Keynotes
By George Egerton
Boston: Roberts Brothers
London: Elkin Mathews
and John Lane, Vigo St.
1894
_Copyright, 1893_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
KNUT HAMSUN,
_In memory of a day when the west wind
and the rainbow met._
1892-1893.
* * * * *
"_Fancies are toys of the brain, to write them down is to destroy
them--as fancies! and yet_--"
"_I gave him such a pretty toy to play with, and he is breaking
it up. When I say: 'You are very naughty, Biff; if you break it I
shall whip you!' he only says_:
"'_But I must, Mumsey, I must!_'"
FRAGMENT OF A LETTER, 1893.
CONTENTS.
A CROSS LINE
NOW SPRING HAS COME
THE SPELL OF THE WHITE ELF
A LITTLE GRAY GLOVE
AN EMPTY FRAME
UNDER NORTHERN SKY:--
I. HOW MARIE LARSEN EXORCISED A DEMON
II. A SHADOW'S SLANT
III. AN EBB TIDE
KEYNOTES.
A CROSS LINE.
The rather flat notes of a man's voice float out into the clear air,
singing the refrain of a popular music-hall ditty. There is something
incongruous between the melody and the surroundings. It seems profane,
indelicate, to bring this slangy, vulgar tune, and with it the mental
picture of footlight flare and fantastic dance, into the lovely
freshness of this perfect spring day.
A woman sitting on a felled tree turns her head to meet its coming,
and an expression flits across her face in which disgust and
humorous appreciation are subtly blended. Her mind is nothing if not
picturesque; her busy brain, with all its capabilities choked by a
thousand vagrant fancies, is always producing pictures and finding
associations between the most unlikely objects. She has been reading
a little sketch written in the daintiest language of a fountain scene
in Tanagra, and her vivid imagination has made it real to her. The
slim, graceful maids grouped around it filling their exquisitely-formed
earthen jars, the dainty poise of their classic heads, and the flowing
folds of their draperies have been actually present with her; and
now,--why, it is like the entrance of a half-typsy vagabond player
bedizened in tawdry finery: the picture is blurred. She rests her head
against the trunk of a pine-tree behind her, and awaits the singer.
She is sitting on an incline in the midst of a wilderness of trees;
some have blown down, some have been cut down, and the lopped branches
lie about; moss and bracken and trailing bramble bushes, fir-cones,
wild rose-bushes, and speckled red "fairy hats" fight for life in
wild confusion. A disused quarry to the left is an ideal haunt of
pike, and to the right a little river rushes along in haste to join a
greater sister that is fighting a troubled way to the sea. A row of
stepping-stones cross it, and if you were to stand on one you would
see shoals of restless stone-loach "beardies" darting from side to
side. The tails of several ducks can be seen above the water, and the
paddle of their balancing feet and the gurgling suction of their bills
as they search for larvae can be heard distinctly between the hum of
insect, twitter of bird, and rustle of stream and leaf. The singer has
changed his lay to a whistle, and presently he comes down the path a
cool, neat, gray-clad figure, with a fishing creel slung across his
back, and a trout rod held on his shoulder. The air ceases abruptly,
and his cold, gray eyes scan the seated figure with its gypsy ease of
attitude, a scarlet shawl that has fallen from her shoulders forming an
accentuative background to the slim roundness of her waist.
Persistent study, coupled with a varied experience of the female
animal, has given the owner of the said gray eyes some facility in
classing her, although it has not supplied him with any definite data
as to what any one of the species may do in a given circumstance. To
put it in his own words, in answer to a friend who chaffed him on his
untiring pursuit of women as an interesting problem,--
"If a fellow has had much experience of his fellow-man he may divide
him into types, and given a certain number of men and a certain number
of circumstances, he is pretty safe on hitting on the line of action
each type will strike. 'Taint so with woman. You may always look out
for the unexpected; she generally upsets a fellow's calculations, and
you are never safe in laying odds on her. Tell you what, old chappie,
we may talk about superior intellect; but if a woman wasn't handicapped
by her affection or need of it, the cleverest chap in Christendom would
be just a bit of putty in her hands. I find them more fascinating as
problems than anything going. Never let an opportunity slip to get new
data--never!"
He did not now. He met the frank, unembarrassed gaze of eyes that would
have looked with just the same bright inquiry at the advent of a hare
or a toad, or any other object that might cross her path, and raised
his hat with respectful courtesy, saying, in the drawling tone habitual
with him,--
"I hope I am not trespassing?"
"I can't say; you may be; so may I, but no one has ever told me so!"
A pause. His quick glance has noted the thick wedding-ring on her slim
brown hand and the flash of a diamond in its keeper. A lady decidedly.
Fast?--perhaps. Original?--undoubtedly. Worth knowing?--rather.
"I am looking for a trout stream, but the directions I got were rather
vague; might I--"
"It's straight ahead; but you won't catch anything now, at least not
here,--sun's too glaring and water too low; a mile up you may in an
hour's time."
"Oh, thanks awfully for the tip. You fish then?"
"Yes, sometimes."
"Trout run big here?" (What odd eyes the woman has! kind of magnetic.)
"No, seldom over a pound; but they are very game."
"Rare good sport, isn't it, whipping a stream? There is so much besides
the mere catching of fish; the river and the trees and the quiet sets a
fellow thinking; kind of sermon; makes a chap feel good, don't it?"
She smiles assentingly, and yet what the devil is she amused at, he
queries mentally. An inspiration! he acts upon it, and says eagerly,--
"I wonder--I don't half like to ask, but fishing puts people on a
common footing, don't it? You knowing the stream, you know, would you
tell me what are the best flies to use?"
"I tie my own, but--"
"Do you? How clever of you! Wish I could;" and sitting down on the
other end of the tree, he takes out his fly-book. "But I interrupted
you, you were going to say--"
"Only,"--stretching out her hand, of a perfect shape but decidedly
brown, for the book,--"that you might give the local fly-tyer a trial;
he'll tell you. Later on, end of next month, or perhaps later, you
might try the oak-fly,--the natural fly, you know. A horn is the best
thing to hold them in, they get out of anything else; and put two on at
a time."
"By Jove, I must try that dodge!"
He watches her as she handles his book and examines the contents
critically, turning aside some with a glance, fingering others almost
tenderly, holding them daintily, and noting the cock of wings and the
hint of tinsel, with her head on one side,--a trick of hers, he thinks.
"Which do you like most, wet or dry fly?" She is looking at some dry
flies.
"Oh," with that rare smile, "at the time I swear by whichever
happens to catch most fish,--perhaps really dry fly. I fancy most
of these flies are better for Scotland or England. Up to this,
March-brown has been the most killing thing. But you might try an
'orange-grouse,'--that's always good here,--with perhaps a 'hare's ear'
for a change, and put on a 'coachman' for the evenings. My husband
[he steals a side look at her] brought home some beauties yesterday
evening."
"Lucky fellow!"
She returns the book. There is a tone in his voice as he says this
that jars on her, sensitive as she is to every inflection of a voice,
with an intuition that is almost second sight. She gathers up her
shawl,--she has a cream-colored woollen gown on, and her skin looks
duskily foreign by contrast. She is on her feet before he can regain
his, and says, with a cool little bend of her head: "Good afternoon, I
wish you a full basket!"
Before he can raise his cap she is down the slope, gliding with easy
steps that have a strange grace, and then springing lightly from stone
to stone across the stream. He feels small, snubbed someway; and
he sits down on the spot where she sat, and lighting his pipe says,
"Check!"
* * * * *
She is walking slowly up the garden path; a man in his shirt-sleeves
is stooping among the tender young peas; a bundle of stakes lies next
him, and he whistles softly and all out of tune as he twines the little
tendrils round each new support. She looks at his broad shoulders and
narrow flanks; his back is too long for great strength she thinks.
He hears her step, and smiles up at her from under the shadow of his
broad-leafed hat.
"How do you feel now, old woman?"
"Beastly! I've got that horrid qualmish feeling again. I can't get rid
of it."
He has spread his coat on the side of the path, and pats it for her to
sit down.
"What is it?" anxiously. "If you were a mare I'd know what to do for
you. Have a nip of whiskey?"
He strides off without waiting for her reply, and comes back with it
and a biscuit, kneels down and holds the glass to her lips. "Poor
little woman, buck up! You'll see that'll fix you. Then you go,
by-and-by, and have a shy at the fish."
She is about to say something, when a fresh qualm attacks her and she
does not. He goes back to his tying.
"By Jove!" he says suddenly, "I forgot; got something to show you!"
After a few minutes he returns, carrying a basket covered with a piece
of sacking; a dishevelled-looking hen, with spread wings trailing and
her breast bare from sitting on her eggs, screeches after him. He puts
it carefully down and uncovers it, disclosing seven little balls of
yellow fluff splashed with olive-green; they look up sideways with
bright round eyes, and their little spoon-bills look disproportionately
large.
"Aren't they beauties?" enthusiastically. "This one is just out,"
taking up an egg; "mustn't let it get chilled; there is a chip out
of it and a piece of hanging skin. Isn't it funny?" he asks, showing
her how it is curled in the shell, with its paddles flattened and its
bill breaking through the chip, and the slimy feathers sticking to its
violet skin.
She suppresses an exclamation of disgust, and looks at his
fresh-tinted skin instead. He is covering basket, hen, and all.
"How you love young things!" she says.
"Some! I had a filly once; she turned out a lovely mare! I cried when I
had to sell her; I wouldn't have let any one in God's world mount her."
"Yes, you would!"
"Who?" with a quick look of resentment.
"Me!"
"I wouldn't!"
"What! you wouldn't?"
"I wouldn't!"
"I think you would if I wanted to!" with a flash out of the tail of her
eye.
"No, I wouldn't!"
"Then you would care more for her than for me. I would give you your
choice," passionately, "her or me!"
"What nonsense!"
"Maybe," concentrated; "but it's lucky she isn't here to make deadly
sense of it." A humble-bee buzzes close to her ear, and she is
roused to a sense of facts, and laughs to think how nearly they have
quarrelled over a mare that was sold before she knew him.
Some evenings later she is stretched motionless in a chair; and yet
she conveys an impression of restlessness,--a sensitively nervous
person would feel it. She is gazing at her husband; her brows are
drawn together, and make three little lines. He is reading, reading
quietly, without moving his eyes quickly from side to side of the page
as she does when she reads, and he pulls away at a big pipe with steady
enjoyment. Her eyes turn from him to the window, and follow the course
of two clouds; then they close for a few seconds, then open to watch
him again. He looks up and smiles.
"Finished your book?"
There is a singular, soft monotony in his voice; the organ with which
she replies is capable of more varied expression.
"Yes, it is a book makes one think. It would be a greater book if he
were not an Englishman; he's afraid of shocking the big middle class.
You wouldn't care about it."
"Finished your smoke?"
"No, it went out; too much fag to light up again! No," protestingly,
"never you mind, old boy, why do you?"
He has drawn his long length out of his chair, and kneeling down beside
her guards a lighted match from the incoming evening air. She draws in
the smoke contentedly, and her eyes smile back with a general vague
tenderness.
"Thank you, dear old man!"
"Going out again?" Negative head-shake.
"Back aching?" Affirmative nod, accompanied by a steadily aimed puff of
smoke, that she has been carefully inhaling, into his eyes.
"Scamp! Have your booties off?"
"Oh, don't you bother! Lizzie will do it."
He has seized a foot from under the rocker, and sitting on his heels
holds it on his knee, while he unlaces the boot; then he loosens the
stocking under her toes, and strokes her foot gently. "Now the other!"
Then he drops both boots outside the door, and fetching a little pair
of slippers, past their first smartness, from the bedroom, puts one on.
He examines the left foot: it is a little swollen round the ankle, and
he presses his broad fingers gently round it as one sees a man do to
a horse with windgalls. Then he pulls the rocker nearer to his chair,
and rests the slipperless foot on his thigh. He relights his pipe,
takes up his book, and rubs softly from ankle to toes as he reads.
She smokes, and watches him, diverting herself by imagining him in the
hats of different periods. His is a delicate skinned face, with regular
features; the eyes are fine in color and shape, with the luminous
clearness of a child's; his pointed beard is soft and curly. She looks
at his hand,--a broad, strong hand with capable fingers; the hand of a
craftsman, a contradiction to the face with its distinguished delicacy.
She holds her own up, with a cigarette poised between the first and
second fingers, idly pleased with its beauty of form and delicate,
nervous slightness. One speculation chases the other in her quick
brain: odd questions as to race arise; she dives into theories as to
the why and wherefore of their distinctive natures, and holds a mental
debate in which she takes both sides of the question impartially. He
has finished his pipe, laid down his book, and is gazing dreamily into
space, with his eyes darkened by their long lashes and a look of tender
melancholy in their clear depths.
"What are you thinking of?" There is a look of expectation in her
quivering nervous little face.
He turns to her, chafing her ankle again. "I was wondering if lob-worms
would do for--"
He stops: a strange look of disappointment flits across her face and is
lost in an hysterical peal of laughter.
"You are the best emotional check I ever knew," she gasps.
He stares at her in utter bewilderment, and then a slow smile creeps to
his eyes and curves the thin lips under his mustache,--a smile at her.
"You seem amused, Gypsy!"
She springs out of her chair, and takes book and pipe; he follows the
latter anxiously with his eyes until he sees it laid safely on the
table. Then she perches herself, resting her knees against one of his
legs, while she hooks her feet back under the other.
"Now I am all up, don't I look small?"
He smiles his slow smile. "Yes, I believe you are made of gutta percha."
She is stroking out all the lines in his face with the tip of her
finger; then she runs it through his hair. He twists his head half
impatiently; she desists.
"I divide all the people in the world," she says, "into those who like
their hair played with, and those who don't. Having my hair brushed
gives me more pleasure than anything else; it's delicious. I'd _purr_
if I knew how. I notice," meditatively, "I am never in sympathy with
those who don't like it. I am with those who do; I always get on with
them."
"You are a queer little devil!"
"Am I? I shouldn't have thought you would have found out I was the
latter at all. I wish I were a man! I believe if I were a man, I'd be a
disgrace to my family."
"Why?"
"I'd go on a jolly old spree!"
He laughs: "Poor little woman! is it so dull?"
There is a gleam of deviltry in her eyes, and she whispers solemnly,--
"Begin with a D," and she traces imaginary letters across his forehead,
and ending with a flick over his ear, says, "and that is the tail of
the y!" After a short silence she queries: "Are you fond of me?" She is
rubbing her chin up and down his face.
"Of course I am, don't you know it?"
"Yes, perhaps I do," impatiently; "but I want to be told it. A woman
doesn't care a fig for a love as deep as the death-sea and as silent;
she wants something that tells her it in little waves all the time. It
isn't the _love_, you know, it's the _being loved_; it isn't really the
_man_, it's his _loving_!"
"By Jove, you're a rum un!"
"I wish I wasn't, then. I wish I was as commonplace as--You don't tell
me anything about myself," a fierce little kiss; "you might, even if it
were lies. Other men who cared for me told me things about my eyes, my
hands, anything. I don't believe you notice."
"Yes I _do_, little one, only I think it."
"Yes, but I don't care a bit for your thinking; if I can't see what's
in your head, what good is it to me?"
"I wish I could understand you, dear!"
"I wish to God you could! Perhaps if you were badder and I were gooder
we'd meet half-way. _You_ are an awfully good old chap; it's just men
like you send women like me to the devil!"
"But you are good," kissing her,--"a real good chum! You understand a
fellow's weak points; you don't blow him up if he gets on a bit. Why,"
enthusiastically, "being married to you is like chumming with a chap!
Why," admiringly, "do you remember before we were married, when I let
that card fall out of my pocket? Why, I couldn't have told another girl
about her! she wouldn't have believed that I _was_ straight; she'd have
thrown me over, and you sent her a quid because she was sick. You are a
great little woman!"
"Don't see it!" she is biting his ear. "Perhaps I was a man last time,
and some hereditary memories are cropping up in this incarnation!"
He looks so utterly at sea that she must laugh again, and, kneeling up,
shuts his eyes with kisses, and bites his chin and shakes it like a
terrier in her strong little teeth.
"You imp! was there ever such a woman!"
Catching her wrists, he parts his knees and drops her on to the rug;
then perhaps the subtile magnetism that is in her affects him, for he
stoops and snatches her up and carries her up and down, and then over
to the window, and lets the fading light with its glimmer of moonshine
play on her odd face with its tantalizing changes, and his eyes dilate
and his color deepens as he crushes her soft little body to him and
carries her off to her room.
* * * * *
Summer is waning, and the harvest is ripe for ingathering, and the
voice of the reaping machine is loud in the land. She is stretched
on her back on the short, heather-mixed moss at the side of a bog
stream. Rod and creel are flung aside, and the wanton breeze with
the breath of coolness it has gathered in its passage over the murky
dykes of black bog-water is playing with the tail-fly, tossing it to
and fro with a half threat to fasten it to a prickly spine of golden
gorse. Bunches of bog-wool nod their fluffy heads, and through the
myriad indefinite sounds comes the regular scrape of a strickle on the
scythe of a reaper in a neighboring meadow. Overhead a flotilla of
clouds is steering from the south in a northeasterly direction. Her
eyes follow them,--old-time galleons, she thinks, with their wealth
of snowy sail spread, riding breast to breast up a wide, blue fjord
after victory. The sails of the last are rose-flushed, with a silver
edge. Someway she thinks of Cleopatra sailing down to meet Antony, and
a great longing fills her soul to sail off somewhere too,--away from
the daily need of dinner-getting and the recurring Monday with its
washing, life with its tame duties and virtuous monotony. She fancies
herself in Arabia on the back of a swift steed; flashing eyes set in
dark faces surround her, and she can see the clouds of sand swirl, and
feel the swing under her of his rushing stride; and her thoughts shape
themselves into a wild song,--a song to her steed of flowing mane and
satin skin, an uncouth rhythmical jingle with a feverish beat; a song
to the untamed spirit that dwells in her. Then she fancies she is on
the stage of an ancient theatre, out in the open air, with hundreds of
faces upturned toward her. She is gauze-clad in a cobweb garment of
wondrous tissue; her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, and one with
quivering diamond fangs coils round her hips; her hair floats loosely,
and her feet are sandal-clad, and the delicate breath of vines and the
salt freshness of an incoming sea seem to fill her nostrils. She bounds
forward and dances, bends her lissome waist, and curves her slender
arms, and gives to the soul of each man what he craves, be it good or
evil. And she can feel now, lying here in the shade of Irish hills,
with her head resting on her scarlet shawl and her eyes closed, the
grand, intoxicating power of swaying all these human souls to wonder
and applause. She can see herself with parted lips and panting, rounded
breasts, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway voluptuously to
the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild,
seductive, intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its strain.
She can feel the answering shiver of emotion that quivers up to her
from the dense audience, spellbound by the motion of her glancing feet;
and she flies swifter and swifter, and lighter and lighter, till the
very serpents seem alive with jewelled scintillations. One quivering,
gleaming, daring bound, and she stands with outstretched arms and
passion-filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a supreme note
to finish her dream of motion; and the men rise to a man and answer
her, and cheer, cheer till the echoes shout from the surrounding hills
and tumble wildly down the crags.
The clouds have sailed away, leaving long feathery streaks in their
wake. Her eyes have an inseeing look, and she is tremulous with
excitement; she can hear yet that last grand shout, and the strain of
that old-time music that she has never heard in this life of hers, save
as an inner accompaniment to the memory of hidden things, born with
her, not of this time.
And her thoughts go to other women she has known, women good and bad,
school friends, casual acquaintances, women workers,--joyless machines
for grinding daily corn, unwilling maids grown old in the endeavor
to get settled, patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent
husbands until they wear out,--a long array. She busies herself with
questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for excitement, for change,
this restless craving for sun and love and motion? Stray words, half
confidences, glimpses through soul-chinks of suppressed fires, actual
outbreaks, domestic catastrophes,--how the ghosts dance in the cells
of her memory! And she laughs, laughs softly to herself, because the
denseness of man, his chivalrous, conservative devotion to the female
idea he has created, blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of
her complex nature. "Ay," she mutters musingly, "the wisest of them
can only say we are enigmas; each one of them sets about solving the
riddle of the _ewig weibliche_,--and well it is that the workings of
our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning enough or _great_
enough to seem to be what they would have us, rather than be what we
are. But few of them have had the insight to find out the key to our
seeming contradictions,--the why a refined, physically fragile woman
will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions,
and love him; the why strength and beauty appeal more often than the
more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart; the why women (and not the
innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard to forgive in their
fellows. They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed
primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman.
Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns,--an
untamable quantity that may be concealed but is never eradicated by
culture, the keynote of woman's witchcraft and woman's strength. But
it is there, sure enough, and each woman is conscious of it in her
truth-telling hours of quiet self-scrutiny; and each woman in God's
wide world will deny it, and each woman will help another to conceal
it,--for the woman who tells the truth and is not a liar about these
things is untrue to her sex and abhorrent to man, for he has fashioned
a model on imaginary lines, and he has said, 'So I would have you!'
and every woman is an unconscious liar, for so man loves her. And when
a Strindberg or a Nietzsche arises and peers into the recesses of her
nature and dissects her ruthlessly, the men shriek out louder than the
women, because the truth is at all times unpalatable, and the gods they
have set up are dear to them--"
"Dreaming, or speering into futurity? You have the look of a seer. I
believe you are half a witch!" And he drops his gray-clad figure on the
turf; he has dropped his drawl long ago in midsummer.
"Is not every woman that? Let us hope I'm for my friends a white one."
"A-ah! Have you many friends?"
"That is a query! If you mean many correspondents, many persons who
send me Christmas cards, or remember my birthday, or figure in my
address book,--no."
"Well, grant I don't mean that!"
"Well, perhaps, yes. Scattered over the world, if my death were belled
out, many women would give me a tear, and some a prayer; and many men
would turn back a page in their memory and give me a kind thought,
perhaps a regret, and go back to their work with a feeling of having
lost something that they never possessed. I am a creature of moments.
Women have told me that I came into their lives just when they needed
me; men had no need to tell me, I felt it. People have needed me more
than I them. I have given freely whatever they craved from me in the
way of understanding or love; I have touched sore places they showed
me, and healed them,--but they never got at me. I have been for myself,
and helped myself, and borne the burden of my own mistakes. Some
have chafed at my self-sufficiency, and have called me fickle,--not
understanding that they gave me nothing, and that when I had served
them their moment was ended, and I was to pass on. I read people
easily, I am written in black letter to most--"
"To your husband?"
"He," quickly,--"we will not speak of him; it is not loyal."
"Do not I understand you a little?"
"You do not misunderstand me."
"That is something."
"It is much!"
"Is it?" searching her face. "It is not one grain of sand in the desert
that stretches between you and me, and you are as impenetrable as a
sphinx at the end of it. This," passionately, "is my moment, and what
have you given me?"
"Perhaps less than other men I have known; but you want less. You are a
little like me,--you can stand alone; and yet," her voice is shaking,
"have I given you nothing?"
He laughs, and she winces; and they sit silent, and they both feel as
if the earth between them is laid with infinitesimal electric threads
vibrating with a common pain. Her eyes are filled with tears that burn
but don't fall; and she can see his some way through her closed lids,
see their cool grayness troubled by sudden fire, and she rolls her
handkerchief into a moist cambric ball between her cold palms.
"You have given me something, something to carry away with me,--an
infernal want. You ought to be satisfied: I am infernally miserable.
You," nearer, "have the most tantalizing mouth in the world when your
lips tremble like that. I--What! can you cry? You?"
"Yes, even I can cry!"
"You dear woman!" pause; "and I can't help you?"
"You can't help me; no man can. Don't think it is because you are you I
cry, but because you probe a little nearer into the real me that I feel
so."
"Was it necessary to say that?" reproachfully; "do you think I don't
know it? I can't for the life of me think how you, with that free gypsy
nature of yours, could bind yourself to a monotonous country life, with
no excitement, no change. I wish I could offer you my yacht; do you
like the sea?"
"I love it; it answers one's moods."
"Well, let us play pretending, as the children say. Grant that I could,
I would hang your cabin with your own colors, fill it with books (all
those I have heard you say you care for), make it a nest as rare as
the bird it would shelter. You would reign supreme. When your highness
would deign to honor her servant, I would come and humor your every
whim. If you were glad, you could clap your hands and order music,
and we would dance on the white deck, and we would skim through the
sunshine of Southern seas on a spice-scented breeze. You make me
poetical. And if you were angry, you could vent your feelings on me,
and I would give in and bow my head to your mood. And we would drop
anchor, and stroll through strange cities,--go far inland and glean
folklore out of the beaten track of everyday tourists; and at night,
when the harbor slept, we would sail out through the moonlight over
silver seas. You are smiling,--you look so different when you smile; do
you like my picture?"
"Some of it!"
"What not?"
"You!"
"Thank you."
"You asked me. Can't you understand where the spell lies? It is the
freedom, the freshness, the vague danger, the unknown that has a
witchery for me,--ay, for every woman!"
"Are you incapable of affection, then?"
"Of course not. I share," bitterly, "that crowning disability of my
sex; but not willingly,--I chafe under it. My God! if it were not for
that, we women would master the world! I tell you, men would be no
match for us! At heart we care nothing for laws, nothing for systems;
all your elaborately reasoned codes for controlling morals or man do
not weigh a jot with us against an impulse, an instinct. We learn those
things from you,--you tamed, amenable animals; they are not natural
to us. It is a wise disposition of Providence that this untamableness
of ours is corrected by our affections. We forge our own chains in a
moment of softness, and then," bitterly, "we may as well wear them with
a good grace. Perhaps many of our seeming contradictions are only the
outward evidences of inward chafing. Bah! the qualities that go to make
a Napoleon--superstition, want of honor, disregard of opinion, and the
eternal I--are oftener to be found in a woman than a man. Lucky for
the world, perhaps, that all these attributes weigh as nothing in the
balance with the need to love, if she be a good woman; to be loved, if
she is of a coarser fibre."
"I never met any one like you; you are a strange woman!"
"No, I am merely a truthful one. Women talk to me--why? I can't say;
but always they come, strip their hearts and souls naked, and let me
see the hidden folds of their natures. The greatest tragedies I have
ever read are child's play to those I have seen acted in the inner life
of outwardly commonplace women. A woman must beware of speaking the
truth to a man; he loves her the less for it. It is the elusive spirit
in her, that he divines but cannot seize, that fascinates and keeps
him."
There is a long silence; the sun is waning and the scythes are silent,
and overhead the crows are circling,--a croaking, irregular army,
homeward bound from a long day's pillage.
She has made no sign, yet so subtilely is the air charged with her
that he feels but a few moments remain to him. He goes over and
kneels beside her, and fixes his eyes on her odd, dark face. They
both tremble, yet neither speaks. His breath is coming quickly, and
the bistre stains about her eyes seem to have deepened, perhaps by
contrast, as she has paled.
"Look at me!"
She turns her head right round and gazes straight into his face; a few
drops of sweat glisten on his forehead.
"You witch woman! what am I to do with myself? Is my moment ended?"
"I think so."
"Lord, what a mouth!"
"Don't! oh, don't!"
"No, I won't. But do you mean it? Am I, who understand your every mood,
your restless spirit, to vanish out of your life? You can't mean it!
Listen!--are you listening to me? I can't see your face; take down your
hands. Go back over every chance meeting you and I have had together
since I met you first by the river, and judge them fairly. To-day is
Monday: Wednesday afternoon I shall pass your gate, and if--if my
moment is ended, and you mean to send me away, to let me go with this
weary aching--"
"A-ah!" she stretches out one brown hand appealingly, but he does not
touch it.
"_Hang something white on the lilac-bush!_"
She gathers up creel and rod, and he takes her shawl, and wrapping it
round her holds her a moment in it, and looks searchingly into her
eyes, then stands back and raises his hat, and she glides away through
the reedy grass.
* * * * *
Wednesday morning she lies watching the clouds sail by. A late
rose-spray nods into the open window, and the petals fall every time.
A big bee buzzes in and fills the room with his bass note, and then
dances out again. She can hear his footstep on the gravel. Presently he
looks in over the half window,--
"Get up and come out,--'twill do you good; have a brisk walk!"
She shakes her head languidly, and he throws a great soft, dewy rose
with sure aim on her breast.
"Shall I go in and lift you out and put you, 'nighty' and all, into
your tub?"
"No!" impatiently. "I'll get up just now."
The head disappears, and she rises wearily and gets through her
dressing slowly, stopped every moment by a feeling of faintness. He
finds her presently rocking slowly to and fro with closed eyes, and
drops a leaf with three plums in it on to her lap.
"I have been watching four for the last week, but a bird, greedy
beggar, got one this morning early: try them. Don't you mind, old girl,
I'll pour out my own tea!"
She bites into one and tries to finish it, but cannot. "You are a good
old man!" she says, and the tears come unbidden to her eyes, and
trickle down her cheeks, dropping on to the plums, streaking their
delicate bloom.
He looks uneasily at her, but doesn't know what to do; and when he has
finished his breakfast he stoops over her chair and strokes her hair,
saying, as he leaves a kiss on the top of her head, "Come out into the
air, little woman; do you a world of good!"
And presently she hears the sharp thrust of his spade above the bee's
hum, leaf rustle, and the myriad late summer sounds that thrill through
the air. It irritates her almost to screaming point; there is a
practical non-sympathy about it; she can distinguish the regular one,
two, three, the thrust, interval, then pat, pat, on the upturned sod.
To-day she wants some one, and her thoughts wander to, and she wonders
what, the gray-eyed man who never misunderstands her, would say to her.
Oh, she wants some one so badly to soothe her; and she yearns for the
little mother who is twenty years under the daisies,--the little mother
who is a faint memory strengthened by a daguerreotype in which she
sits with silk-mittened hands primly crossed on the lap of her moiré
gown, a diamond brooch fastening the black-velvet ribbon crossed so
stiffly over her lace collar, the shining tender eyes looking steadily
out, and her hair in the fashion of fifty-six. How that spade dominates
over every sound! and what a sickening pain she has, an odd pain; she
never felt it before. Supposing she were to die, she tries to fancy
how she would look; they would be sure to plaster her curls down. He
might be digging her grave--no, it is the patch where the early peas
grew, the peas that were eaten with the twelve weeks' ducklings: she
remembers them, little fluffy golden balls with waxen bills, and such
dainty paddles,--remembers holding an egg to her ear and listening to
it cheep inside before even there was a chip in the shell. Strange how
things come to life! What! she sits bolt upright and holds tightly to
the chair, and a questioning, awesome look comes over her face; and
then the quick blood creeps up through her olive skin right up to her
temples, and she buries her face in her hands and sits so a long time.
The maid comes in and watches her curiously, and moves softly about.
The look in her eyes is the look of a faithful dog, and she loves her
with the same rare fidelity. She hesitates, then goes into the bedroom
and stands thoughtfully, with her hands clasped over her breast. She is
a tall, thin, flat-waisted woman, with misty blue eyes and a receding
chin. Her hair is pretty. She turns as her mistress comes in, with an
expectant look on her face. She has taken up a nightgown, but holds it
idly.
"Lizzie, had you ever a child?"
The girl's long left hand is ringless; yet she asks it with a quiet
insistence, as if she knew what the answer would be, and her odd
eyes read her face with an almost cruel steadiness. The girl flushes
painfully, and then whitens; her very eyes seem to pale, and her under
lip twitches as she jerks out huskily,--
"Yes!"
"What happened to it?"
"It died, M'am."
"Poor thing! Poor old Liz!"
She pats the girl's hand softly, and the latter stands dumbly and looks
down at both hands, as if fearful to break the wonder of a caress. She
whispers hesitatingly,--
"Have you--have you any little things left?"
And she laughs such a soft, cooing little laugh, like the chirring of a
ring-dove, and nods shyly back in reply to the tall maid's questioning
look. The latter goes out, and comes back with a flat, red-painted deal
box, and unlocks it. It does not hold very much, and the tiny garments
are not of costly material; but the two women pore over them as a gem
collector over a rare stone. She has a glimpse of thick-crested paper
as the girl unties a packet of letters, and looks away until she says
tenderly,--
"Look, M'am!"
A little bit of hair inside a paper heart. It is almost white, so silky
and so fine that it is more like a thread of bog-wool than a baby's
hair; and the mistress, who is a wife, puts her arms round the tall
maid, who has never had more than a moral claim to the name, and kisses
her in her quick way.
The afternoon is drawing on; she is kneeling before an open trunk,
with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. A heap of unused, dainty
lace-trimmed ribbon-decked cambric garments are scattered around her.
She holds the soft, scented web to her cheek and smiles musingly; and
then she rouses herself and sets to work, sorting out the finest, with
the narrowest lace and tiniest ribbon, and puckers her swarthy brows,
and measures lengths along her middle finger, and then gets slowly up,
as if careful of herself as a precious thing, and half afraid.
"Lizzie!"
"Yes, M'am!"
"Wasn't it lucky they were too fine for every day? They will be so
pretty. Look at this one with the tiny valenciennes edging. Why, one
nightgown will make a dozen little shirts,--such elfin-shirts as they
are too; and Lizzie!"
"Yes, M'am!"
"Just hang it out on the lilac-bush,--mind, the lilac-bush!"
"Yes, M'am!"
"Or, Lizzie, wait: I'll do it myself!"
NOW SPRING HAS COME.
A CONFIDENCE.
"_When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the flowers are
blossoming on the plain!
Lal, lal, la, la, la, lallallalla, lal, lal, lal, la, la, la,
la, la.
When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the mockin'-bird is
singing on the tree!_"
"I don't believe that mocking-bird line belongs to the song at all,
Lizzie; you never do get a thing right!"
The words have a partly irritated, partly contemptuous tone, that seems
oddly at variance with the size of the child who utters them. She is
lying flat on her stomach on the floor, resting her elbows at each side
of a book she is reading, holding her sharp chin in the palms of her
hands, waving her skinny legs in unconscious time to the half tired,
half feverish lilt of the nurse as she jogs the baby in time to the
tune. She gazes, as she speaks, at the girl with a pair of unusually
bright, penetrating eyes. This mocking-bird line never fails to annoy
her.
"Troth, an if I cud get the young limb to slape I wouldn't care if
'twas mockin'-birds or tom cats!" is the indifferent answer.
* * * * *
Strange how some trivial thing will jog a link in a chain of
association, and set it vibrating until it brings one face to face
with scenes and people long forgotten in some prison cell in one's
brain; calling to new life a red-haired girl, with sherry-brown eyes,
and a flat back, pacing a nursery floor in impatient endeavor to get
a fractious child to sleep,--ay, her very voice and her persistent
mixing of mocking-birds and spring-time. So muses the child twenty
years after, as, past her first youth, with only the eyes and the smile
unchanged, she lies on a bear-skin before the fire on a chilly evening
in late spring, and goes over a recent experience. A half humorous
smile, with a tinge of mockery in it, plays round her lips as she
says,--
"Twenty years ago. Queer how it should fit in after all that time!
* * * * *
"Tell you how it was? That is not very easy; pathos may become bathos
in the telling. Let me see. Of course it was chance,--or is there any
such thing as chance? Say fate, instead. The three old ladies who spin
our destinies were in want of amusement, so they pitched on me. They
sent their messenger to me in the guise of a paper-backed novel with
a taking name. I was waiting in a shop for some papers I had ordered,
when it struck me. I took it up. The author was unknown to me. I opened
it at haphazard, and a line caught me. I read on. I was roused by the
bookseller's suave voice,--
"'That is a very bad book, Madam. One of the modern realistic school, a
_tendenz roman_. I would not advise Madam to read it.'
"'A-ah, indeed!'
"I laid it down and left the shop. But the words I had read kept
dancing before me; I saw them written across the blue of the sky, in
the sun streaks on the pavement, and the luminous delicacy of the
Norwegian summer nights; they were impressed on my brain in vivid
color, glowing, blushing with ardor as they were. Weeks passed; one
afternoon, time hung heavily on my hands, and I sent for the book. I
read all that afternoon; let the telling words, the passionate pain,
the hungry yearning, all the tragedy of a man's soul-strife with evil
and destiny, sorrow and sin, bite into my sentient being. When the
book was finished, I was consumed with a desire to see and know the
author. I never reasoned that the whole struggle might be only an
extraordinarily clever intuitive analysis of a possible experience. I
accepted it as real, and I wanted to help this man. I longed to tell
him in his loneliness that one human being, and that one a woman, had
courage to help him. The abstract ego of the novel haunted me. I have
a will of my own, so I set to work to find him. It was not so easy.
None of my acquaintances knew him, or of him; he was a strange meteor;
and as the book was condemned by the orthodox, I had to feel my way
cautiously.
"Isn't it dreadful to think what slaves we are to custom? I wonder
shall we ever be able to tell the truth, ever be able to live
fearlessly according to our own light, to believe that what is right
for us must be right! It seems as if all the religions, all the
advancement, all the culture of the past, has only been a forging of
chains to cripple posterity, a laborious building up of moral and
legal prisons based on false conceptions of sin and shame, to cramp
men's minds and hearts and souls, not to speak of women's. What half
creatures we are, we women!--hermaphrodite by force of circumstances,
deformed results of a fight of centuries between physical suppression
and natural impulse to fulfil our destiny. Every social revolution has
told hardest on us: when a sacrifice was demanded, let woman make it.
And yet there are men, and the best of them, who see all this, and
would effect a change if they knew how. Why it came about? Because men
manufactured an artificial morality; made sins of things that were
as clean in themselves as the pairing of birds on the wing; crushed
nature, robbed it of its beauty and meaning, and established a system
that means war, and always war, because it is a struggle between
instinctive truths and cultivated lies. Yes, I know I speak hotly;
but my heart burns in me sometimes, and I hate myself. It's a bad
thing when a man or woman has a contempt for himself. There's nothing
like a good dose of love-fever (in other words, a waking to the fact
that one is a higher animal, with a destiny to fulfil) to teach one
self-knowledge, to give one a glimpse into the contradictory issues
of one's individual nature. Study yourself, and what will you find?
Just what I did,--the weak, the inconsequent, the irresponsible. In one
word, the untrue feminine is of man's making; while the strong, the
natural, the true womanly is of God's making. It is easy to read as a
primer; but how change it? Go back to any poet!
"Well, at length an old bookseller I knew gave me surer information.
My intuition was not at fault: the experiences were wrung from the
man's soul. As the old superstition has it, a dagger dipped in a man's
heart-blood will always strike home; so no wonder they pierced me with
their passion, despair, and brave endurance. What the old fellow wrote
to him I know not, but I got an unconventional pretty letter from him,
and it ended in our writing to each other. As my time to leave drew
near, the desire to see him became overpowering. I could afford it; he
could not. It ended in our arranging to meet at a little town on the
coast.
"It is strange how the idea of a person one has never seen can
possess one as completely as this did me. I, whom, as you know, think
as little of starting alone for, say, Mexico, as another woman of
going to afternoon tea; who have trotted the globe without male
assistance,--felt as tremulously stirred as at confirmation day.
There are days that stand out in the gallery of one's remembrances
clean-painted as a Van Hooge, with a sharp clearness.
"I slept on board, and early the next morning, it was Sunday, I stood
on deck watching the coast as we glided through the water that danced
in delicious September sunshine. I was happily expectant. At dinner
hour we passed a fjord, a lovely deep-blue fjord, winding to our
right as we passed, with the spire of a church just visible among the
fir-trees round the bend. Boats of all kinds, from a smart cutter to a
pram were coming out after the service. The white sails swelled as they
caught the breeze, flapped as they tacked, hung listlessly a second,
and then dashed with a swerve, like swift snowy-winged birds, through
the water. I had not troubled with church-going of late years. Why?
Oh, speculation, weariness of soul that found no drop of consolation
in religious observance,--maybe that might be the reason. But all
those honest, simple folk in their Sunday bravery, fair-haired girls
with their psalm-books wrapped up in their only silk kerchief, the
ring of laughter echoing across the water, the magic of sun and sky,
mountain and fjord, made me feel that I too was church-going, and I
felt strangely happy. It is the off moments that we do not count as
playing any part in our lives that are, after all, the best we have. I
am afraid it would be impossible to make you see things as I felt, them.
"I went up to the hotel when I landed. I had the reputation of
riches; the hotel was at my service. I inquire for him, go down to my
sitting-room, send him my card, and wait. I wait with an odd feeling
that I am outside myself, watching myself as it were. I can see the
very childishness of my figure, the too slight hips and bust, the flash
of rings on my fingers,--they are pressed against my heart, for it
is beating hatefully,--ay, the very expectant side-poise of head is
visible to me some way. It flashes across me as I stand that so might a
slave wait for the coming of a new master, and I laugh at myself for my
want-wit agitation. A knock.
"'Come in!'