer's stall? the pretty girl in that big hat, standing upon the
corner? the roguish faces of those ragamuffins at play? Well, I see
these, but I see also the drooping figure of the woman beside the stall;
the consumptive girl with the heavy bundle, going from her work; the
panting horses that draw the surface cars."
They both gazed silently from the balcony. Then Mariana turned away. "It
is the hour for my music," she said. "I must go."
The sunlight caught the nimbus around her head and brightened it with
veins of gold.
"All joy goes with you," he answered, lightly. "And I shall return to
work."
"All frivolity, you mean," laughed Mariana, and she left him with a
nod.