Dreams and wakings
The incomparable Lucy Tait was still but a star to be adored in her distant heaven when I went away from Little Arcady to learn some things not taught in the faded brick schoolhouse. It was six years before I came back; six years that I lived in a crowded place where people had no easy ways nor front yards with geranium beds nor knew enough of their neighbors either to love or to hate them.
I came back to the Little Country a mannish being, learned in the law, and with the right sort of laugh in my heart for the old school days, for the simplicity of my boy's love.
But there and then, with her old sweet want of pity, did she smite me again. Through and through she smote the man as she had smitten the boy. Treacherously it was, within my own citadel, at the very moment of my coming. Gayly up the remembered path I went, under the flowering horse-chestnut, to the little house standing back from the street, only to find that, as of old, she blocked my way. She stood where the pink-blossomed climber streamed up the columns of the little porch, and her arm was twined among the strands to draw them to her face. She was leaving—but she had stayed too long; not the child with yellow braids, humorously preserved in my memory, but a blossomed, a fruiting Eve, with whilom braids massed high in a coronet, their gold a little tarnished. Later it came to me to think that she was Spring, and had filched a crown from Autumn. In that first glance, however, I could only wonder instinctively if the tassels yet danced from her boot tops. I saw at once that this might not any longer be known. One could only surmise pleasantly. But straightway was I Atlas, stooping a little, rounding my shoulders under the earth she deigned to walk upon.
And the disconcerting strangeness of it was in this: that though she was no longer the woman child, yet with one flash of her gold-curtained eyes had she reduced me to my ancient schoolboy clumsiness. She was a woman, but I was again an awkward, stammering boy, rebelliously declining to believe that a state she had come away from could retain any significance, industrial or otherwise. Nor, in the little time left to us, did I ever achieve a condition higher than this.
Consciously I was a prince of lofty origin in her presence, but ever unable to make known my excellencies of rank. It was as in a dream when we must see evil approach without power to raise an averting hand.
She was Spring with a stolen crown of Autumn; and again, she was a sherbet—sweet, fragrant, cold, and about to melt—but not for me. I knew that.
I heard presently that she spoke well of me. She spoke of my having a kind face—even the kindest face in the world.
"The kindest, plainest face in the world," was her fashion of putting it. And of course that made it hopeless, since, surely, no woman has ever loved the kindest face she knew.
Only a fool would have hoped after this—and at least I never gave her ground to call me that. Not even did I commit the folly of revealing my need. She alone ever knew it, and she only in the way that the child had known the schoolboy to gloom and rage afar in his passion for her. She had no word of mine for it then, nor had she now, and I believe she felt rather certain there never would be any. She seemed to be grateful for this and doubly kind, with only now and then the flash of a knowing look, or the trifle of a deep, swiftly questioning glance, born, I dare say, of that curiosity which the devil contrives to kindle in God's most angelic women.
Doubtless she had a little speech of refusal patted into kindliness for me. Perhaps she would not have been wholly anguished to have me hear this—to be able to assure me tenderly, graciously, of the depth and pureness of her friendship for me. Who knows? I am older now, and things once hidden are revealed. Sometimes I think that a certain new respect for me grew within her as the days tried the metal of my silence—a respect, but nothing more. Her appreciation of my face was too palpably without those reservations that so often cry louder than words.
So we sealed our secret, she and I, in an unspoken pledge, and not even Solon Denney, so keen of scent for rivals, ever divined it.
He called me out with the old boyish whistle the day he confided to me the tremendous news of his engagement. He laughed, foolish with joy as he told it, and I felt tingling in my arms that old boyish, brute impulse to slay him for the wretched ease of his victory. But we were men, so I thrust one of those rebellious arms in among the strands of the creeper, where her own arm had once been, and laid the other on his shoulder in all friendliness. This, while he rambled on of the bigness of life, the great future before Arcady of the Little Country, the importance of the Argus, which he had just founded, and the supreme excellence of that splendid mechanism, the new Washington hand-press, installed the week before.
His life was builded of these many interests, of her and himself and his country and his town. In the fulness of his heart he even brought out the latest Argus and read parts from his obituary of Douglas, while I stood stupidly striving to realize what I had long known must be true.
"A great man has fallen," he read, declaiming a little, as in our school days. "Stephen A. Douglas is dead. The voice that so lately and eloquently appealed to his countrymen is hushed in—"
How long he read is uncertain. But from moment to moment his tones would call me back from visions, and I would vaguely hear that one was gone who had warned his fellows against the pitfalls of political jealousy, and bade all who loved their country band against those who would seek to pluck a laurel from the wreath of our glorious confederacy.
But under visions I had made my resolve. Douglas was dead, but others were living.
Two months before in a gray dawn, the walls of a fort in Charleston Harbor had crumbled under fire from a score of rebel batteries. Now the shots echoed in my ears with a new volume.
"Good luck, Solon—and good-by—I'm going 'on to Richmond.'"
"Oh, that!" said he, easily, "that will be over before you can get to the front."
But I went, forthwith, and, triumphant lover though he was, the editor of the Little Arcady Argus was less than a prophet.
I went to the "little" war; and of her I carried, as I marched, an ambrotype in a closed case, which I had obtained deviously. She smiled in it, a little questioning, inciting smile, that seemed to lurk back in her eyes rather than along her lips. It was the smile that had availed to keep me firm in my vows of silence.
It was another picture I brought back five years later—the picture of a young girl, not smiling but grave, even fearful, as if she had faced the camera full of apprehension. But I knew her not; the thing had come to me by chance, and I threw it aside to be forgotten.
It is best to tell quickly that those years were swift and full. Early in the second a letter from Solon, read at a random camp-fire, told me of my namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her first-born. And I lusted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty dish and bed of care at once. Lacking the battle death, I could at least mimic it, as they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime—above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty for its own barren sake.
At the last I lay on a cot in a field hospital, entertained for the moment by the novelty of that vacant, spacious feeling on my left side—wondering if I could shave now with one arm—without another hand to pull my face into hard little hummocks for the razor.
I heard the soft quick tread of a hospital steward, and standing before me, he took from its envelope the letter Solon Denney had sent me to say that she was dead. I handed it back, told him to burn it, and I shut my eyes to the sickening shapes of life. My fever came up again, and in the night I felt inch by inch over ground wet with blood for a picture I had relinquished in a Quixotic moment. I must have been troublesome, for they gave me the drug of dreams and I awakened peacefully. I watched the field surgeons gather about a young line officer brought in with a shot through his neck. For the better probing of the wound they removed his head and gave it to me to hold. Seeing that it was Solon Denney's head, I was seized with a mood of jest—I would hide it and make Solon search. I advanced craftily down an endless corridor, but came to the edge of a wood, where there was a wicked spitting of shots. I cried out again, and once more they gave me the drug. Then I dreamed more quietly. I saw that the soul of my dead arm searched for her soul—that it would soon be drawn to her and offer itself to comfort her and never, never leave her. It would say, "At least take the arm, since you may have it without the face." It seemed that my other arm should go to her, too. This side of her there could be nothing for either to close upon. It appeared to me that I fell asleep on this fancy and dreamed that I awoke painfully to a poor, one-sided life, effortless, barren, forbidding.
A year later I went back to the Little Country to be counsellor at law to its people in time of need and a father to Solon Denney and his two children. Solon could direct large affairs acceptably, but he and his babes were as thistle-down in a prairie wind.
He brought the children to visit me that first day I came home—to a home where I was now to live alone.
I sat on the little porch above the river bank, close by the wall of blossoming creeper whose tendrils she had once embraced, bringing her cheek intrepidly against the blossoms of that year, and saw him come slowly up the path. He seemed so sadly alone because of the two little creatures that followed him.
I placed a chair for Solon and was confronted by my namesake.
"Did they shotted your arm off in the war? " he asked.
"Yes, in the war."
He patted the empty sleeve, and his eyes beamed with discovery.
"What did you have your sleeve rolled up for when your arm was shotted?"
I made plain to him the mystery of the whole sleeve.
"She often spoke of you," said Solon. "She seemed to think you would like to be a help to us if you could."
I turned to greet the woman child, but she had strayed into the house. I heard her shouts from my bedroom. Then she came running to us, cooing in helpless joy.
"Candy—candy—Uncle Maje—lovely candy—all pink and dusty."
Well over a face set with the mother's eyes was spilled that which she had clutched and eaten of,—a thing pink and dusty, in truth, but which was not candy.
"She does those things constantly," said the dejected father. "I don't see what I can do to her."
I saw, however, and did it, first wiping the tooth-powder from her face. She had called me Uncle Maje.
"She's a regular baddix," announced my namesake, gravely judicial. Then, as if with intention to indicate delicately that the family afforded striking contrasts, he added, "I ain't a baddix—I can nearly sing."
The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon. The woman child at last put me to thinking—to thinking that perhaps butterflies are not meant to be happily caught. With many shouts she had clumsily enough imprisoned one—a fairy thing of green and bronze—in a hand so plump that it seemed to have been quilted. A moment she held it, then set it free, perhaps for its lack of spirit. It crawled and fluttered up the vine, trailing a crumpled wing most sadly, and I took it for my lesson. Assuredly they were not to be caught with any profit—at least not brutally in an eager hand. Brush them ever so lightly and the bloom is off the wings. They are to be watched in their pretty flitting, loved only in their freedom and from afar, with no clumsy reachings. That was a good thing to know in any world.
The Argus announced my home-coming with a fine flourish of my title in Solon's best style. It said that I had come back to take up the practice of the law. Not even Solon knew that I had come back to the memory of her.
This is how it befell that I was presently engrossed to outward seeming with the affairs of Little Arcady—even to the extent of a casual Potts, and those blessed contingencies that were later to unfold from him. Thus I took my allotted place and the years began.