Meanwhile, it was with tears in his eyes that the young man in white
had listened to her quiet talk, for you could nowhere have found a
nature more readily sensitive than his to all the beauty and wonder
which life, as if it were haphazardly, produces every day. He pitied
this betrayed child quite ineffably, because in her sorrow she was so
pretty.
So he spoke consolingly. "Fie, Donna Graciosa, you must not be too
harsh with Eglamore. It is his nature to scheme, and he weaves his
plots as inevitably as the spider does her web. Believe me, it is
wiser to forget the rascal--as I do--until there is need of him; and I
think you will have no more need to consider Eglamore's trickeries, for
you are very beautiful, Graciosa."
He had drawn closer to the girl, and he brought a cloying odor of
frangipani, bergamot and vervain. His nostrils quivered, his face had
taken on an odd pinched look, for all that he smiled as over some
occult jest. Graciosa was a little frightened by his bearing, which
was both furtive and predatory.
"Oh, do not be offended, for I have some rights to say what I desire in
these parts. For, _Dei gratia_, I am the overlord of these parts,
Graciosa--a neglected prince who wondered over the frequent absences of
his chief counselor and secretly set spies upon him. Eglamore here
will attest as much. Or if you cannot believe poor Eglamore any
longer, I shall have other witnesses within the half-hour. Oh, yes,
they are to meet me here at noon--some twenty crop-haired stalwart
cut-throats. They will come riding upon beautiful broad-chested horses
covered with red velvet trappings that are hung with little silver
bells which jingle delightfully. They will come very soon, and then we
will ride back to court."
Duke Alessandro touched his big painted mouth with his forefinger as if
in fantastic mimicry of a man imparting a confidence.
"I think that I shall take you with me, Graciosa, for you are very
beautiful. You are as slim as a lily and more white, and your eyes are
two purple mirrors in each of which I see a tiny image of Duke
Alessandro. The woman I loved yesterday was a big splendid wench with
cheeks like apples. It is not desirable that women should be so large.
All women should be little creatures that fear you. They should have
thin, plaintive voices, and in shrinking from you be as slight to the
touch as a cobweb. It is not possible to love a woman ardently unless
you comprehend how easy it would be to murder her."
"God, God!" said Count Eglamore, very softly, for he was familiar with
the look which had now come into Duke Alessandro's face. Indeed, all
persons about court were quick to notice this odd pinched look, like
that of a traveler nipped at by frosts, and people at court became
obsequious within the instant in dealing with the fortunate woman who
had aroused this look, Count Eglamore remembered.
And the girl did not speak at all, but stood motionless, staring in
bewildered, pitiable, childlike fashion, and the color had ebbed from
her countenance.
Alessandro was frankly pleased. "You fear me, do you not, Graciosa?
See, now, when I touch your hand it is soft and cold as a serpent's
skin, and you shudder. I am very tired of women who love me, of all
women with bold, hungry eyes. To you my touch will always be a
martyrdom, you will always loathe me, and therefore I shall not weary
of you for a long while. Come, Graciosa. Your father shall have all
the wealth and state that even his greedy imaginings can devise, so
long as you can contrive to loathe me. We will find you a suitable
husband. You shall have flattery and titles, gold and fine glass, soft
stuffs and superb palaces such as are your beauty's due henceforward."
He glanced at the peddler's pack, and shrugged. "So Eglamore has been
wooing you with jewels! You must see mine, dear Graciosa. It is not
merely an affair of possessing, as some emperors do, all the four kinds
of sapphires, the twelve kinds of emeralds, the three kinds of rubies,
and many extraordinary pearls, diamonds, cymophanes, beryls, green
peridots, tyanos, sandrastra, and fiery cinnamon-stones"--he enumerated
them with the tender voice of their lover--"for the value of these may
at least be estimated. Oh, no, I have in my possession gems which have
not their fellows in any other collection, gems which have not even a
name and the value of which is incalculable--strange jewels that were
shot from inaccessible mountain peaks by means of slings, jewels
engendered by the thunder, jewels taken from the heart of the Arabian
deer, jewels cut from the brain of a toad and the eyes of serpents, and
even jewels that are authentically known to have fallen from the moon.
We will select the rarest, and have a pair of slippers encrusted with
them, in which you shall dance for me."
"Highness," cried Eglamore, with anger and terror at odds in his
breast, "Highness, I love this girl!"
"Ah, then you cannot ever be her husband," Duke Alessandro returned.
"You would have suited otherwise. No, no, we must seek out some other
person of discretion. It will all be very amusing, for I think that
she is now quite innocent, as pure as the high angels are. See,
Eglamore, she cannot speak, she stays still as a lark that has been
taken in a snare. It will be very marvelous to make her as I
am. . . ." He meditated, as, obscurely aware of opposition, his
shoulders twitched fretfully, and momentarily his eyes lightened like
the glare of a cannon through its smoke. "You made a beast of me, some
long-faced people say. Beware lest the beast turn and rend you."
Count Eglamore plucked aimlessly at his chin. Then he laughed as a dog
yelps. He dropped the gloves which he had held till this,
deliberately, as if the act were a rite. His shoulders straightened
and purpose seemed to flow into the man. "No," he said quietly, "I
will not have it. It was not altogether I who made a brain-sick beast
of you, my prince; but even so, I have never been too nice to profit by
your vices. I have taken my thrifty toll of abomination, I have stood
by contentedly, not urging you on, yet never trying to stay you, as you
waded deeper and ever deeper into the filth of your debaucheries,
because meanwhile you left me so much power. Yes, in some part it is
my own handiwork which is my ruin. I accept it. Nevertheless, you
shall not harm this child."
"I venture to remind you, Eglamore, that I am still the master of this
duchy." Alessandro was languidly amused, and had begun to regard his
adversary with real curiosity.
"Oh, yes, but that is nothing to me. At court you are the master. At
court I have seen mothers raise the veil from their daughters' faces,
with smiles that were more loathsome than the grimaces of a fiend,
because you happened to be passing. But here in these woods, your
highness, I see only the woman I love and the man who has insulted her."
"This is very admirable fooling," the Duke considered. "So all the
world is changed and Pandarus is transformed into Hector? These are
sonorous words, Eglamore, but with what deeds do you propose to back
them?"
"By killing you, your highness."
"So!" said the Duke. "The farce ascends in interest." He drew with a
flourish, with actual animation, for sottish, debauched and
power-crazed as this man was, he came of a race to whom danger was a
cordial. "Very luckily a sword forms part of your disguise, so let us
amuse ourselves. It is always diverting to kill, and if by any chance
you kill me I shall at least be rid of the intolerable knowledge that
to-morrow will be just like to-day." The Duke descended blithely into
the level road and placed himself on guard.
Then both men silently went about the business in hand. Both were
oddly calm, almost as if preoccupied by some more important matter to
be settled later. The two swords clashed, gleamed rigidly for an
instant, and then their rapid interplay, so far as vision went, melted
into a flickering snarl of silver, for the sun was high and each man's
shadow was huddled under him. Then Eglamore thrust savagely and in the
act trod the edge of a puddle, and fell ignominiously prostrate. His
sword was wrenched ten feet from him, for the Duke had parried
skilfully. Eglamore lay thus at Alessandro's mercy.
"Well, well!" the Duke cried petulantly, "and am I to be kept waiting
forever? You were a thought quicker in obeying my caprices yesterday.
Get up, you muddy lout, and let us kill each other with some pretension
of adroitness."
Eglamore rose, and, sobbing, caught up his sword and rushed toward the
Duke in an agony of shame and rage. His attack now was that of a
frenzied animal, quite careless of defense and desirous only of murder.
Twice the Duke wounded him, but it was Alessandro who drew backward,
composedly hindering the brutal onslaught he was powerless to check.
Then Eglamore ran him through the chest and gave vent to a strangled,
growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword free and
grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again and again.
He meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash and mutilate that
haughty mask of infamy, but Graciosa clutched his weapon by the hilt.
The girl panted, and her breath came thick. "He gave you your life."
Eglamore looked up. She leaned now upon his shoulder, her face
brushing his as he knelt over the unconscious Duke; and Eglamore found
that at her dear touch all passion had gone out of him.
"Madonna," he said equably, "the Duke is not yet dead. It is
impossible to let him live. You may think he voiced only a caprice
just now. I think so too, but I know the man, and I know that all this
madman's whims are ruthless and irresistible. Living, Duke
Alessandro's appetites are merely whetted by opposition, so much so
that he finds no pleasures sufficiently piquant unless they have God's
interdiction as a sauce. Living, he will make of you his plaything,
and a little later his broken, soiled and castby plaything. It is
therefore necessary that I kill Duke Alessandro."
She parted from him, and he too rose to his feet.
"And afterward," she said quietly, "and afterward you must die just as
Tebaldeo died."
"That is the law, madonna. But whether Alessandro enters hell to-day
or later, I am a lost man."
"Oh, that is very true," she said. "A moment since you were Count
Eglamore, whom every person feared. Now there is not a beggar in the
kingdom who would change lots with you, for you are a friendless and
hunted man in peril of dreadful death. But even so, you are not
penniless, Count Eglamore, for these jewels here which formed part of
your masquerade are of great value, and there is a world outside. The
frontier is not two miles distant. You have only to escape into the
hill-country beyond the forest, and you need not kill Duke Alessandro
after all. I would have you go hence with hands as clean as possible."
"Perhaps I might escape." He found it quaint to note how calm she was
and how tranquilly his own thoughts ran. "But first the Duke must die,
because I dare not leave you to his mercy."
"How does that matter?" she returned. "You know very well that my
father intends to market me as best suits his interests. Here I am so
much merchandise. The Duke is as free as any other man to cry a
bargain." He would have spoken in protest, but Graciosa interrupted
wearily: "Oh, yes, it is to this end only that we daughters of Duke
Alessandro's vassals are nurtured, just as you told me--eh, how long
ago!--that such physical attractions as heaven accords us may be
marketed. And I do not see how a wedding can in any way ennoble the
transaction by causing it to profane a holy sacrament. Ah, no,
Balthazar's daughter was near attaining all that she had been taught to
desire, for a purchaser came and he bid lavishly. You know very well
that my father would have been delighted. But you must need upset the
bargain. 'No, I will not have it!' Count Eglamore must cry. It cost
you very highly to speak those words. I think it would have puzzled my
father to hear those words at which so many fertile lands, stout
castles, well-timbered woodlands, herds of cattle, gilded coaches,
liveries and curious tapestries, fine clothing and spiced foods, all
vanished like a puff of smoke. Ah, yes, my father would have thought
you mad."
"I had no choice," he said, and waved a little gesture of impotence.
He spoke as with difficulty, almost wearily. "I love you. It is a
theme on which I do not embroider. So long as I had thought to use you
as an instrument I could woo fluently enough. To-day I saw that you
were frightened and helpless--oh, quite helpless. And something
changed in me. I knew for the first time that I loved you and that I
was not clean as you are clean. What it was of passion and horror, of
despair and adoration and yearning, which struggled in my being then I
cannot tell you. It spurred me to such action as I took,--but it has
robbed me of sugared eloquence, it has left me chary of speech. It is
necessary that I climb very high because of my love for you, and upon
the heights there is silence."
And Graciosa meditated. "Here I am so much merchandise. Heigho, since
I cannot help it, since bought and sold I must be, one day or another,
at least I will go at a noble price. Yet I do not think I am quite
worth the value of these castles and lands and other things which you
gave up because of me, so that it will be necessary to make up the
difference, dear, by loving you very much."
And at that he touched her chin, gently and masterfully, for Graciosa
would have averted her face, and it seemed to Eglamore that he could
never have his fill of gazing on the radiant, shamed tenderness of
Graciosa's face. "Oh, my girl!" he whispered. "Oh, my wonderful,
worshiped, merry girl, whom God has fashioned with such loving care!
you who had only scorn to give me when I was a kingdom's master! and
would you go with me now that I am friendless and homeless?"
"But I shall always have a friend," she answered--"a friend who showed
me what Balthazar's daughter was and what love is. And I am vain
enough to believe I shall not ever be very far from home so long as I
am near to my friend's heart."
A mortal man could not but take her in his arms.
"Farewell, Duke Alessandro!" then said Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay
so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you
so bestial; our age, too, had a part--our bright and cruel day, wherein
you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy
to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a bloodless
saint, if to do that had been as patently profitable. For you and all
your kind are so much putty in the hands of circumspect fellows such as
I. But I stood by and let our poisoned age conform that putty into the
shape of a crazed beast, because it took that form as readily as any
other, and in taking it, best served my selfish ends. Now I must pay
for that sorry shaping, just as, I think, you too must pay some day.
And so, I cry farewell with loathing, but with compassion also!"
Then these two turned toward the hills, leaving Duke Alessandro where
he lay in the road, a very lamentable figure in much bloodied finery.
They turned toward the hills, and entered a forest whose ordering was
time's contemporary, and where there was no grandeur save that of the
trees.
But upon the summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a
restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the
highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive
with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's
attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their
reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous
among them.
Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its
remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a
child's new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in
appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east
a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was
all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the
working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.
"It is a very rich and lovely land," said Eglamore--"this kingdom which
a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand." He viewed it for a
while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa's hand and
looked into her face, and he laughed joyously.
JUDITH'S CREED
"_It does not appear that the age thought his works worthy of
posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any ideal tribute on
future times, or had any further prospect than of present popularity
and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of fame, that, when he
retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the
vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with fatigue or
disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he who
had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last
be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the
transactions of the world._"
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's my own,
Which is most faint.
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.--_Epilogue to The Tempest_.
He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his
verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit.
The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid.
A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the last
quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609
a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there,
was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.
He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primal
habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate
blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about
him with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table
was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves--some brown and
others gray as yet--and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored
peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in
this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed
drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was
curious--he meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited
island"--how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and
silver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and
dark green . . . in search of rottenness. . . .
He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned
plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table among
several others and duly found the chapter entitled _Of the Cannibals_.
"So, so!" he said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato,
'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters----'" And with
that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into
verse. He wrote--while his left hand held the book flat--as orderly as
any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.
Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark
lady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of
some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltale
book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.
He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the table
and compared the printed page with what he had just written. "So
nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."
He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the
expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would
die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it."
He shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because I
never learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topic
did not seem much to concern him.
"Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time when
you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make
sugar-candy dolls."
"The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he assented. "In
fact, I got only some L30 clear profit."
"There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!"
the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her
traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.
Then she stayed silent,--tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark,
steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint
some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that.
Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot
of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little
patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic. . . .
He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old
times. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful
would be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the
exotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an
absurdity.
She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women love
men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager to
secure a patron--yes, and to get your profit of him--and you were
always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are
so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without
any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your
incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much
more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me--how long ago it was!--to
see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands,
and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping
the new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey;
it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so
assiduously."
He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much
dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him;
and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's
apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.
"Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented.
"They could be very useful to me--Pembroke, and Southampton, and those
others--and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It was
my business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could; and
this attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that he
derive as much money as was possible from its representation. What
would you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or the
blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by the
eating of them." The woman waved this aside.
She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proud
head--caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in a
brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilled
with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this little
parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly.
"Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked with you
at evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then
entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at
whose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang
like a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my
love--because I knew then that your love for me was splendid and
divine--these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then
how glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooed
them. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"
"Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere a
lass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."
"And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our play
that you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all these
people wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I was
proud----" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and
glad? That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. You
would have found some magic phrase to make that ancient glory
articulate, I know. Yet,--did I ever love you? I do not know that. I
only know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving any
other man."
He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried,
whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."
Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she
demanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What
if I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain?
What if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"
He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, you
are again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the very
heart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension.
You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here in
this abominable village, there is no one who understands--not even
those who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil good
paper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in,
they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to
a child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty
oracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her
interpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud,
dark lady!" the playmaker said.
Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry;
and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection that it
would be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to lament,
his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.
"I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a
skilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no
purpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I
was one once. But most of us are poets of one sort or another when we
love. Do you not understand? To-day I do not love you any more than I
do Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell you this and not be
moved at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here at the
last, two feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundly
severed as if an ocean tumbled between us?"
He fell to walking to and fro, his hands behind his back. She waited,
used as she was to his unstable temperament, a trifle puzzled.
Presently he spoke:
"There was a time when a master-poet was needed. He was
found--nay,--rather made. Fate hastily caught up a man not very
different from the run of men--one with a taste for stringing phrases
and with a comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him love a
headstrong child newly released from the nursery."
"We know her well enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, and
tyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and
inconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her person
and her living. You were not niggardly of vituperation."
And he grimaced. "Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more natural
form of expression than affidavits, and they are made effective by
compliance with different rules. I find no flagrant fault with you
to-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house,
and an actor--yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor--a gross, poor
posturing vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. What
child would not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity and
prettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. So
you amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I could
not help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my
personal importance--I submitted, because your mockery was more
desirable than the adoration of any other woman. And all this helped
to make a master-poet of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions
spoke through me--as if some implacable god elected to play godlike
music on a mountebank's lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not,
when there was no tragedy more poignant than mine?--and where in any
comedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fate
gained her ends, as always."
He was a paunchy, inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his elongated
features and high, bald forehead loaned him an aspect of serene and
axiom-based wisdom, much as we see him in his portraits; but now his
countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about it, as
when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and merge.
His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely
ruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of all
her childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as we
estimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the
doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude,
corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with
stripping me of health and strength,--not satisfied with pilfering
inventiveness and any strong hunger to create--why, that insatiable
fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken
instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would
give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed.
And I still lived--I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed.
Yes, that tradesman scrambled through these evils, somehow, and came
out still able to word adequately all such imaginings as could be
devised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no more
heart-wringing music."
She said, "You lie!"
He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth.
She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.
Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome and
temperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would die
to-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.
Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is the
most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been
wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded
man--among so many other bleeding folk--who perversely augments his
agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars over
the cut for him, as time does for all the others. He does not suffer
any longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, he
must henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."
"I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure of
fame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabble
immortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the price
without all this whimpering."
"Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is the
difference. At bottom I am a creature of the most moderate
aspirations, as you always complained; and for my part, Fate must in
reason demand her applause of posterity rather than of me. For I
regret the unlived life that I was meant for--the comfortable level
life of little happenings which all my schoolfellows have passed
through in a stolid drove. I was equipped to live that life with
relish, and that life only; and it was denied me. It was demolished in
order that a book or two be made out of its wreckage."
She said, with half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of all
this." And how he laughed!
"Did I not say you were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."
He motioned with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man,
who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girl
was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porter
in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed by
the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and so
candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the
girl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and the
attendant playwright made note of it.
"Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women
must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far
from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of
beauty?"
"The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiastic
answer. "So!--but who is she?"
He replied: "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse for
whose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes any
lively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannot
read or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I very
much fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from a
bull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and so
I write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds this
world an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter and
kindliness--for could Herod be unkind to her?--and it is largely
populated by ardent young fellows who are intended chiefly to be
twisted about your fingers; and it is illuminated by sunlight whose
real purpose is to show how pretty your hair is. And if affairs go
badly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong--why, of
course, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. For
nothing that happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit,
because God orders all happenings, and God loves us. There you have
Judith's creed; and upon my word, I believe there is a great deal to be
said for it."
"And this is you," she cried--"you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!"
"I lived all that," he replied--"I lived it, and so for a long while I
believed in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost many
illusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wicked
person. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sighted
people exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves always
to have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never because
of malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demand
commiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I find
humanity to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I had
suspected. And so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because I
very potently believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! men
lack an innate aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedly
attempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates on its pursuers.
This much, at least, has Judith taught me."
The woman murmured: "Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was
borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent
on me in all things." She said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he was so
little and so helpless! Now he is dead."
"My dear, my dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also had
a son. He would have been a man by this."
They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.
"I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands.
I know--they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought
that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say.
But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that
even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I
find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking
and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us--these buffet
us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did,
why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."
"Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all
happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not to
be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But
is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."
"With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are
ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely
by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my
day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each
maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day
their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an
urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine
intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to
look at, and--greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very
long--I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of all
imaginable creeds--that if we do nothing very wrong, all human
imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will
be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic
truth--this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of
this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in
dealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter
tone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman?
Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if
it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and
the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she
were to find me out?"
"I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.
"Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in
me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity's
owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then
Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me--and Judith
only in all the world!--as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah,
madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the low
cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your
hand--much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the
clutching of a vine--and beg you never to be friends with anything save
sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys--who
did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her
father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding
attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees
in play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money--Judith, who
cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,--why, Judith, madam, did not ask,
but gave, what was divine."
"You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words,
make knives of them. . . . You" and she spoke as with difficulty--"you
have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either
man or woman!"
He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty
once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly
abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who
made a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of
ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under
old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped
from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all
that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward
the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal,
because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations
of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued
the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the
normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm--that
young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric,
and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the
date of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; and
then he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said--"there is a
leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."
She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And just
now you are more like him----"
"Faith, but he was really a poet--or, at least, at times----?"
"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this
powerful rhyme----'"
"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion
botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and
ungrammatical. _Shall_ should be changed to _will_." And at that the
woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayed
creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writing
must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement
of phrases. And so,
"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was
unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or
even just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my
poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I
had not come."
Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also
have lied to you--in part? Our work is done; what more is there to
say?"
"Nothing," she answered--"nothing. Not even for you, who are a
master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."
"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even
for a moment you consider me?"
She did not answer.
When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation;
and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an
uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.
"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "_We, too, are kin To dreams and
visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped
suns_--Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, _We are
such stuff As dreams are made on_--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out the
line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now
here, instead of _thickly-templed India_, suppose we write _the
still-vexed Bermoothes_--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ."
And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint
of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously
upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprising
Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a very
efficacious spur to composition.
And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase
flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and
surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted
nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter.
For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and weave beautiful
and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did
not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking
of a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and
error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.
CONCERNING CORINNA
"_Dr. Herrick told me that, in common with all the Enlightened or
Illuminated Brothers, of which prying sect the age breeds so many, he
trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the whole, but in part, as
they believed Nature was in certain senses not true, and a betrayer,
and that she was not wholly the benevolent power to endow, as accorded
with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar. But he wished not
to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had drawn up to himself a
certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to petting a great black
pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and to talking idly._"
A Gyges ring they bear about them still,
To be, and not, seen when and where they will |
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