The Project Gutenberg eBook, Aftermath, by James Lane Allen
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Title: Aftermath
Author: James Lane Allen
Release Date: September 28, 2004 [eBook #13554]
Language: English
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFTERMATH***
E-text prepared by Al Haines
AFTERMATH
Part Second of _A Kentucky Cardinal_
by
JAMES LAKE ALLEN
Author of _The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_, _Flute and Violin_, etc.
1899
Dedication
This to her from one who in childhood used to stand at the windows
of her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars.
I
I was happily at work this morning among my butterbeans--a vegetable of
solid merit and of a far greater suitableness to my palate than such
bovine watery growths as the squash and the beet. Georgiana came to
her garden window and stood watching me.
"You work those butterbeans as though you loved _them_," she said,
scornfully.
"I do love them. I love all vines."
"Are you cultivating them as vines or as vegetables?"
"It makes no difference to nature."
"Do you expect me to be a vine when we are married?"
"I hope you'll not turn out a mere vegetable. How should you like to
be my Virginia-creeper?"
"And what would you be?"
"Well, what would you like? A sort of honeysuckle frame?"
"Oh, anything! Only support me and give me plenty of room to bloom."
I do not always reply to Georgiana, though I always could if I chose.
Whenever I remain silent about anything she changes the subject.
"Did you know that Sylvia once wrote a poem on a vegetable?"
"I did not."
"You don't speak as though you cared."
"You must know how deeply interested I am."
"Then why don't you ask to see the poem?"
"Was it on butterbeans?"
"The idea! Sylvia has better taste."
"I suppose I'd better look into this poem."
"You are not to laugh at it!"
"I shall weep."
"No; you are not to weep. Promise."
"What am I to promise?"
"That you will read it unmoved."
"I do promise--solemnly, cheerfully."
"Then come and get it."
I went over and stood under the window. Georgiana soon returned and
dropped down to me a piece of writing-paper.
"Sylvia wrote it before she began to think about the boys."
"It must be a very early poem."
"It is; and this is the only copy; please don't lose it."
"Then I think you ought to take it back at once. Let me beg of you not
to risk it--" But she was gone; and I turned to my arbor and sat down
to read Sylvia's poem, which I found to be inscribed to "The Potato,"
and to run as follows:
"What on this wide earth
That is made or does by nature grow
Is more homely yet more beautiful
Than the useful Potato?
"What would this world full of people do,
Rich and poor, high and low,
Were it not for this little-thought-of
But very necessary Potato?
"True, 'tis homely to look on,
Nothing pretty even in its blow,
But it will bear acquaintance,
This useful Potato.
"For when it is cooked and opened
It's so white and mellow,
You forget it ever was homely,
This useful Potato.
"On the whole it is a very plain plant,
Makes no conspicuous show,
But the internal appearance is lovely
Of the unostentatious Potato.
"On the land or on the sea,
Wherever we may go,
We are always glad to welcome
The sound Potato."[*]
[*]The elder Miss Cobb was wrong in thinking this poem Sylvia's. It
was extant at the time over the signature of another writer, whose
authorship is not known to have been questioned. Miss Sylvia perhaps
copied it out of admiration, or as a model for her own use.
J.L.A.
In the afternoon I was cutting stakes at the wood-pile for my
butterbeans, and a bright idea struck me. During my engagement to
Georgiana I cannot always be darting in and out of Mrs. Cobb's front
door like a swallow through a barn. Neither can I talk freely to
Georgiana--with her up at the window and me down on the ground--when I
wish to breathe into her ear the things that I must utter or die.
Besides, the sewing-girl whom Georgiana has engaged is nearly always
there. So that as I was in the act of trimming a long slender stick,
it occurred to me that I might make use of this to elevate any little
notes that I might wish to write over the garden fence up to
Georgiana's window.
I was greatly taken with the thought, and, dropping my hand-axe,
hurried into the house and wrote a note to her at once, which I
thereupon tied to the end of the pole by a short string. But as I
started for the garden this arrangement looked too much like catching
Georgiana with a bait. Therefore, happening to remember, I stopped at
my tool-house, where I keep a little of everything, and took from a peg
a fine old specimen of a goldfinch's nest. This I fastened to the end
of the pole, and hiding my note in it, now felt better satisfied. No
one but Georgiana herself would ever be able to tell what it was that I
might wish to lift up to her at any time; and in case of its being not
a note, but a plum--a berry--a peach--it would be as safe as it was
unseen. This old house of a pair of goldfinches would thus become the
home of our fledgling hopes: every day a new brood of vows would take
flight across its rim into our bosoms.
Watching my chance during the afternoon, when the sewing-girl was not
there, I rushed over and pushed the stick up to the window.
"Georgiana," I called out, "feel in the nest!"
She hurried to the window with her sewing in her arms. The nest swayed
to and fro on a level with her nose.
"What is it?" she cried, drawing back with extreme distaste.
"You feel in it!" I repeated.
"I don't wish to feel in it," she said. "Take it away!"
"There's a young dove in it," I persisted--"a young cooer."
"I don't wish any young cooers," she said, with a grimace.
Seeing that she was not of my mind, I added, pleadingly; "It's a note
from me, Georgiana! This is going to be our little private
post-office!" Georgiana sank back into her chair. She reappeared with
the flush of apple-blossoms and her lashes wet with tears of laughter.
But I do not think that she looked at me unkindly. "Our little private
post-office," I persisted, confidingly.
"How many more little private things are we going to have?" she
inquired, plaintively.
"I can't wait here forever," I said. "This is growing weather; I might
sprout."
"A dry stick will not," said Georgiana, simply, and went back to her
sewing.
I took the hint, and propped the pole against the house under the
window. Later, when I took it down, my note was gone.
I have set the pole under Georgiana's window several times within the
last two or three days, It looks like a little dip-net, high and dry in
the air; but so far as I can see with my unaided eye, it has caught
nothing so large as a gnat. It has attracted no end of attention from
the birds of the neighborhood, however, who never saw a goldfinch's
nest swung to the end of a leafless pole and placed where it could be
so exactly reached by the human hand. In particular it has fallen
under the notice of a pair of wrens, which are like women, in that they
usually have some secret business behind their curiosity. The business
in this case is the matter of their own nest, which they have located
in a broken horse-collar in my saddle-house. At such seasons they are
alert for appropriating building materials that may have been fetched
to hand by other birds; and they have already abstracted a piece of
candle-wick from the bottom of my post-office.
Georgiana has been chilly towards me for two days, and I think is doing
her best not to freeze up altogether. I have racked my brain to know
why; but I fear that my brain is not of the sort to discover what is
the matter with a woman when nothing really is the matter. Moreover,
as I am now engaged to Georgiana, I have thought it better that she
should begin to bring her explanations to me--the steady sun that will
melt all her uncertain icicles.
At last this morning she remarked, but very carelessly, "You didn't
answer my note."
"What note, Georgiana?" I asked, thunderstruck.
She gave me such a look.
"Didn't you get the note I put into that--into that--" Her face grew
pink with vexation and disgust.
"Did you put a note into the--into the--" I could not have spoken the
word just then.
I retired to my arbor, where I sat for half an hour with my head in my
hands. What could have become of Georgiana's note? A hand might have
filched it; unlikely. A gust of wind have whisked it out; impossible.
I debated and rejected every hypothesis to the last one. Acting upon
this, I walked straight to the saddle-house, and in a dark corner
peered at the nest of the wrens. A speck of white paper was visible
among the sticks and shavings. I tore the nest out and shook it to
pieces. How those wrens did rage! The note was so torn and mudded
that I could not read it. But suppose a jay had carried it to the high
crotch of some locust! I ran joyfully back to the window.
"I've found it, Georgiana!" I called out.
She appeared, looking relieved, but not exactly forgiving.
"Where!"
My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
"Where did you find it?" she repeated, imperiously.
"What do you want to know for?" I said, savagely.
"Let me see it!" she demanded.
My clasp on it suddenly tightened.
"Let me see it!" she repeated, with genuine fire.
"What do you want to see it for?" I said.
She turned away.
"Here it is," I said, and held it up.
She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.
"Did the pigs get it?"
"The wrens. It was merely a change of post-office."
"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the
letters."
Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when
they were looking and I was not; but women--_all_ women--now and then
hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves. Sylvia, for
instance. She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden
failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her
whim. And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack
of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass
sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as
well be weeds!"
The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the
passage of the Greatest Common Divisor--far more dreadful than the
passage of the Beresina--her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement,
and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany
appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her
sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be
naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires
that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then
by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry
straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies;
and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at
the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end.
The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to
supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the
teeth of all known estimates of mortality. How unlike Georgiana!
I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when
they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a
blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing
high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its
shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to
find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it
all--there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid
Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public
pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.
I caught some one taking a grape the other evening--a sort of green
grape. Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her
escort on the evening of her Commencement--him of the duck trousers and
webbed feet. On one occasion I have observed her walking along the
borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him
that _he_ could come in and get flowers whenever he wished. I wish I
might catch him once.
To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I
strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana.
Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the
shadow of the vines. He had his arm around her and was kissing her.
"Upon my honor!" I said; and striding over to him I thrust my hand
under his coattails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him
head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street.
"Let me catch _you_ in here kissing anybody again!" I said.
He had bit me viciously on one of my calves--which are sizable--as I
had dragged him along; so that, I had been forced to stoop down and
twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose. I met him on
the street early the next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plum
in its ripeness. I tapped it.
"Only three persons know of your misbehavior last night," I said. "If
you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch,
the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose: it will be
your neck!"
My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have
forborne returning to the arbor had I not felt assured that she must
have escaped to the house through modesty and sheer shame. But she had
not budged.
"I blush for you, Sylvia!" I exclaimed. "I know all about that fellow!
He shouldn't kiss--my old cat!"
"I don't see what _you_ have to do with it!" said Sylvia, placidly.
"And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrupt me
again when I am engaged in entertaining a young gentleman."
"Sylvia, my dear child!" I said, gravely, sitting down beside her.
"How old are you?"
"I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, "with
the assistance of my immediate family."
"Well, I don't think you are," I replied. "And since your brother is
at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty
of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully
understand. If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of
this and not be hurt by it; or you might not be hurt by it if you were
a good deal older; but at your age it is terrible; in time it will
affect your character."
"How old must I be?" said Sylvia, wickedly.
"Well, in your case," I replied, warmly, a little nettled by her tone,
"you'd better abstain altogether."
"And in your case?" said Sylvia.
"You never mind my case!" I retorted.
"But I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia. "I do mind it if
it's going to affect my character!"
"You know very well, Sylvia," I replied, "that I never kissed you but
three times, and then as a brother."
"I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said
Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.
It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers
of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent
men--and as to the way that different men would try to act with her.
I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long. Her
ill-nature had quickly vanished; she was, in her way, provoking,
charming. I was sitting close to her. The moonlight played upon her
daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines. It was
unpremeditated; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant
by ungratified longings for Georgiana; but suddenly I bent down and
kissed her.
Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat. How long Georgiana
had been standing in the entrance to the arbor I do not know. She may
that instant have come. But there she was, dressed in white--pure,
majestic, with the moon shining behind her, and shedding about her the
radiance of a heavenly veil.
"Come, Sylvia," she said, with perfect sweetness; and, bidding me
good-night with the same gentlewoman's calm, she placed her arm about
the child's waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out
of my garden.
At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little
screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbor, I would gladly have crept
into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes. Still, how was I to
foresee what I should do? A man's conversation may be his own; his
conduct may vibrate with the extinct movements of his ancestors.
Georgiana's behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels.
For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability
to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it
under her window. It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's
nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich
egg. All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run
down; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air. To my tortured
vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of
one of Sylvia's poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its
behalf Sylvia's fondest epithets: "how homely, yet how beautiful,"
"little thought of, but very necessary," "unostentatious, but of lovely
internal appearance."
Towards sunset I took it sadly down. On top of the nest lay
Georgiana's old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles! She had
divined what all the writing meant and would not have it. Instead she
sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness but of her surrender.
When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either
gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in
his arms. Henceforth, if Georgiana were removed to another planet, I
would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star
than coexist with any earthly woman. One thought besets me: did she
realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanors with
Sylvia? Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is
engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril?
This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpses of her
face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to
despatch a reckless note: "Will you come to the arbor for a little
while tonight? I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I
have desired it. It is so much more private there. Write on the back
of this paper one word, 'Yes.' There is a pencil in the nest."
The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a
shoulder and the movement of a busy hand. As I pushed the note up I
said:
"Read it at once. I am waiting."
A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil; then note and
pencil were put back. On the former was written, "Yes."
I think I must have done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I
started aimlessly off to town. On the way I met Georgiana.
"Good God, Georgiana!" I exclaimed. "You _here_!"
"Where else?" said she. "And why not?"
"I thought I just saw you at the window--" And then my awful soul
within me said: "H-sh-sh-sh! Not a word of this to a human being!"
After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy into the garden,
and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbor, where I
bade them sit down.
In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as president of the Philosophical
Society, ordered excavations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky
for the skeletons of extinct animals. My father, who was interested in
antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard
to earlier discoveries at that spot; and when this expedition was
undertaken he formed one of the explorers. Jack, his servant, at that
time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the
negroes who were to do the digging.
The wonders then unearthed have always been the greenest spot in old
Jack's memory; so that they have been growing larger ever since.
Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a
sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to
talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he
gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a
year. It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to
have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the
bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landing.
Last night I had merely to ask him whether he credited the story of an
old traveller that he had once used some ribs found there for his
tent-poles and a tooth for his hominy beater; whereupon Dilsy,
foreseeing what was coming, excused herself on the plea of sudden
rheumatism and went to bed, as I wished she should.
The hinges on the little private gate under Georgiana's window I keep
rusty; this enables me to note when any one enters my garden.
By-and-by I heard the hinges softly creak, whereupon I feigned not to
believe what Jack was telling me; whereupon he fell into an harangue of
such affectionate and sustained vehemence that when the hinges creaked
again I was never able to determine. Was ever such usage made before
of an antediluvian monster?
To-day the sewing-girl thrust out spiteful faces at me several times.
She is the one that helped Georgiana last year when she was making her
wedding-clothes to marry the West Point cousin. God keep him safely in
the distance, or guide him firmly to the van of war! How does a woman
feel when she is making her wedding-clothes for the second time and for
another man? I know very well how the other man feels. Upon my urging
Georgiana to marry me at once--nature does not recognize engagements;
they are a device of civilization--she protested:
"But I must get ready! Think of the sewing!"
"Oh, bother!" I grumbled. "Where are all those clothes that you made
last year?"
How was I to suppose that Georgiana must have everything made over as
part of her feeling for me? I would not decree it otherwise; yet I
question whether this delicacy may not impose reciprocal obligations,
and remove from my life certain elements of abiding comfort. What if
it should engender a prejudice against my own time-worn
acquaintances--the familiars of my fireside? It might be justifiable
sagacity in me to keep them locked up for the first year or so after
Georgiana and I become a diune being; and, upon the whole, she should
never know what may have been the premarital shortcomings of my
wardrobe as respects things unseen. No matter how well a bachelor may
appear dressed, there is no telling what he conceals upon his person.
I feel sure that the retrospective discovery of a ravelling would
somehow displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship. Nature is
very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal. Invariably the
young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are
preparing for natural selection; and I flatter myself that even my own
garments--in their superficial aspects at least, and during my long
pursuit of Georgiana--have not been very far from somewhat slightly
ingratiating.
This pursuit is now drawing to a close. It is nearly the last of June.
She has given me her word that she will marry me early in September.
Two months for her to get the bridal feathers ready; two for me to
prepare the nest.
II
I have forgotten nature. I barely know that July, now nearly gone, has
passed, sifted with sweetness and ablaze with light. Time has swept
on, the world run round; but I have stood motionless, abiding the hour
of my marriage as a tree the season of its leaves. For all that it
looks so calm, within goes on a tremendous surging of sap against its
moments of efflorescence.
After which I pray that, not as a tree, but as a man, I may have a
little peace. When Georgiana confessed her love, I had supposed this
confession to mark the end of her elusiveness. When later on she
presented to me the symbol of a heart pierced with needles, I had taken
it for granted that thenceforth she would settle down into something
like a state of prenuptial domestication, growing less like a swift and
more like a hen. But there is nothing gallinaceous about my Georgiana.
I took possession of her vow and the emery-ball, not of her; the
privilege was merely given to plant my flag-staff on the uncertain edge
of an unknown land. In war it sometimes becomes necessary to devastate
a whole country in order to control a single point: I should be pleased
to learn what portion of the earth's surface I am required to subdue
ere I shall hold one little citadel.
As for me, Georgiana requires that I shall be a good deal like an old
rock jutting out of the quiet earth: never ruffled, never changing
either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be
it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of
impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand
years. Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near
as the delighted cave of the winds. The part of wisdom in me then is
not to heed each sallying gust, but to capture the cave and drive the
winds away.
For I know in whom I have believed; I know that this myriad caprice is
but the deepening of excitement on the verge of captivity; I know that
on ahead lie the regions of perpetual calm--my Islands of the Blest.
Georgiana does not play upon the pianoforte; or, as Mrs. Walters would
declare, she does not perform upon the instrument. Sylvia does; she
performs, she executes. There are times when she will execute a piece
called "The Last Hope" until the neighbors are filled with despair and
ready to stretch their heads on the block to any more merciful
executioner. Nor does Georgiana sing to company in the parlor. That
is Sylvia's gift; and upon the whole it was this unmitigated practice
in the bosom--and in the ears--of her family that enabled Sylvia to
shine with such vocal effulgence in the procession on the last Fourth
of July and devote a pair of unflagging lungs to the service of her
country.
But Georgiana I have never known to sing except at her sewing and
alone, as the way of women often is. During a walk across the summer
fields my foot has sometimes paused at the brink of a silvery runlet,
and I have followed it backward in search of the spring. It may lead
to the edge of a dark wood; thence inward deeper and deeper;
disappearing at last in a nook of coolness and shadow, green leaves and
mystery. The overheard rill of Georgiana's voice issues from inner
depths of being that no human soul has ever visited, or perhaps will
ever visit. What would I not give to thread my way, bidden and alone,
to that far region of uncaptured loveliness?
Of late some of the overhead lullabies have touched me inexpressibly.
They beat upon my ear like the musical reveries of future mother
hood--they betoken in Georgiana's maidenhood the dreaming unrest of the
maternal.
One morning not long ago, with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran
in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may.
The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine
while I may--the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, body and spirit.
Naturally she and I have avoided the subject of the Cardinal. But to
the tragedy of his death was joined one circumstance of such coarse and
brutal unconcern that it had left me not only remorseful but resentful.
As we sat together the other evening, after one of those silences that
fall unregarded between us, I could no longer forbear to face an
understanding.
"Georgiana," I said, "do you know what became of the redbird?"
Unwittingly the color of reproach must have lain upon my words, for she
answered quickly with yet more in hers,
"I had it buried!"
It was my turn to be surprised.
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure. I told them where to bury it; I showed them the very
spot--under the cedar. They told me they had. Why?"
I thought it better that she should learn the truth.
"You know we can't trust our negroes. They disobeyed you. They lied
to you; they never buried it. They threw it on the ash-pile. The pigs
tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it
to pieces."
She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress.
After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
"And you have believed that I knew of this--that I permitted it?"
"I have believed nothing. I have waited to understand."
A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to
blame me." Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with
tears in her eyes:
"Promise me--promise me, Adam, until we are married, and--yes, _after_
we are married--as long as I live, that you will never believe anything
of me until you _know_ that it is true!"
"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!" I cried, trying to draw her
to me, but she would not permit it. "And you?"
"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white
inward light. "I know that you can never do anything that will make me
think the less of you."
Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I
have paid little heed to the birds. The subject has been a sore one.
Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of
Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and
nearer and nearer to my own kind.
When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on
the outskirts of the town and of humanity. On the side of them lay the
sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as
the sweet deep ocean of my poetry. I called my neighbors my
manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose
passages. The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.
There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there
was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle.
In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who
was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old
doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
sweet-peas. Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.
But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it. I have
become less a woodsman, more a civilian. Unless she relents, it may
end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
Legislature. Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.
It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
exerting themselves to marry. I am more like a badger than like one of
them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a
badger-like creature close at hand.
For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has
the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed
raccoon. He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a
tree in my front yard: a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild
nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime
leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and
claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation. So am I;
and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in
spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and
more easily to be broken. The restless beast enlivens his captivity by
the keenest scrutiny of every object within his range; I too have
busied myself with the few people that have come this way.
First, early in the month, Georgiana's brother--down from West Point,
very stately, and with his brow stern, as if for gory war. When I
called promptly to pay my respects, as his brother-in-law to be, he was
sitting on the front porch surrounded by a subdued family, Georgiana
alone remaining unawed. He looked me over indifferently, as though I
were a species of ancient earthworks not worth any more special
reconnoissance, and continued his most superior remarks to his mother
on the approaching visit of three generals.
Upon leaving I invited him to join me on the morrow in a squirrel hunt
with smooth-bores, whereupon he manifested surprise that I was
acquainted with the use of fire-arms. Whereupon I remarked that I
would sometimes hit big game if it were so close that I could not miss
it, and further urged him to have breakfast with me at a very early
hour in order that we might reach the woods while the squirrels were at
theirs.
Going home, I knocked at the cabin where Jack and Dilsy lay snoring
side by side with the velocity of rival saw-mills, and begged Dilsy to
give me a bite about daybreak--coffee and corn-batter cakes--saying
that I could get breakfast when I returned. I shared this scant bite
with my young soldier--to Dilsy's abject mortification, I not having
told her of his coming. Then we set off at a brisk pace towards a
great forest south of the town some five miles away, where the
squirrels had appeared and were doing great damage, being the last of a
countless plague of them that overran northern and central Kentucky a
year ago.
On the way I dragged him through several canebrakes, a thicket of
blackberry; kept him out all day; said not a word about dinner; avoided
every spot where he could have gotten a swallow of water; not once sat
down to rest; towards the middle of the afternoon told him I desired to
take enough squirrels home to make Jack a squirrel-skin overcoat, and
asked him to carry while I killed; loaded him with squirrels, neck,
shoulders, breast, back, and loins, till as he moved he tottered and
swayed like a squirrel pyramid; about sundown challenged him to what he
had not yet had, some crack shooting, which in that light requires
young eyesight, and barked the squirrel for him four times; later still
snuffed the candle for him, having brought one along for the purpose;
and then, with my step fresh, led him swiftly home.
He has the blood of Georgiana in him, and stood it like a man. But he
was nearly dead. He has saluted me since as though I were a murderous
garrison intrenched on the Heights of Abraham.
Then the three generals of the United States army descended in a
body--or in three bodies; and the truth is that their three bodies
scarce held them, they were in such a state of flesh when they reached
Kentucky, and of being perpetually overfed while they remained. The
object of their joint visit under a recent act of Congress was to
locate a military asylum for disabled soldiers; and had they stayed
much longer they must have had themselves admitted to their own
institution as foremost of the disabled. Having spent some time at the
Lower Blue Lick Springs, the proposed site--where this summer are over
five hundred guests of our finest Southern society--they afterwards
were drawn around with immense solidity towards Louisville, Frankfort,
Maysville, Paris, and Lexington, being everywhere received with such
honors and provisions that these great guns were in danger of becoming
spiked forever in both barrel and tube.
Upon reaching this town one of them detached himself from the heated
rolling mass and accepted the invitation of young Cobb--who had formed
the acquaintance at West Point--to make a visit in his home. He had
not been there many days before he manoeuvred to establish a private
military retreat for himself in the affections of Mrs. Cobb. So that
his presence became a profanation to Georgiana, whose reverence for her
heroic father burns like an altar of sacred fire, and whose nature
became rent in twain between her mother's suitor and her brother's
guest.
A most pestiferous variety of caterpillar has infested the tops of my
cherry-trees this summer, and during the general's encampment near Mrs.
Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy
with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her
garden--just over the fence--buckled in to suffocation, and with his
long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn. I was
engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn.
They were passing almost beneath me on the other side; he had been
talking; I heard her brief reply, in a voice low and full of dignity,
"I have been married, sir!"
"Mother of Georgiana!" I cried, within myself. But had she ever
thought of taking a second husband she must have seen through "Old
Drumbeater," as Sylvia called him. There were times when their
breakfast would be late--for the sake of letting his chicken be broiled
in slow perfection or his rolls or waffles come to a faultless brown;
and I, being at work near the garden fence, would hear him tramping up
and down the walk on the other side and swearing at a family that had
such irregular meals. The camel, a lean beast, requires an
extraordinary supply of food, which it proceeds to store away in its
hump as nourishment to be drawn upon while it is crossing the desert.
There may be no long campaigning before the general; but if there were
and rations were short, why could he not live upon his own back? It is
of a thickness, a roundness, and an impenetrability that would have
justified Jackson in using him as a cotton-bale at the battle of New
Orleans.
Thus in my little corner of the world we have all been at the same
business of love, and I wonder whether the corner be not the world
itself: Mrs. Cobb and the general, Georgiana and I the sewing-girl and
the carpenter; for I had forgotten to note how quickly these two have
found out that they want each other. My arbor is at his service, if he
wishes it; and Jack shall keep silent about the mastodon.
It is true that from this sentimental enumeration I have omitted the
name of Mrs. Walters; but there is a secret here which not even
Georgiana herself will ever get from me. Mrs. Walters came to this
town twenty years ago from the region of Bowling Green. Some years
afterwards I made a trip into that part of the State to hear the
mocking-bird--for it fills those more southern groves, but never visits
ours; and while there I stepped by accident on this discovery: _There
never was any Mr. Walters_. It is her maiden name. But as I see the
freedom of her life and reflect upon the things that a widow can do and
an old maid cannot--with her own sex and with mine--I commend her
wisdom and leave her at peace. Indeed I have gone so far, when she has
asked for my sympathy, as to lament with her Mr. Walters's death.
After all, what great difference is there between her weeping for him
because he is no more, and her weeping for him because he never was?
After which she freshens herself up with another handkerchief, a little
Florida water, and a touch of May roses from the apothecary's.
And I have omitted the name of Sylvia; but then Sylvia's name, like
that of Lot's wife, can never be used as one of a class, and she
herself must always be spoken of alone. However, if Sylvia had been
Lot's wife she would not have turned to a pillar of salt, she would
most probably have become a geyser.
I don't know why, but she went on a visit to Henderson after that
evening in the arbor. I suspect the governing power of Georgiana's
wisdom to have been put forth here, for within a few days I received
from Sylvia a letter which she asked me not to show to Georgiana, and
in which she invited me to correspond with her secretly. The letter
was of a singularly adhesive quality as to the emotions. Throughout
she referred to herself as "the exile," although it was plain that she
wrote in the highest spirits; and in concluding she openly charged
Georgiana with having given her a black eye--a most unspeakable phrase,
surely picked up in the school-room. As a return for the black eye,
Sylvia said that she had composed a poem to herself, a copy of which
she enclosed.
I quote Sylvia's commemorative verses upon her wrongs and her
banishment. They show features of metrical excess, and can scarcely
claim to reflect the polish of her calmer art; but they are of value to
me as proving that whatever the rebuke Georgiana may have given, it had
rebounded from that elastic spirit.
LINES TO MYSELF
Oh! she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, love-lit _eyes_,
And wavy, dark brown hair.
I loved the gentle girl,
But, oh! I heaved a sigh
When first she told me she could see
Out of only _one_ eye.
But soon I thought within myself
I'd better save my tear and sigh
_To bestow upon an older person I know
Who has more than one eye_.
She is brave and intelligent
Too. She is witty and wise.
She'll accomplish more now than _another person_ I know
Who has _two_ eyes.
Ah, you need not pity _her_!
_She_ needs not your tear and sigh.
She'll make good use, I tell you,
Of her _one_ remaining eye.
In the home where we are hastening,
In our eternal Home on High,
See that _you_ be not rivalled
By the girl with only _one_ eye.[*]
[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote
that she had "composed" this poem. It is known to be the work of
another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and
produced a version of her own. J. L. A.
Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in
the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days
ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age--a boy,
enormously fat--whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her
mother had been decoyed by the general. Further to satirize the
similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of
yellow ribbon.
Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she
has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on
the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling
elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter. There is a
real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in
nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated
with thick tissues of blubber. If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she
seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in
deep.
Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open
letter in her hand.
"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.
It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the
Louisville _Journal_ accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and
assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of
Kentucky poetesses. The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to
None but God."
"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."
"He is," cried Sylvia. "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"
"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having
such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover
ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."
"Never!" cried Sylvia. "I would spurn him as chaff!"
"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further,
"you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something
new to parse."
Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.
"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's
say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in
Virgil and Homer. And if he could do that then, think what he must he
able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"
I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr.
Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was
based upon the fact that he could not parse it.
There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.
This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time
during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the
collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew;
but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to
the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs.
Walters's house--poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such
deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head.
Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this,
he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a
hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to
produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and
friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at
the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove
of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but
in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is
not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could
white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was
of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently
resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of
his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he
must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that
so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.
It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having
left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom. She
threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a
snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted
outward.
"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank
with bewilderment. Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been
her bed. Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded
with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes
blazing green with defiance.
She slammed and locked the door.
"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought
her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.
"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and
bringing the handcuffs.
"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands. "I
believe it's the devil."
"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were
all gathered together.
"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.
"Oh, Mrs. Walters! You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.
"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck
at being made ridiculous.
"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters,
bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.
And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter. She laid aside her
own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her
desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now
peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt
that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's
Fair in New York.
"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to
me that things happen in order to show you off."
"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again
without a shiver and a glance at the chimney. I begrudge her the quilt
for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in
it."
"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her
marriage?"
"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very
long."
"How long should you think?"
"Oh, well--about a minute."
"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters.
I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as
perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."
"Or perhaps wish to."
III
The end of August--the night before my marriage.
Several earthquakes have lately been felt in this part of the globe.
Coming events cast their shocks before.
The news of it certainly came like the shock of an earthquake to many
people of the town, who know perfectly well that no woman will allow
the fruit and flowers to be carried off a place as a man will. The
sagacious old soul who visits me yearly for young pie-plant actually
hurried out and begged for a basketful of the roots at once, thus
taking time--and the rhubarb--by the forelock. And the old epicurean
harpy whose passion is asparagus, having accosted me gruffly on the
street with an inquiry as to the truth of my engagement and been
quietly assured, how true it was, informed me to my face that any man
situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself
with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the
spot. Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the
hotels is female entanglements--mendacious, unwifely, and for him
unavailing.
Through divers channels some of my fellow-creatures--specimens of the
most dreadful prose--have let me know that upon marrying I shall
forfeit their usurious regard. As to them, I shall relapse into the
privacy of an orchard that has been plucked of its fruit. But my
wonderment has grown on the other hand at the number of those to whom,
as the significant unit of a family instead of a bachelor zero, I have
now acquired a sterling mercantile valuation. Upon the whole, I may
fairly compute that my relation to the human race has been totally
changed by the little I may cease to give away and by the less that I
shall need to buy.
And Mrs. Walters! Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a
singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential
vocalization, I have upon occasion classified her among the waders; and
certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana transpired, she
waded not only all around the town but all over it, sustained by a
buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in
depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom.
It was the crowning triumph of this vacant soul's life to boast that
she had made this match; and for the sake of giving her so much
happiness, I think I should have been willing to marry Georgiana
whether I loved her or not.
So we are all happy: Sylvia, who thus enters upon a family right to my
flowers and to the distinction of being the only Miss Cobb; Dilsy, who,
while gathering vegetables about the garden, long ago began to receive
little bundles of quilt pieces thrown down to her with a smile and the
right word from the window above; and Jack, who is to drive us on our
bridal-trip to the Blue Lick Springs, where he hopes to renew his
scientific studies upon the maxillary bones. I have hesitated between
Blue Lick and Mud Lick, though to a man in my condition there can be no
great difference between blue and mud. And I had thought of the
Harrodsburg Springs, but the negro musicians there were lately hurried
off to Canada by the underground railway, out of which fact has grown a
lawsuit for damages between the proprietor and his abolitionist guest.
A few weeks ago I intrusted a secret to Georgiana. I told her that
before she condescended to shine upon this part of the world--now the
heavenlier part--I had been engaged upon certain researches and
discoveries relating to Kentucky birds, especially to the Kentucky
warbler. I admitted that these studies had been wretchedly put aside
under the more pressing necessity of fixing the attention of all my
powers, ornithological and other, upon her garden window. But as I
placed specimens of my notes and drawings in her hand, I remarked
gravely that after our marriage I should be ready to push my work
forward without delay.
All this was meant to give her a delightful surprise; and indeed she
examined the evidences of my undertaking with devouring and triumphant
eagerness. But what was my amazement when she handed them back in
silence, and with a face as white as though as fragrant as a rose.
"I have distressed you, Georgiana!" I cried, "and my only thought had
been to give you pleasure. I am always doing something wrong!"
She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow,
as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares. Then she
sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.
"You have shared your secret with me," she said, solemnly, at length.
"I'll share mine with yon. It is the only fear that I have ever felt
regarding our future. It has never left me; and what you have just
shown me fills me with terror."
I sat aghast.
"I am not deceived," she continued; "you have not forgotten nature. It
draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world. Whenever
you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you
get the right meaning. With nature alone you are perfectly natural.
Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable
side. But these drawings, these notes--there lies your power, your
gift, your home. You truly belong to the woodsmen."
Never used to study myself, I listened, to this as to fresh talk about
a stranger.
"Do you not foresee what will happen?" she went on, with emotion.
"After we have been married a while you will begin to wander off--at
first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night,
then for days and nights together. That was the way with Audubon, that
was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the
way with all whom nature draws as it draws you. And, me--think of
me--at home! A woman not able to go with you! Not able to wade the
creeks and swim the rivers! Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves,
to endure the rain, the cold, the travel! And, so I shall never be
able to fill your life with mine as you fill mine with yours. As time
passes, I shall fill it less and less. Every spring nature will be
just as young to you; I shall be always older. The water you love
ripples, never wrinkles. I shall cease rippling and begin wrinkling.
No matter what happens, each summer the birds get fresh feathers; only
think how my old ones will never drop out. I shall want you to go on
with your work. If I am to be your wife, I must be wings to you. But
think of compelling me to furnish you the wings with which to leave me!
What is a little book on Kentucky birds in comparison with my
happiness!"
She was so deeply moved that my one desire was to uproot her fears on
the spot.
"Then there shall be no little book on Kentucky birds!" I cried. "I'll
throw these things into the fire as soon as I go home. Only say what
you wish me to be, Georgiana," I continued, laughing, "and I'll be
it--if it's the town pump."
"Then if I could only be the town well," she said, with a poor little
effort to make a heavy heart all at once go merrily again.
Bent on making it go merrily as long as I shall live, the following day
I called out to her at the window:
"Georgiana, I'm improving. I'm getting along."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well, in town this morning they chose me as one of the judges of
vegetables at the fair next month. I said, 'Gentlemen, I expect to be
married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my
wife. Will she have the privilege of accompanying me among these
competing vegetables? And last month they made me director of a
turnpike company--I suppose because it runs through my farm. To-day at
a meeting of the directors I said, 'Gentlemen, how far is this turnpike
to run? I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther.
I do not wish to be separated from my wife.'"
Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life. It is well to let a
woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of
dispensing.
"You'd better be careful!" she said, archly.
"Remember, I haven't married you yet."
"I _am_ careful," I replied. "I haven't married _you_ yet, cither! My
idea, Georgiana," I continued, "is to plant a grove and raise cocoons.
That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses.
I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport,
Kentucky; and you know that we couldn't possibly lose each other among
the mulberry-trees."
"You'd better take care!" she repeated. "Do you expect to talk to me
in this style after we are married?"
"That will all depend upon how you talk to me," I answered. "But I
have always understood married life to be the season when the worm
begins to turn."
Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the
monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words. I was
really no better than those men who say to their wives:
"While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary--you
were everything. Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and
you must not stand in the way."
But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy
with me at any cost. I divine now the reason of the effort she has
long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I
have privately set about changing the character of my life with the
idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.
And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the
month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek
its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered
for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he
hates to do. Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my
fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the
September fields--the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered
in. At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing
conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too
strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn. I hear the angry talk of
our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our
statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines. (Think of a human
creature calling himself a divine.) The troubled ebb and flow of
events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great
republic--these have replaced for me the old communings with nature
that were full of music and of peace.
Evening after evening now I turn my conversations with Georgiana as
gayly as I can upon some topic of the time. She is not always pleased
with what I style my researches into civilized society. One evening in
particular our talk was long and serious, beginning in shallows and
then steering for deep waters.
"Well, Georgiana," I had said, "Miss Delia Webster has suddenly
returned to her home in Vermont."
"And who is Miss Delia Webster?" she had inquired, with unmistakable
acidity.
"Miss Delia Webster is the lady who was sentenced to the State
penitentiary for abducting our silly old servants into Ohio. But the
jury of Kentucky noblemen who returned the verdict--being married men,
and long used to forgiving a woman anything--petitioned the governor to
pardon Miss Delia on the ground that she belongs to the sex that can do
no wrong--and be punished for it. Whereupon the governor, seasoned to
the like large experience, pardoned the lady. Whereupon Miss Webster,
having passed a few weeks in the penitentiary, left, as I stated, for
her home in Vermont, followed by her father, who does not, however,
seem to have been able to overtake her."
"If she'd been a man, now," suggested Georgiana.
"If she'd been a man she would have shared the fortunes of her
principal, the Reverend Mr. Fairbanks, who has _not_ returned to his
home in Ohio, and will not--for fifteen years."
"Do you think it an agreeable subject of conversation?" inquired
Georgiana.
"Then I will change it," I said. "The other day the editor of the
Smithland _Bee_ was walking along the street with his little daughter
and was shot down by a doctor."
"Horrible!" exclaimed Georgiana. "Why?"
"Self-defence," I answered. "And last week in the court-room in Mount
Sterling a man was shot by his brother-in-law during the sitting of
court."
"And why did _he_ kill _him_?"
"Self-defence!" I answered. "And in Versailles a man down in the
street was assassinated with a rifle fired from the garret of a tavern.
Self-defence. And in Lexington a young man shot and killed another for
drawing his handkerchief from his pocket. Self-defence!--the sense of
the court being that whatever such an action might mean in other
civilized, countries, in Kentucky and under the circumstances--the
young fellows were quarrelling--it naturally betokened the reaching for
a revolver. Thus in Kentucky, Georgiana, and during a heated
discussion, a man cannot blow his nose but at the risk of his life."
"I'll see that you never carry a handkerchief," said Georgiana. "So
remember--don't you ever reach for one!"
"And the other day in Eddysville," I went on, "two men fought a duel by
going to a doctor's shop and having him open a vein in the arm of each.
Just before they fainted from exhaustion they made signs that their
honor was satisfied, so the doctor tied up the veins. I see that you
don't believe it, but it's true."
"And why did they fight a duel in that way?"
"I give it up," I said, "unless it was in self-defence. We are a most
remarkable society of self-defenders. But if every man who fights in
Kentucky is merely engaged in warding off a murderous attack upon his
life, who does all the murderous attacking? You know the seal of our
commonwealth: two gentlemen in evening dress shaking hands and with one
voice declaring, 'United we stand, divided we fall.' So far as the
temper of our time goes, these two gentlemen might well be represented
as twenty paces apart, and as calling out, 'United, we stood; divided,
_you_ fall!' Killings and duels! Killings and duels! Do you think we
need these as proofs of courage? Do you suppose that the Kentuckians
of our day are braver than the pioneers? Do you suppose that any
people ever elevated its ideal of courage in the eyes of the world by
all the homicides and all the duels that it could count? There is only
one way in which any civilized people has ever done that, there is only
one way in which any civilized people has ever been able to impress the
world very deeply with a belief in the reality and the nobility of its
ideal of courage: it is by the warlike spirit of its men in times of
war, and by the peaceful spirit of its men in times of peace. Only,
you must add this: that when those times of peace have come on, and it
is no longer possible for such a people to realize its ideal of courage
in arms, it is nevertheless driven to express the ideal in other
ways--by monuments, arches, inscriptions, statues, literature,
pictures, all in honor of those of their countrymen who lived the ideal
before the world and left it more lustrous in their dying. That is the
full reason why we know how brave a people the Greeks were--by their
peaceful ways of honoring valor in times of peace. And that in part is
why no nation in the world doubts the courage of the English, because
when the English are not fighting they are forever doing something to
honor those who have fought well. So that they never have a peace but
they turn it into preparation for the next war.
"And that is why, as the outside world looks in upon us to-day and
sifts the evidence of whether or not we are a brave people, it does not
find the proof of this in our homicides and duels, but in the spirit of
our forefathers of the Revolution, in the soldiers of the wilderness
and of Indian warfare, of the war of 1812, of the war with Mexico, at
Cerro Gordo, at Buena Vista, at Palo Alto, at Resaca de la Palma.
Wherever the Kentuckians have fought as soldiers, many or few, on
whatever battle-field, in whatsoever cause, there you may see whether
they know what it is to be men, and whether they have an ideal of
courage that is worth the name.
"Then a few years ago in Frankfort twenty thousand people followed to
the grave the bodies of the men who had fallen in Mexico. The State
has raised a monument to them, to the soldiers of 1812, to those who
fought at the river Raisin. The Legislature has ordered a medal to be
struck in honor of a boy who had defended his ensign. No man can make
a public speech in Kentucky without mention of Encancion and Monterey,
or of the long line of battles in which every generation of our people
has fought. This is the other proof that in times of peace we do not
forget. It is not much, but it is of the right kind--it is the
soldier's monument, it is the soldier's medal, it is the soldier's
funeral oration, it is the recognition by the people of its ideal of
courage in times of peace. And with every other brave people this
proof passes as the sign universal. But our homicides and our duels,
nearly all of them brought about in the name--even under the fear--of
courage, what effect have they had in giving us abroad our reputation
as a community? I ask myself the question, what if all the men who
have killed their personal enemies or been killed by them in Kentucky,
and if all the men who have killed their personal friends or been
killed by them in Kentucky, had spent their love of fighting and their
love of courage upon a monument to the Pioneers--such a monument as
stands nowhere else in the world, and might fitly stand in this State
to commemorate the winning of the West? Would the world think the
better or the worse of the Kentucky ideal of bravery?
"I had not meant to talk to you so long on this subject," I added, in
apology, "but I have been thinking of these things lately since I have
been so much in town."
"I am interested," said Georgiana; "but as I agree with you we need not
both speak." But she looked pained, and I sought to give a happier
turn to the conversation.
"There is only one duel I ever heard of that gave me any pleasure, and
that one never came off. A few years ago a Kentuckian wrote a
political satire on an Irishman in Illinois--wrote it as a widow. The
Irishman wished to fight. The widow offered to marry the Irishman, if
such a sacrifice would be accepted as satisfactory damages. The
Irishman sent a challenge, and the Kentuckian chose cavalry broadswords
of the largest size. He was a giant; he had the longest arms of any
man in Illinois; he could have mowed Erin down at a stroke like a green
milkweed; he had been trained in duelling with oak-trees. You never
heard of him: his name is Abraham Lincoln."
"I have heard of him, and I have seen him--in Union County before I
came here," said Georgiana, with enthusiasm.
"He came here once to hear Mr. Clay speak," I resumed; "and I saw them
walking together one day under the trees at Ashland--the two most
remarkable-looking men that I ever beheld together or in human form."
My few acres touch the many of the great statesman. Georgiana and I
often hear of the movements of his life, as two little boats in a quiet
bay are tossed by the storms of the ocean. Any reference to him always
makes us thoughtful, and we fell silent now.
"Georgiana," I said at length, softly. "It's all in self-defence. I
believe you promised to marry me in self-defence."
"I did!" she said, promptly.
"Well, I certainly asked you in self-defence, Miss Cobb," I replied.
"And now in a few days, according to the usage of my time, I am going
to take your life--even at the peril of my own. If you desire, it is
your privilege to examine the deadly weapons before the hour of actual
combat," and I held out my arms to her appealingly.
She bent her body delicately aside, as always. "I am upset," she said,
discouragingly. "You have been abusing Kentucky."
"Ah, that is the trouble!" I answered. "You wish me to become more
interested in my fellow-creatures. And then you will not let me speak
of what they do. And the other day you told me that I am not perfectly
natural with anything but nature. Nature is the only thing that is
perfectly natural with me. When I study nature there are no delicate
or dangerous or forbidden subjects. The trees have no evasions. The
weeds are honest. Running water is not trying to escape. The sunsets
are not colored with hypocrisy. The lightning is not revenge.
Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and nature
invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life.
I am bidden to master and proclaim whatsoever truth she has fitted me
to grasp. If I am worthy to investigate, none are offended; if I
should be wise enough to discover any law of creation, the entire world
would express its thanks. Imagine my being assassinated because I had
published a complete report upon the life and habits of the
field-mouse!"
"If one mouse published a report on the life and habits of another,
there'd be a fight all over the field," said Georgiana.
"A ridiculous extreme," I replied. "But after you have grown used to
study nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human
life repels you. You may not investigate, you may not speak out, you
may not even think, you may not even feel. You are not allowed to
reveal what is concealed, and you are required to conceal what is
revealed. Natural! Have you ever known any two men to be perfectly
natural with each other except when they were fighting? As for the men
that I associate with every day, they weigh their words out to one
another as the apothecary weighs his poisons, or the grocer his
gunpowder."
"You forget," said Georgiana, "that we are living in a very
extraordinary time, when everybody is sensitive and excited."
"It is so always and everywhere," I replied. "You may never study life
as you study nature. With men you must take your choice: liberty for
your mind and a prison for your body; liberty for your body and a
prison for your mind. Nearly all people choose the latter; we know
what becomes of the few who do not."
But this reference to the times led us to speak slowly and solemnly of
what all men now are speaking--war that must come between the North and
the South. We agreed that it would come from each side as a blazing
torch to Kentucky, which lies between the two and is divided between
the two in love and hate--to Kentucky, where the ideal of a soldier's
life is always the ideal of a man's duty and utmost glory.
At last I felt that my time had come.
"Georgiana," I said, "there is one secret I have never shared with you.
It is the only fear I have ever felt regarding our future. But, if
there should be a war--you'd better know it now--leave you or not leave
you, I am going to join the army."
She grew white and faint with the thought of a day to come. But at
last she said:
"Yes; you must go."
"I know one thing," I added, after a long silence; "if I could do my
whole duty as a Kentuckian--as an American citizen--as a human being--I
should have to fight on both sides."
I have thus set down in a poor way a part of the only talk I ever had
with Georgiana on these subjects during the year 1851.
Yesterday, about sunset, the earth and sky were beautiful with that
fulness of peace which things often attain at the moment before they
alter and end. The hour seemed to me the last serene loveliness of
summer, soon to be ruffled by gales and blackened by frosts.
Georgiana stood at her window looking into the west. The shadows of
the trees in my yard fell longer and longer across the garden towards
her. Darkest among these lay the shapes of the cedars and the pines in
which the redbird had lived. Her whole attitude bespoke a mood
surrendered to memory; and I felt sure that we two were thinking of the
same thing.
As she has approached that mystical revelation of life which must come
with our marriage, Georgiana's gayety has grown subtly overcast. It is
as if the wild strain in her were a little sad at having to be captured
at last; and I too experience an indefinable pain that it has become my
lot to subdue her in this way. The thought possesses me that she
submits to marriage because she cannot live intimately with me and
lavish her love upon me in any other relation; and therefore I draw
back with awe from the idea of taking such possession of her as I will
and must.
As she stood at her window yesterday evening she caught sight of me
across the yard and silently beckoned. I went over and looked up at
her, waiting and smiling.
"Well, what is it?" I asked at length, as her eyes rested on me with
the fulness of affection.
"Nothing. I wanted to see you standing down there once more. Haven't
you thought of it? This is the last time--the last of the window, the
last of the garden, the end of the past. Everything after this will be
so different. Aren't you a little sorry that you are going to marry
me?"
"Will you allow me to fetch the minister this instant?"
In the evening they put on her bridal dress and sent over for me, and,
drawing the parlor doors aside, blinded me with the sight of her
standing in there, as if waiting in duty for love to claim its own. As
I saw her then I have but to close my eyes to see her now. I scarce
know why, but that vision of her haunts my mind mysteriously.
I see a fresh snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark
mountains. The sun must travel far and be risen high to reach it; but
when it does, its rays pour down from near the zenith and are most
powerful and warm; then in a little while the whole valley is green
again and a white mist, rising from it, muffles the face of the sun.
Oh, Georgiana! Georgiana! Do not fade away from me as I draw you to
me.
My last solitary candle flickers in the socket: it is in truth the end
of the past.
IV
Last summer I felled a dead oak in the woods and had the heart of him
stored away for my winter fuel: a series of burnt-offerings to the
worshipful spirit of my hearth-stone. There should have been several
of these offerings already, for October is almost ended now, and it is
the month during which the first cool nights come on in Kentucky and
the first fires are lighted.
A few twilights ago I stood at my yard gate watching the red domes of
the forest fade into shadow and listening to the cawing of crows under
the low gray of the sky as they hurried home. A chill crept over the
earth. It was a fitting hour; I turned in-doors and summoned Georgiana.
"We will light our first fire together," I said, straining her to my
heart.
Kneeling gayly down, we piled the wood in the deep, wide chimney. Each
of us then brought a live coal, and together we started the blaze. I
had drawn Georgiana's chair to one side of the fireplace, mine
opposite; and with the candles still unlit we now sat silently watching
the flame spread. What need was there of speech? We understood.
By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated, outward into the room.
My sense caught the fragrance. I sniffed it with a rush of memories.
Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odors of
the woods, had been strangely pleasant to me. I remember thinking of
them when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by
nature towards the temple of the skies. They aroused in me even then
the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world; and later they
became in-wrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had
been the delight of my life for many years. So that coming now, at the
very moment when I was dedicating myself to my hearth-stone and to
domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from
my past. For an instant ungovernable longings surged over me to return
to it. For an instant I did return; and once more I lay drowsing
before my old camp-fires in the autumn woods, with the frosted trees
draping their crimson curtains around me on the walls of space and the
stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bedchamber. My dog, who had
stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke
also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the
corner of his eye--I fancied with reproachful constancy. I caught his
look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana.
Her gaze was buried deep in the flames. And how sweet her face was,
how inexpressibly at peace. She had folded the wings of her whole
life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove. No past laid
its disturbing touch upon her shoulder. Instead, I could see that if
there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the
future--a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the
happiness that they must bring. As I set my own thoughts to journey
after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld
Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples,
spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her
face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and
youth.
"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and
feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may
speak. "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back
into his elements--smoke and light, heat and ashes. What a magnificent
work he was on natural history, requiring hundreds of years for his
preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not
the wisest can read him wisely, and enduringly bound in the finest of
tree calf! It is a dishonor to speak of him as a work. He was a
doctor of philosophy! He should have been a college professor! Think
how he could have used his own feet for a series of lectures on the
laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils and moisture! Was
there ever a head that knew as much as his about the action of light?
Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or
better face the tempests of the world? What did he not know about
birds? He had carried them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom
for a thousand years. Even his old coat, with all its rents and
patches--what roll of papyrus was ever so crowded with the secrets of
knowledge? The august antiquarian! The old king! Can you imagine a
funeral urn too noble for his ashes? But to what base uses, Georgiana!
He will not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a
kettle of lye with which to whiten our floors."
What Georgiana's reply could have been I do not know, for at that
moment Mrs. Walters flitted in.
"I saw through the windows that you had a fire," she said, volubly,
"and ran over to get warm. And, oh! yes, I wanted to tell you--"
"Stop, _please_, Mrs. Walters!" I cried, starting towards her with an
outstretched hand and a warning laugh. "You have not yet been formally
introduced to this room, and a formal introduction is necessary. You
must be made acquainted with the primary law of its being;" and as Mrs.
Walters paused, dropping her hands into her lap and regarding me with
an air of mystification, I went on:
"When I had repairs made in my house last summer, I had this fireplace
rebuilt, and I ordered an inscription to be burnt into the bricks. We
expect to ask that all our guests will kindly notice this inscription,
in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings. So I beg of you not
to speak until you have read the words over the fireplace."
Mrs. Walters wonderingly read the following legend, running in an arch
across the chimney:
Good friend, around these hearth-stones speak
no evil word of any creature.
She wheeled towards me with instantaneous triumph.
"I'm glad you put it there!" she cried. "I'm glad you put it there!
It will teach them a lesson about their talking. If there is one thing
I _cannot_ stand it is a gossip."
I have observed that a fowl before a looking-glass will fight its own
image.
"Take care, Mrs. Walters!" I said, gently. "You came very near to
violating the law just then."
"He meant it for me, Mrs. Walters," said Georgiana, fondling our
neighbor's hand, and looking at me with an awful rebuke.
"I meant it for myself," I said. "And now it is doing its best to make
me feel like a Pharisee. So I hasten to add that there are other rooms
in the house in which it will be allowed human nature to assert itself
in this long-established, hereditary, and ineradicable right. Our
guests have only to intimate that they can no longer restrain their
propensities and we will conduct them to another chamber. Mrs. Moss
and I will occasionally make use of these chambers ourselves, to
relieve the tension of too much virtue. But it is seriously our idea
to have one room in the house where we shall feel safe, both as
respects ourselves and as respects others, from the discomfort of
evil-speaking. As long as these walls stand or we dwell in them, this
is to be the room of charity and kindness to all creatures."
Although we exerted ourselves, conversation flagged during the visit of
Mrs. Walters. Several times she began to speak, but, with a frightened
look at the fireplace, dropped into a cough, or cleared her throat in a
way that called to mind the pleasing habit of Sir Roger de Coverly in
the Gardens of Gray's Inn.
Later in the evening other guests came. Upon each the law of that
fireside was lightly yet gravely impressed. They were in the main the
few friends I know in whom such an outward check would call for the
least inner restraint; nevertheless, on what a footing of confidence it
placed our conversation! To what a commanding level we were safely
lifted! For nothing so releases the best powers of the mind as the
understanding that the entire company are under bond to keep the peace
of the finest manners and of perfect breeding.
And Georgiana--how she shone! I knew that she could perfectly fill a
window; I now see that she can as easily fill a room. Our bodies were
grouped about the fireplace; our minds centred around her, and she
flashed like the evening star along our intellectual pathway.
The next day Mrs. Walters talked a long time to Georgiana on the edge
of the porch.
Thus my wife and I have begun life together. I think that most of our
evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life
universal. No matter how closely the warring forces of existence,
within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there
we enter peace. We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever
meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous
hours. And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household
than to escape an ignoble evening. To attain a noble one is like lying
calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have
struggled upward amid enemies all day long.
Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured
the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and
still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now
that I never shall. The charm in her which I pursue, yet never
overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world
which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit--of that
elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all
terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose. Even while I
live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains
for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does
not end and has no waking.
This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold
her entire self into mine. We have been a revelation to each other,
but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains,
which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the
discoveries of our union. Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting
beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full
of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at
what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live. Yet,
folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment. Often
she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere,
seeking an entrance to where I really am. Even during the intimate
silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing
walls of flesh--we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs
of individual being.
During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the
earth been flooded with beauty.
Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky
its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her
sleep. Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float
upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily
downward along her figure. How august she is in her purity! The
whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as
pitch to the whiteness of her nature.
The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of
the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had
slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed.
With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood:
that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one
of her feet--how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming,
irremediable. My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was
moving down that way; it would cross her feet; it would reveal the
truth.
I turned my face away and closed my eyes.
V
It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings.
However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow,
Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled
and ringed about with petticoats--like a tree within its layers of
bark--that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women;
for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household
now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it.
"We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples,
and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens,
and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes. One
evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside
the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to
enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the
countersign.
"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"
She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.
"It is 'Peace,'" she said. "But I desert to the enemy."
Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable;
for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.
Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the
divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine
right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in
winter. It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who
dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind--dwell on and on in affection,
submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor,
their sustenance, or their life.
Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over
the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and
lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled
and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted
fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing
their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to
leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost
of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful,
trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!
What joy at nightfall to gather them home to food and warmth and rest!
If there is ever a time when I feel myself a mediaeval lord to trusty
vassals, it is then. Of a truth I pass entirely over the Middle Ages,
joining my life to the most ancient dwellers of the plains, and
becoming a simple father of flocks and herds. When they have been duly
stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and
create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and
then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and
petitions responds to that laughter of the corn! What squeals and
grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric! What a blowing of
mellow horns from the cows! And the quick nostril trumpet-call of the
horse, how eager, how dependent, yet how commanding! As I mount to the
top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I
ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute
peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven and
earth.
Or I love to catch up the bundles of oats as they are thrown down from
the loft and send them whirling through the cutting-box so fast that
they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or,
grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ricks over the mangers with the rich
aromatic hay until I am as warm as when I loaded the wagons with it at
midsummer noons.
With what sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled! How
robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts! In what comfort of mind I
can turn to my own roof and store!
This hour in my stable is the only one out of the twenty-four left to
me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world
of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to
gratify Georgiana. I think little enough of this business otherwise.
Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual
satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing
my legs through my pantaloons of a morning. But a man can study
nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.
If time is left, I veer off from the barn to the wood-pile, for I love
to wield an axe, besides having a taste to cut my own wood for the
nightly burning. This evening I could but stop to notice how the
turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous black nutgalls on the
limbs, except that the wind whisked their tails about as cheerily as
though they were already hearth-brooms.
It is well for my poor turkeys that their tails contain no moisture;
for on a night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least
incautious movement of a fowl in the morning would serve to crack its
tail off--up to the pope's-nose.
As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two
snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the
porch--the guardian spirits of our portal. There they were, wedged
each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their
feathers, and leaving but one side exposed. Happening to have some
wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge;
they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning.
Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine
the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering
gray--the no less fit external for a man.
The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit
of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and
listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled
down. I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given
up along with my other studies.
This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in
Kentucky--the memory of the white man, which goes back some
three-quarters of a century. Twice the Ohio River has been frozen
over, a sight he had never seen. The thermometer has fallen to thirty
degrees below zero. Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three
railroads we have in the State.
News comes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New
York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a
hundred yards from the bank.
Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown,
destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants. It
set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that
to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me
occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how
one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild
beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins
of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding
for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had
opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a
buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a
wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer
left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.
Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing
vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have
been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures. A
recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods--Georgiana being away from
home with her mother--showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled
out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels
of the snow-walkers in search of food. Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit,
weasel, mouse, mink, fox--their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in
and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful
and pitiful to behold. Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the
field. At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove--starved at the
brink of plenty. Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip
and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus
at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I
buried my vegetables. I told Georgiana:
"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets
out what we need. Think of it--a whole neighborhood of rabbits
hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible
leaf." Once that night I turned in bed, restless. Georgiana did the
same.
"Are you awake?" she said, softly.
"Are you?"
"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"
"Yes; are you?"
"What do you suppose they think about us?"
"I'd rather not know."
Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering
among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair. God and
nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but
death and man. She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly
renders me an account of what she has done. This winter gives her a
great chance and she adorns it. It seems that never before were so
many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never
mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk,
and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past.
There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful
is this whole aspect of her nature.
A little thing happened to-night.
Towards ten o'clock she brought my hat, overcoat, overshoes, mittens,
comforter.
"Put them on," she said, mysteriously.
She also got ready, separating herself from me by so many clothes that
I could almost have felt myself entitled to a divorce.
It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow. We
crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings. When we
reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids. All
that part of the ground was alive with rabbits. Georgiana had spread
for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast. It had been done
to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out
there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to
herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness.
She is asleep now--for the sake of the Secret. After she had gone to
bed, what with the spectacle of the rabbits and what with our talk
beforehand of the many cardinals in the cedars, my thoughts began to
run freshly on old subjects, and, unlocking my bureau, I got out my
notes and drawings for the work on Kentucky birds. Georgiana does not
know that they exist; she never shall. With what authority those
studies call me still, as with a trumpet from the skies! and I know
that trumpet will sound on till my ears are past hearing. Sometimes I
look upon myself as a man who has had two hearts; one lies buried in
the woods, and the other sits at the fireside thinking of it. But
sleep on, Georgiana--mother that is to be. The dreams of your life
shall never be disturbed by the old dreams of mine.
VI
The population of this town on yesterday was seven thousand nine
hundred and twenty; today it is seven thousand, nine hundred and
twenty-_one_. The inhabitants of the globe are enriched by the same
stupendous unit; the solar system must adjust itself to new laws of
equilibrium; the choir of angels is sweetened by the advent of another
musician. During the night Georgiana bore a son--not during the night,
but at dawn, and amid such singing of birds that every tree in the yard
became a dew-hung belfry of chimes, ringing a welcome to the heir of
this old house and of these old trees--to the dispenser of seed during
winters to come--to the proprietor of a whole race of seed-scatterers
as long as nature shall be harsh and seasons shall return.
I had already bought the largest family Bible in the town as a
repository for his name, Adam Cobb Moss, which in clear euphony is most
fit to be enrolled among the sweetly sounding vocables of the Hebrew
children. The page for the registration of later births in my family
is so large and the lines ruled across it are so many that I am deeply
mortified over this solitary entry at the top. But surely Georgiana
and I would have to live far past the ages of Abraham and Sarah to fill
it with the requisite wealth of offspring, beginning as we do, and
being without divine assistance. When the name of our eldest-born is
inscribed in this Bible, not far away will be found a scene in the home
of his first parents, Georgiana and I being only the last of these, and
giving, as it were, merely the finishing Kentucky touch to his Jewish
origin.
But I gambol in spirit like a hawk in the air. Let me hood myself with
parental cares: I have been a sire for half a day.
I am speechless before the stupendous wisdom of my son in view of his
stupendous ignorance. Already he lectures to the old people about the
house on the perfect conduct of life, and the only preparation that he
requires for his lectures is a few drops of milk. By means of these,
and without any knowledge of anatomy, he will show us, for instance,
what it is to be master of the science of vital functions. When he
regards it necessary to do anything, he does it instantly and
perfectly, and the world may take the consequences and the result. He
forthwith addresses himself to fresh comfort and new enterprises for
self-development. Beyond what is vital he refuses to go; things that
do not concern him he lets alone. He has no cares beyond his needs;
all space to him is what he can fill, all time his instant of action.
He does not know where he came from, what he is, why here, whither
bound; nor does he ask.
My heart aches helplessly for him when he shall have become a man and
have grown less wise: when he shall find it necessary to act for
himself and shall yet be troubled by what his companions may think;
when he shall no longer live within the fortress of the vital, but take
up his wandering abode with the husks and swine; when he shall no
longer let the world pass by him with heed only as there is need, but
weary himself to better the unchangeable; when space shall not be some
quiet nook of the world large enough for the cradle of his life, but
the illimitable void filled with floating spheres, out upon the myriads
of which, with his poor, puzzled, human eyes, he will pitifully gaze;
when time shall not be his instant of action, but two eternities, past
and future, along the baffling walls of which he will lead his groping
faith; and when the questioning of his stoutest years shall be: Whence
came I? And what am I? Why here for a little while? Where to be
hereafter? A swimmer is drowned by a wave originating in the moon; a
traveller is struck down by a bolt originating in a cloud; a workman is
overcome by the heat originating in the sun; and so, perhaps, the end
will come to him through his solitary struggle with the great powers of
the universe that perpetually reach him, but remain forever beyond his
reach. If I could put forth one protecting prayer that would cover all
his years, it would be that through life he continue as wise as the day
he was born.
The third of June once more. Rain fell all yesterday, all last night.
This morning earth and sky are dark and chill. The plants are bowed
down, and no wind releases them from their burden of large white drops.
About the yard the red-rose bushes fall away from the fences, the
lilacs stand with their purple clusters hanging down as heavily as
clusters of purple grapes. I hear the young orioles calling drearily
from wet nests under dripping boughs. A plaintive piping of lost
little chickens comes from the long grass.
How unlike the day is to the third of June two years ago. I was in the
strawberry bed that crystalline morning; Georgiana came to the window,
and I beheld her for the first time. How unlike the same day one year
back. Again I was in the strawberry bed, again Georgiana came to
window and spoke to me as before. This morning as I tipped into her
room where she lay in bed, she turned her face to me on the pillow, and
for the third time she said, fondly;
"Old man, are you the gardener?"
The sky being so blanketed with cloud, although the shutters were open
only a faint gray light filled the room. It was the first day that she
had been well enough to have it done; but now the bed in which
Georgiana lay was spread with the most beautiful draperies of white;
the pillows were rich with needle-work and lace, and for the first time
she had put on the badge of her new dignity, a little white cap of
ribbons and lace, the long wide streamers of which, edged with lace,
lay out upon the counterpane like bauds of the most delicate frost.
The fingers of one hand rested lightly on the child beside her, as
though she were counting the pulse of its oncoming life. Out in the
yard the lilies of the valley, slipping out of their cool sheaths of
green leaves, were not more white, more fresh. And surely Georgiana's
gayety is the unconquerable gayety of the world, the youthfulness of
youth immortal.
I went over to her with the strange new awe I feel at my union with the
young mother, where hitherto there has but been a union with the woman
I love. She stretched out her hands to me, almost hidden under the
lace of her sleeves, and drew my face down against hers, as she said in
my ear,
"_Now_ you are the old Adam!"
When she released me, she bent over the child and added, reproachfully,
"You haven't paid the least attention to the baby yet."
"I haven't noticed that the baby has bestowed the least attention upon
me. He is the youngest."
"He is the guest of the house! It is your duty to speak to him first."
"He doesn't act like a guest in my house. He behaves as though he
owned it. I'm nobody since he arrived--not even his body-servant."
Georgiana, who was still bending over the child, glanced up with a look
of confidential, whimsical distress.
"How could anything so old be born so young!"
"He will look younger as he gets older," I replied. "And he will not
be the first bachelor to do that. At present this youngster is an
invaluable human document in too large an envelope; that's all."
Georgiana, with a swift, protecting movement, leaned nearer to the
child, and spoke to him:
"It's your house; tell him to leave the room for his impertinence."
"He may have the house, since it's his," I replied. "But there is one
thing I'll not stand; if he ever comes between me and you, he'll have
to go; I'll present him to Mrs. Walters."
I was not aware of the expression with which I stood looking down upon
my son, but Georgiana must have noticed it.
"And what if he supplants me some day?" she asked, suddenly serious,
and with an old fear reviving.
"Oh, Georgiana!" I cried, kneeling by the bedside and putting my arms
around her, "you know that as long as we are in this world I am your
lover."
"No longer?" she whispered, drawing me closer.
"Through eternity!"
By-and-by I went out to the strawberry-bed. The season was too
backward. None were turning. With bitter disappointment I searched
the cold, wet leaves, bending them apart for the sight of as much as
one scarlet lobe, that I might take it in to her if only for
remembrance of the day. At last I gathered a few perfect leaves and
blossoms, and presented them to her in silence on a plate with a waiter
and napkin.
She rewarded me with a laugh, and lifted from the plate a spray of
blossoms.
"They will be ripe by the time I am well," she said, the sunlight of
memory coming out upon her face. Then having touched the wet blossoms
with her finger-tips, she dropped them quickly back into the plate.
"How cold they are!" she said, as a shiver ran through her. At the
same time she looked quickly at me, her eyes grown dark with dread.
I set the plate hastily down, and she put her hands in mine to warm
them.
VII
A month has gone by since Georgiana passed away.
To-day, for the first time, I went back to the woods. It was pleasant
to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and
has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere
again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and
wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward,
along the groove of law, passes from its red origin in universal flame
to its white end in universal snow.
And yet, as I approached the edge of the forest, it was as though an
invisible company of influences came gently forth to meet me and sought
to draw me back into their old friendship. I found myself stroking the
trunks of the trees as I would throw my arm around the shoulders of a
tried comrade; I drew down the branches and plunged my face into the
new leaves as into a tonic stream.
Yesterday a wind storm swept this neighborhood. Later, deep in the
woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top.
Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across
my path.
As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my
ear--always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as
though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: _What can I
do_? _What can I do_? _What can I do_?
I knew what that note meant. It was the note with which a bird now and
then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.
After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under
the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape,
the female. The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by,
watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular,
careless note--he knew only too well that she was past my harming. The
plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.
I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of
the nest.
It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had
forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a
scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human
life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad
blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of
cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
people--a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that
will attend afar. For him this day the flags of nations will fly at
half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings
may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of
their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.
Too soon withdrawn! Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of
the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but
whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.
The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to
change all that made up my life with Georgiana. She was a true
hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him. I no less. Now that he is
dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate
and whose general have fallen on the field together.
As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the
woods and was confronted by the wreck of the storm, my thoughts being
yet full of Mr. Clay, of his enemies and disappointment, there rose
before my mind a scene such as Audubon may once have witnessed:
The light of day is dying over the forests of the upper Mississippi.
The silence of high space falls upon the vast stream. On a
thunder-blasted tree-top near the western bank sits a lone, stern
figure waiting for its lordliest prey--the eagle waiting for the swan.
Long the stillness continues among the rocks, the tree-tops, and above
the river. But far away in the north a white shape is floating nearer.
At last it comes into sight, flying heavily, for it is already weary,
being already wounded. The next moment the cry of its coming is heard
echoing onward and downward upon the silent woods. Instantly the
mighty watcher on the summit is alert and tense; and as the great snowy
image of the swan floats by, in mid-air and midway of the broad expanse
of water, he meets it. No battle is fought up there--the two are not
well matched; and thus, separated from all that is little and
struggling far above all that is low, with the daylight dying on his
spotlessness, the swan receives the blow in its heart.
So came Death to the great Commoner.
Oh, Georgiana! I do not think of Death as ever having come to you. I
think of you as some strangely beautiful white being that one day rose
out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler, and uttering
your note of divine farewell, spread your wings towards the open sea of
eternity, there to await my coming.
VIII
It is a year and four months since Georgiana left me, and now
everything goes on much as it did before she came. The family have
moved back to their home in Henderson, returning like a little company
of travellers who have lost their guide. Sylvia has already married;
her brother writes me that he is soon to be; the mother visits me and
my child, yearningly, but seldom, on account of her delicate health;
and thus our lives grow always more apart. None take their places, the
house having passed to people with whom, beyond all neighborly
civilities, I have naught to do. Nowadays as I stroll around my garden
with my little boy in my arms strange faces look down upon us out of
Georgiana's window.
And I have long since gone back to nature.
When the harvest has been gathered from our strong, true land, a growth
comes on which late in the year causes the earth to regain somewhat of
its old greenness. New blades spring up in the stubble of the wheat;
the beeless clover runs and blossoms; far and wide over the meadows
flows the tufted billows of the grass; and in the woods the oak-tree
drops the purple and brown of his leaf and mast upon the verdure of
June. Everywhere a second spring puts forth between summer gone and
winter nearing. It is the overflow of plenty beyond the filling of the
barns. It is a wave of life following quickly upon the one that broke
bountifully at our feet. It is nature's refusal to be once reaped and
so to end.
The math: then the aftermath.
Upon the Kentucky landscape during these October days there lies this
later youth of the year, calm, deep, vigorous. And as I spend much
time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I
feel that in my way I am part of it, that I can match the aftermath of
nature with the aftermath of my life. The Harvester passed over my
fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter's edge.
The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these
pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value
what he reads. They will give him some account of how his father and
mother met in the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life
together. And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war,
and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways
not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he
may take well to heart. He ought to know and to remember this: that
his life was the price of hers; she was extinguished that he might
shine, and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as
the altar's from which it was kindled.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his
mother--which, please God, he will have, or, getting all things else,
he can never be a gentleman--was honor. It shone from her countenance,
it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in
expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanor
with a spiritual grace. Honor in what are called the little things of
life, honor not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men
understand it--that his mother had. It was the crystalline, unshakable
rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed
structure of her life was reared.
If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must
have made his mother too serious and too hard. Let him think again.
It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet.
I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeableness
from radiant joyousness to sober calm; but oftenest it was like the
vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon; and she was of
a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely--but only to the
unyielding edge of honor. Yet she did not escape this charge of being
both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to
the laxness of small misdemeanors, and felt ill at ease before the
terrifying truth that she was a lady.
Beyond this single trait of hers--which, if it please God that he
inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else--I set nothing
further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my
writing. By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother
was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him
behold a living harvest.
Upon these fields of cool October greenness there risen out of the
earth a low, sturdy weed. Upon the top of this weed small white
blossoms open as still as stars of frost. Upon these blossoms lies a
fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never
cloyed, never satisfied. Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow
and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts. The
common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it
life-everlasting. Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its
virtue of bringing a quiet sleep.
This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck
a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sunshine,
the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the
healthful influences of the fields. I shall make me a tribute of it to
the memory of her undying sweetness.
If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside
hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting.
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