I meet what my soul has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think
always. Have I lived before in some other life that no surprise
touches me?--that it is just as if I am only meeting the embodiment
of a disintegrated floating image that has often flashed before my
consciousness, and flown before I could fix it? Has this man, or some
psychical part of this man, been in touch with me before, or how is
it? I stand still and stretch out my hand; I check an impulse to put
out both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know before he speaks how his
voice will sound, what his touch will be like before he clasps my hand.
It is odd how the most important crisis of our lives often comes upon
us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; yet
the vehemence of the denials, the keenness of the weapons of satire and
scepticism that are turned against it only prove its existence. As long
as man is man and woman is woman, it will be to them at some time the
sweetest and possibly the most fatal interest in life to them. Thrust
it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as you will, sooner or later
it will have its revenge. I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or
widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy thing, jessed by my will.
Sometimes, by way of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an hour,
but always to call it back again to my own safe keeping. Now it left me.
"We sat and talked,--rather I talked, I think, and he listened. He said
my going to see him even on literary grounds was eccentric; but then it
seemed I had a way of doing as I pleased without exciting much comment.
How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it! Was I really going away?
How tiresome it was, really awfully tiresome! What was he like? Well,
an American bison or a lion. You might put his head among the rarest
and handsomest heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? No, not a
bit. His hands, for instance, are great laborer's hands, freckled too;
I don't like his gait either,--indeed, a dozen things. What we talked
about? Well, as I said, he listened mostly; laughed with a great joyous
boyish laugh, with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential
manner and a very caressing smile; a trick, too, of throwing back his
head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, I suppose
I made him. I told him all about myself; turned myself inside out,
good and bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old gown; laughed
at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it?
I suppose it was; but the whole thing was rather unusual. He got up
and walked about, sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets and
exclaimed, 'The Deuce!' etc. I fancy he learned a good deal about me in
a few hours. You see it was not as if one were talking to a stranger;
it was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long
time, and was filling up the gaps made during the absence. You can't
understand. I think we were both very happy. He admired--no, that is
not the word; he was taken with me, that is better. He said my hands
were 'as small as a child's;' the tablecloth was dark-red plush that
made a good background. He pointed timidly, as a great shy boy might,
to one of my rings; you see they don't as a rule wear many rings up
there; I suppose they gave an impression of wealth. 'That one is very
beautiful!' I laughed; I was so glad my hands were pretty,--pretty
hands last so much longer than a pretty face. I laughed too at his
finger, it had such a deferential expression about it; and I called
him a great child. I think we were both like two great children; we had
found a common interest to rejoice in,--we had found ourselves. Every
moment was delightful; we were making discoveries, finding we had had
like experiences,--had both hungered, both known want, were both of
an age; we were both unconventional, and were shaking hands mentally
all the time. I don't remember now what it was he said; but I remember
I was obliged to drop my head, and I felt I was smiling from sheer,
delicious pleasure. He cried laughingly: 'You say I am a great child,
you are a child yourself when you smile!'
"He was to have supper with me, and he went away for an hour. After
he left I walked over to a long mirror and looked at myself. Tried to
fancy how _he_ saw me,--that might be different, you know. I had color,
life, eyes like stars, trembling, smiling lips. There was something
quivering, alert about me; I scarce knew myself. Of course the same
hips, figure, features were reflected there,--it was something shining
through that struck me as foreign. Do you know what I did? I danced all
round the room. Shows what an idiot an old woman can be. By the way,
he denied that I was old; I was like a little girl, but a remarkable
little girl; no wonder people always noticed me, as if I were a
somebody. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it, for that matter
seen it too, at the pier. He knew the moment I stepped off the boat
that it was I. Yes, people always stared at me, but how could he know?
Ah! presentiment perhaps. So he was on the pier? Why did he not come
and meet me? No legible answer, but a slow reddening up to the roots of
his fair hair. I do not know quite how he conveyed it, but I had the
sensation, a charming one, of being treated as a queen.
"But to go back. I sat or rather lay in an arm-chair at the window, and
watched the water and the ships. It was getting dusk, the luminous dusk
of the north, as if a soft transparent purple veil is being dropped
gently over the world. The fjord was full of lights from the different
crafts at anchor, and the heaven full of stars; and the longer one
looked up there, the more one saw myriads of flimmering eyes of light,
until one's brain seemed full of their brightness, and one forgot one's
body in gazing. Long silvery streaks glistened through the heaving
water like the flash of feeding trout, and lads and lassies in boats
rowed to and fro, and human vibration seemed to thrill from them,
filling the atmosphere with man and woman. And the silken air caressed
my face as the touch of cool, soft fingers. I had a feeling of perfect
well-being; one does not get many such moments in one's life, does one?
I think I just was happy, rehearsing the hours that flew too quickly,
recalling every look, tone, gesture, and smile. The _jomfru_ came in to
lay the table; she knew me from a previous visit and began to talk; but
I wanted to be alone with my thoughts; so I went upstairs, washed my
hands and puffed them with sweet smelling powder, and then when I went
down again and sat and waited I clasped them up over my head to make
them white. He came back, flung his hat on the sofa out of sheer boyish
delight at being back, came over and stood and looked down at me, and I
laughed up to him. If I were to talk until Doomsday, I could not make
you understand what I cannot yet understand myself.
"After supper, at which I sipped my tea and watched him, we sat at the
window and looked out at the purple world. I had told him he might
smoke. Well? Well, we talked, and we talked when we were both silent;
and he, I mean his thinking self, came to me; and I--well, I believe
from the moment he came into the room, all the best of me went straight
to him. The lights out in the harbor twinkled, a star fell, and I
wished--well, wishes are foolish. I think he must have been watching my
face, for when our eyes met, he smiled as if he understood. Sometimes
he jumped up and stood rocking a chair backward and forward. He was
sorry I was going away! Yes? Oh, we might meet again! That might be
difficult! Indeed? I should have thought _he_ would be the last person
in the world to say it was difficult to meet. He laughed at that, with
a quick sidelong look he has, like a Finn dog, and said I was sharp,
awfully sharp, as if he liked being caught. By the way, he occasionally
used strong language; said I must forgive him, he wasn't very used to
ladies' society.
"At ten I said I would say good-night for conventionality's sake. He
begged, humbly it struck me, for a little longer. I was to leave by
the steamer at eight in the morning, would be down at seven; he might
come to me. Would I give him a portrait of myself? Yes, I would get
one specially done. As much in profile as possible, he thought that
would be happier. Yes. He came to the top of the stairs with me, and
when we bade good-night he took my hand and held it curiously as if
it were something fearfully fragile, and stood and watched me down
the corridor. And will you credit it? I felt inclined to run like an
awkward little school-girl. I said prayers that night; thanked God, I
don't quite know what for,--I suppose I did then,--perhaps for being
happy. I looked at my foreign self in the glass too, and when the light
was out--Yes?--I did what you and every other woman might do, I cuddled
my face to an imaginary face, rubbed my cheek to an imaginary cheek,
whispered a God bless you! and fell asleep.
"I was down before seven, paid my bill, and sat waiting, with the
little tray, with its thick white cups and lumpy yellow cream, before
me. He came,--such a glad man, with glad eyes, glad smile, and
outstretched hands. And I,--I was so glad, too, that I could have
shouted out for very joy of living. I might have been drinking some
magic elixir instead of coffee.
"'It is tiresome!' he said impatiently.
"'What is tiresome? You have said that so often.'
"'It is tiresome when a person one wants so badly to keep in the
country is going out of it.'
"'Supposing I were to stay in it, you would probably be in one place
and I in another. It is only a question of a little dearer postage!'
"We both laughed at that. It takes such a little thing to make one
laugh when one is happy. Then the steamer came in sight, and we walked
down through the bright morning to the pier, and went on board. He
stood silently; we only looked at each other. It did not then strike
me as odd--it does now. The first bell rang! I felt a chill steal over
me. 'It is tiresome, it is hateful!' His smile had flown; and old deep
lines and traces of past suffering I had not noticed before showed
plainly.
"'I will come back,' I said, 'when the winter is over!'
"'Ay, but winter is long, or it used to be!'
"'No matter, I will come with the spring!'
"The second bell rang! Ah, why can't we do as our hearts bid us? We
have one short life, and it is spoiled by chains of our own forging in
deference to narrow custom. I shivered. There was after all an autumn
chill in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell now.... The third
bell! We turn, and I tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and I
say good-by and God bless you! Not from a purely religious conception
of God, unless it be that God (and I think it does) means all that is
good and beautiful, tender and best. I might have said, 'The best I can
think of befall you!' A second later, and the streamer rail separates
us! I look into his soul through his eyes, and see it is sorry,
regretful,--as sorry as I am glad it is so: he is sorry I am going from
him, and in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes to me as I
would have it come to me.
"'When spring comes' I whisper as I lean over to him, while the steamer
glides out. He follows it to the end of the pier, and stands there as
long as we are in sight. If he had held out his arms and said, 'Woman,
stay with me!' I would, I fear, have jumped down and stayed. Didn't
know anything about him? No, that is true, only that I had been waiting
for something ever since I was old enough to have a want, and that
he was that something; that I was nearly thirty when I found him,
and--life is short!
"I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I believe I thought the
sun shone differently. I almost asked some people on deck if they did
not think that the day was quite the loveliest day ever dawned since
the world was a world; if there was not something peculiarly and
singularly delicious in the very air? I found a quiet sofa, and lay
with closed eyes, and lived it over again.
"The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was insanely happy, then
I was intensely miserable. I sent him my portrait and a letter, and
counted the days and the hours to a reply. It came. I stole away
to read all the warm meaning ill concealed under the words of it;
slept with it under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and answered
it straight from my heart. Why try and tell you of the aftertime? I
would not go through that winter again for anything in the world.
Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency,--all the strongest feelings
that can torture or wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be up on a
high mountain alone with my dream. I wonder does a man ever realize
the beauty there is in a woman's thought of him! What kind were the
letters? Warm, passionate, yet with a _reservatio mentalis_ that hurt
me, but always with a 'When spring comes!' in them. It is amazing to
what depths of folly a human being can descend! I had his photograph
on my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant his household saint. It
would be hard to find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, and
waited with strained ears and fever-racked nerves for the postman's
knock. Do you know there is something touchingly pitiful in the way one
finds out all the tender bits in a letter and re-reads them? I have
kissed a thumb-mark on the paper! Heavens, how the days dragged! I was
ill with yearning thought; night brought no rest but the comfort of
being alone; all the years of my life were not as long as that weary
winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its place. It was foolish,
exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare
times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a thin, waxen, yellow face
with dark-ringed eyes, and I was certainly older looking. Thinking of
it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think I was hysterical. How
many of the follies and frailties of women are really due to hysterical
rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. You see there is
no time of sowing wild oats for women; we repress and repress, and
then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our sexual and
emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of some sort. When we
shall live larger and freer lives we shall be better balanced than we
are now. If what I suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask a
better sample of conventional hell's pain. Hu-s-sh! Very well, I won't
say those things!
"It is bad enough to be a fool and not to know it; but to be a fool and
feel with every fibre of your being, every shred of your understanding,
that you are one, and that there is no help for it; that all your
philosophy won't aid you; that you are one great want, stilled a
little by a letter, only to be haunted afresh by the personality
of another creature, tortured with doubts and hurt by your loss of
self-respect,--ah! it was a long winter! Then the New Year came and
went, and time dragged slowly but surely, and at length the Almanacs
said it was spring-time, and the girls at the street corners called,
'Vilets, sweet vilets!' and the milliners marked down guinea bonnets to
12_s._ 11_d._, and I watched each token of its coming with a fearsome,
joyous expectation--Go on? Ah, yes, I'll go on,--where was I? Oh,
spring was coming, wasn't it? I do not laugh as I used to, eh? How used
I to laugh? I forget. Well, I won't laugh if it hurts you, dear, not
even at myself.
"Well, once again, I was standing at a table in a hotel room, waiting.
It is the simple things that are so hard to describe, and that are most
complicated in their effects. I said again, 'Come in!' held fast to the
table with my left hand and smiled,--to be accurate, began a smile.
Spring is later up there; perhaps some of the winter's frost was still
in the atmosphere, for something froze it on my lips. I felt a curious
stiffening in my face, and the touch of his hand did not thaw me. Feel
happy? No; I was numb in one way, and yet keenly alive to impressions.
I felt as if my nerve net was outside my skin, not under it, and that
the exposure to the air and surrounding influences made it intensely,
acutely sensitive. I seemed to see with my sense of feeling as well as
my sight. You know how in great cold you seem to burn your hand with an
icy heat if you suddenly grasp a piece of iron? Well, I felt some way I
was touched by glowing shivers: that sounds nonsense, but it expresses
the feeling. Why? I don't know why: I was analyzing, being analyzed;
criticising, being criticised. It was all so different, you see.
Supposing you had just sipped a beaker of exhilarating, life-giving,
rich wine with an exquisite bouquet, and a glow that steals through you
and witches and warms you; and suddenly, without your knowing how it
happens, the draught is transformed into luke-warm water, or 'Polly'
without the 'dash' in it! What did he say? Let me think. Oh, yes: I was
wretchedly thin. Odd how things strike one. I once saw a representation
of Holberg's Stundeslöse in Copenhagen. One of the characters is an
ancient housekeeper, with a long money-bag, who is, as they term it,
'marriage-sick.' A match is arranged between her and a young spark in
the village. The scene is this: while the monetary part of the affair
is being arranged by the notary, etc., he says to her,--'Permit me to
pass my hand over your bosom, mistress?' She simpers; and I shall
never forget the comical expression of dismay with which the suitor
rolls his eyes and drops his jaw as he turns aside. I felt rather
than saw the comprehensive look which accompanied his comment on my
thinness, and that scene flashed across my inner vision. Odd, was it
not? A sort of sympathetic after-comprehension. It was as if I, too,
were having a hand passed across the flatness of my figure.
"'Yes, I have got thin.' Silence. Had I been very ill? Yes, very! Was
that why I was so pale? It was fearful,--not a tinge of warm color in
my face; one would be afraid to touch me. I felt as if I were being
toted up: item, so much color; item, so much flesh. Had I been worried?
I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive. Ah, yes,
I had dwelt too much on a trouble I had. Did I sleep? Not much. That
was foolish. I ought to eat plenty, too. I looked as if I didn't eat
enough; my eyes and cheeks were hollowed out. Ah, yes, no doubt I
did look older than in autumn! I was not contradicted. I would have
told a little lie to spare a man's feelings. Men are perhaps more
conscientious.
"What else? I am rehearsing it all as best I can. Oh, my hands were
altered; he thought they were not so small, eh? Might be my wrists
were less round, that made a difference. Did it? They certainly were
larger, and not so white. Did he kiss me? Oh, yes. You see I wanted
to sift this thing thoroughly, to get clear into my head what ground
I was standing on. So I let him. They were merely lip-kisses; his
spirit did not come to mine, and I was simply analyzing them all the
time. Did I not feel anything? Yes, I did,--deeply hurt; ah, I can't
say how they hurt me! They lacked everything a kiss, as the expression
of the strongest, best feeling of a man and woman, _can_ hold. How do
I know? My dear woman, have you never dreamt, felt, had _intuitive
experiences_? I have. I am not sure that I had not a keen sense of the
ludicrous side of the whole affair; that one portion of my soul was not
having a laugh at the other's expense. I do not quite know what I had
been expecting. 'Tis true he had written me beautiful letters. You see
he is too much of a word-artist to write anything else.
"Treated me badly? No, I am not prepared to say that he did. I am glad
he was too honest to hide his startled realization of the fact that
autumn and spring are different seasons, and that one's feelings may
undergo a change in a winter. I do not see why I should resent that.
Why, it would be punishing him for having cared for me. To put it in
his words: 'I came as a strangely lovely dream into his life.' Probably
the whole mistake lay in that. He thought of me as a dream lady, with
dainty hands; idealized me, and wrote to the dream creature. When I
came back in the flesh, he realized that I was a prosaic fact, with
less charming hands, a tendency to leanness, and coming crow's feet.
His look of dismayed awakening was simply delicious.
"I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting images that flit across
my memory; you would grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst
of all my pain,--I was sitting next him, and he was stroking my hand
mechanically,--I noticed a glass case on the wall containing an Italian
landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink lakes; pasteboard figures of
Dutch-peasant build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and bandaged
legs, figured in the foreground; you wound it up, and the figures
danced to a _varso-viana_. I was listening to him, and yet at the same
time I caught myself imagining how he and I would look dressed like
that, bobbing about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly keep from
shrieking with laughter. He had a turn-down collar on: he ought always
to wear unstarched linen,--it and his throat didn't fit. You cannot
understand me? Dearest woman, I do not pretend to understand the thing
myself.
"Did we not talk about anything? Of course we did,--Tolstoi and his
doctrine of celibacy; Ibsen's Hedda; Strindberg's view of the female
animal,--and agreed that Friedrich Nietszche appealed to us immensely.
You must make allowances. Here was a man passionately attached to his
art,--his art, that he had been treating churlishly for months for the
sake of a dream. The dream was out, and he feared her revenge. That is
the one potent element of consolation for me. If one has made an idiot
of one's self, it is at least self-consoling to have done so for a
genius. He chose the better part, if you come to think of it. The man
or woman who jeopardizes a great talent--be it of writing, painting,
or acting--for marriage sake is bartering a precious birthright for
a mess of pottage, mostly indifferent pottage. And even if it were
excellent, it is bound to pall when one has it every day. There never
was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally
the more gifted half who has to pay the heaviest toll.
"I believe he was intensely sorry for me. I asked him once, you know,
half playfully, half maliciously, if he had meant something, something
deliciously tender,--I quoted it out of one of his letters. He paled
to his lips, closed his eyes for a second, and I saw drops of sweat
break out on his forehead. I sprang up and turned aside his answer. I
remember when I was a little child I never would pick flowers; I always
fancied they felt it, and bled to death. I used to sneak behind, and
gather up all those my playmates threw down on the road or fields, and
put them, stalks down, into the water in the ditch or brook; even now I
can't wear them. I did not wish to hurt him either; he could not help
his passion-flower withering. I suppose it was written that my love
should turn, like fairy gold, into withered leaves in my grasp.
"What, dear,--a white hair? Oh, I saw several lately. How did it end?
Oh, he said that he was going away to glean material for a new book;
that he would burn my letters,--it was safer and wiser to burn letters.
No, I did not ask him; he volunteered it. He asked me, did I not think
so? I said yes. But is it not marvellous how dazzlingly swift our
thoughts can travel, like light? While I was saying, 'Yes, one often
regretted not having burned letters; receipts, receipts for bills,
were really the only things of importance to keep,' I was thinking and
crying inwardly over my letters. Such letters!--one only writes once
like that, I think. All the perfume of the flowers I ever smelt, all
the sun-glints on hill and sea, all the strains of music and light and
love I had garnered from the glad, fresh, young years when I tossed
cowslip balls in the meadows, were crystallized into love-words in
those letters of mine. It seemed to me often that the words burnt with
a white flame as I wrote them, and I was shy when I saw them written;
and he said, 'I shall burn them!' much as you might say, 'I shall take
the trimming off that last summer hat of mine.' I did not like to
think of his burning them, perhaps with his old washing-bills. Do you
know, if I had a finger or toe cut off, I wouldn't like them to take it
away; I'd like to bury it. A sort of feel, I suppose.
"Well, we said good-by! I felt as if I had a sponge with a lot of holes
in it, instead of a heart, and that all the feeling had oozed away
through them. He was glad to go, I think; he felt himself a brute I
dare say, yet how could he help it?
* * * * *