ARTHUR HOLYOKE’S DREAMS.
When the living poet and the dead came out to see the stars once
more, the Florentine found himself upon a grassy slope, alone in the
early morning, with his silent guide. So, when Tannhäuser, after his
ten years’ sojourn in the Venusberg, broke through the walls of the
mountain in a rift made by a prayer, he too found himself on the brow
of a green and sunny mountain valley, filled with the long-forgotten
breath of morning; and, in place of the devil’s music, a shepherd
piping to his sheep. So, reader, you in flesh and blood, as I hope,
may follow me, in the story, to the time of dates and daylight, and
a place--the time, September, 1883; the place, the village of Great
Barrington, far down in Berkshire in old Massachusetts. The early
morning shadows still reached long across the green carpet of meadow
in the intervale; the shadows of the houses, and of the great masses
of elm foliage, and of the tall spire of the meeting-house up on the
hill; the undulating masses of greenery that robed the lower hills were
striped here and there with autumn scarlet, like a blackbird’s wing;
and the silver lace in the meadow grass, and the long silken cobwebs
in the air, and the rich violet-blue sky, shading off to pink like an
onyx near the horizon, were precursors of the coming glory of the day.
No one was stirring in the village. In the ploughed uplands a few
farmers were idly walking, hither and thither like generals on the
battlefield of their success, tightening a sheaf of fodder or replacing
a yellow squash or two that had rolled off from a summit of the great
golden pyramids standing, piled like cannon-balls, in the cornfields.
But the day of sowing was over, and the day of reaping was over, and
little remained but to sit and look at the crops and grow fat. Up on
the hill, the roads were empty--who should travel when there was no
need? Even the plodding oxen-teams were idle in their stalls, being
fattened and coddled, perhaps, for the annual cattle show. So that
Gracie Holyoke and Arthur had the beautiful Stockbridge road, and the
morning look of the mountains, all to themselves. They rode at a sharp
canter, but with little conversation; at least, so a groom might have
thought riding behind them; as the two heads never seemed to turn
inward. But there was no groom, and the chestnut horses had a way of
riding so closely side by side (being in this constantly drilled) that
to turn one’s head was hardly necessary.
Were these two in love? A city groom, used to ride behind many a
preening pair in their smart T-cart, seasoned and wearied with his
master’s catechism of flirtation, which he had so often overheard;
being there in theory to play propriety, but in fact, as he well knew,
only as a license to flirt, much as a policeman is stationed in the
Park for the skating when the ice is thin--such a groom would have said
No. For they hardly ever look at one another. But perhaps an older
groom, good dan Cupid himself, the blind passenger who perches like
dark care on so many a horse’s back, and drives dark care away--he
might answer Yea: for they are not flirting.
Now, there are several legitimate states of being in love, as
videlicet, to be in love and know it, to be in love and not know it, to
know that she loves you and to think that you love her, to be in love,
but with another person than the one you think:--but to know it and not
be in love is but a modern and puerile intellectual trifling; this we
call flirtation. And in that these two were surely not. Were they then
simply indifferent to one another? Unlikely--so early in the morning.
And surely, the cosmic chances are all in our favor: is it not the
normal relation, to be in love? Given, a young man of twenty-one and a
lovely girl some few months younger--and the uplands, and the forest,
and the sun, moon, stars, storm and springtime--and show me one such
younker not in love and you will show me a wretched fellow you had best
avoid.
No such selfish saint or sordid sinner can this slender Arthur be,
who turns in his saddle and shows the clear-cut New English profile
with the delicate but winning smile. But see, the smile has faded into
earnestness; leaning yet farther from the saddle, he is looking up into
his companion’s face, and seeming to be searching for something there.
Does he find it? Ah, Cupid, good dan Cupid, were you right once more?
or were we both too hasty--for she has not blushed, but the one rounded
cheek we see, as we press after them, grows quickly pale, and we can
just make out the dark eye-lashes that droop quickly down, breaking
the contour; and now they do not speak again, but ride at the run in
mutual silence--oh, a silence that is surely mutual, if ever silence
was--and we have much to do, being old and no longer in love, to keep
behind these two, who do not dally. This was all that happened in the
ride. Only, coming home, and both dismounting (she without waiting for
his aid) and he taking her hand to say good-morning (as he had done a
hundred times before, that very summer) the color mounted in the young
girl’s face (as it had never done before) so that she turned the face
aside which was too near her heart, and ran indoors in haste and left
him there.
This was all that happened on that ride--it was all that had ever
happened--but in it, Arthur Holyoke had made bold to ask his cousin to
become his wife; and she had bade him wait till evening for his answer;
and then they both had ridden home. A city groom would have seen
nothing of it all; yet these things had been done. A short probation,
you will say, until the evening only; and Arthur hardly thought of it
as such, but walked home briskly, hat in hand, castle-building; his
dark gray eyes turned inward, and the wind making free with his curly,
undecided-colored hair. For what probation was there more, after all
their lives had so far been together, than living on together, man and
wife? Not that she loved him then so much as he loved her--but that
was to be expected. She loved him more than he deserved, he knew; but
then, that is true of most pairs, and the men must needs not waste
their pity, but resign themselves, as it is the way of women. And
Arthur walked along the straight garden path that led from door to
highway in Judge Holyoke’s old place, switching off the prim asters
with his riding-cane. For his uncle’s house was built in the days of
gardens, not of lawns--can we not imagine the large contempt with
which the dwellers of a prairie would regard a barbered rood or two of
grass?--and the flowers were part of Gracie’s presence there, and she
of them.
Arthur was not too stout, but strong and graceful, almost Greek in
figure as in face; a strange, strong scion of that narrow-chested
clergyman-father, so stout in spirit, but so fragile in this world, who
had died and left him to his uncle’s care, the Judge. There are many
such: it seems our people (like some mute, inglorious poet) have had
their period of pale and interesting youth, and now are comfortably
stout and genial, in their easy-going middle age, the wasting spiritual
fires quelled: like a sometime tractarian clergyman, now optimistic
in a fat living. Arthur, however (not to carry the analogy too far),
was spiritual enough in his way, though not the orthodox; delicately
balanced, mobile, imaginative, Celtic more than Saxon, and rather Greek
than either. Nor could you truly say that his way wanted depth, unless
depth means sluggishness or stillness. Arthur was a New Englander, and
New England is in reality the essence of all things American, in germ
and future; and the people, the crowds, are already rather Greek than
English. Irreverent, fond of novelty and quick--in politics, if not in
art, they are Athenian. The public of Aristophanes is the public of the
American burlesque; of lions, fair ladies, lecturers; of advertised
politics, priests and prophets, of the mind-cure and of the secular
Sunday newspaper.
Arthur Holyoke had been brought up by the Judge, chiefly on the simple
plan of keeping him in the country and giving him plenty of books; a
most admirable plan, never to be enough recommended. The Judge spent
his winters in the city; then Arthur was kept at boarding-school; one
of those quiet little boarding-schools of the wooden Doric variety,
now disappearing. The Judge travelled abroad, or went to England or
to the West, every summer; Arthur was left at Great Barrington. One
winter Arthur had passed in Boston with his uncle, and had attended
lectures at the Institute of Technology; it was the winter that Gracie
had been away with her aunt in New York. This happened in one of these
years when the whim of Hellenism seemed, in Boston, to be permanently
eclipsing the Hebraism which has really made that city; and Arthur was
intoxicated by the new atmosphere, as a hardy wind-flower might be in
the rich sweet air and tempered light of a grapery. You do not make
grapes of blackberries by putting them under glass; but you modify them
considerably. If you had asked Arthur what was to be his profession,
he would have answered engineering; but his inward consciousness was
that he should be a great poet. But he knew the pitying contempt
with which the world regards its contemporary failures--and its
contemporaries are always failures--in that line; and in spite of his
assurance that he had it in him (whilst others had not) he did not mean
that it should be known until it was known only to his glory. These
dreams had blended with his dreams of life with Gracie, until it was
hard to say which was more the cause and which the effect; they grew
apace together. To-day his dreams of love had the ascendant; and he
wandered about the country many hours, rapt in his love and her. They
would live where? in the city, of course; in New York, where was the
largest focus for his genius. That, too, was the place where the most
rapid fortune was to be made; for, of course, they must have money,
and the money must be made quickly, that he might get his leisure and
return to his poetry again. For this was to be the ultimate, the crown
of his life. Engineering would not do; some quicker way than this
must be found; banking, or railroads. The years of business would be
irksome, no doubt; but then, with Gracie with him!
So the boy wandered, through the afternoon, working many a gorgeous
variegation on the themes of love and fame; with but the least
substratum of gold among them, as if to give strength to the pigments
of his fancy. Meantime, Gracie, on her part, had been thinking, now
happily, now in shades of sadness, oftener still in prayer. Yet she
went about the household on her usual duties, passing silently like
the daylight through the long library, where the old Judge sat over his
briefs and closely-wrought opinions, nor ever noticed so slight a thing
as a young girl’s mood.
Arthur found her in the garden, when he came, in a favorite place of
hers, sitting on an old stone seat by the little brook, where it was
most densely overshadowed by the flowering shrubs. She had that serious
look in her dark eyes which he loved best in them, and she neither
blushed nor smiled when he took her hand and sat him down beside her.
Arthur had often fancied that at this time a flow of speech worthy of a
Petrarch would be his; but as it was, the simplest words alone seemed
strong to him. “The day has seemed so long to me!” Perhaps he thought
it true; but it was not. The day had seemed short, and full of dreams.
She made no answer; but, in a moment, turned her head and looked at
him, gravely, as it seemed to Arthur, fondly, as it might have seemed
to an older man. “I do not think we ought to be engaged,” she said; and
this he could not make her unsay in all the afternoon.
But the old tragicomedy was re-enacted, which is so old, and will seem
so new to our great-grandchildren; and Arthur knew, at the first, that
she loved no one else; and at the last, he knew, or might have known,
that she loved him. But the _yes_ she would not say, but only, _wait_;
and when he urged, But you may care for someone else? she only said,
“I shall care for no one else, Arthur”--and at the last it grew to be
but a pleasant play, so sure he was of her. It was settled between
them that he was to go to New York and make his fortune and hers; and
that then he was to come back and ask her father’s consent; or sooner
perhaps, if the fortune was too slow in coming. She would not write
to him, she said,--but she would answer a letter now and then--and he
kissed her once for the first time, under the old lilac bush, before
they left. And more, a thousand times more, he felt in love with
her than he had even been that morning; and so they came out of the
greenery into the broad sward with the long slanting shadows of the
sunset, he still holding to her hand.
They were close on the Lenox road; and he had to drop her hand
in haste, as an open carriage came swinging by, bearing an old
acquaintance of ours--Mrs. Levison Gower and a guest of hers from
Lenox. The guest must have made some quick remark to Mrs. Gower about
them; for they both turned and looked at the young people, and she
bowed to Gracie; and then the light wheels whisked by, leaving but
the dust, and the crisp sound of the horses’ trot. Arthur had noticed
the glance, but did not speak of it; he saw that Gracie was blushing
again. He forgot even to ask who Mrs. Gower was, as he took Gracie’s
hand again in his; and together, slowly, they went down the broad
garden-walk.